The United States and NATO

The Formative Years

Lawrence S. Kaplan

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813182025
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Zwischenstaatliche Organisationen

The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was one of the most important accomplishments of American diplomacy in countering the Soviet threat during the early days of the Cold War. Why and how such a reversal of a 150-year nonalignment policy by the United States was brought about, and how the goals of the treaty became a reality, are questions addressed here by a leading scholar of NATO.

The importance of restoring Europe to strength and stability in the post-World War II years was as obvious to America as to its allies, but the means of achieving that goal were far from clear. The problem for European statesmen was how to secure much- needed American economic and military aid without sacrificing political independence. For American policymakers, in contrast, a degree of American control was seen as an essential quid pro quo. As Mr. Kaplan shows, the lengthy negotiations of 1947 and 1948 were chiefly concerned with reconciling these opposing views.
For the Truman administration, the difficulties of achieving a treaty acceptable to the allies were matched by those of winning its acceptance by Congress and the public. Many Americans saw such an "entangling alliance" as a threat not only to American security but to the viability of the United Nations. Mr. Kaplan demonstrates the tortuous course of the debate on the treaty and the pivotal role of the communist invasion of South Korea in its ultimate approval.

This authoritative study offers a timely reevaluation of the origins of an alliance that continues to play a critical role in the balance of power and in the prospects for world peace.

1. Introduction

Is it a truism or an act of faith to assert that creation of the Atlantic alliance in 1949 was the most important event in American history since the Treaty of Paris established independence in 1783? Certainly its treatment by historians suggests rather that this is simply one more grandiose statement to stand alongside Wilson’s league or the United Nations, if not the Kellogg Pact and the Carter Doctrine, as a symbol of great expectations shattered or illusion perpetrated. It is the rare historian who would agree with Armin Rappaport and call the signing of the treaty the “American Revolution of 1949.”¹

Unlike the League of Nations after a generation, NATO survives; and, unlike the United Nations, it survives today as a meaningful alliance and organization thirty-five years after its creation. The Atlantic alliance began as a response to a European perception that the world destroyed by the ravages of World War II could not be rebuilt without United States involvement. It was not simply a question of a promissory statement of American concern for the fate of Western Europe or even of a massive economic aid program and a modest military support system, all of which were either in process or in prospect by the end of 1947. What was needed was a sense of confidence in Europe that the pull of a communist system would not undermine whatever aid or promises the United States had been willing to make hitherto. This could be provided by a complete abandonment of the cherished American tradition of nonentanglement with Europe that had begun with the Revolution and was enshrined in mythic American concepts associated with Washington’s Farewell Address, Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, and the Monroe Doctrine. As addressed in chapter 2, some elements in the North Atlantic Treaty were traumatic, particularly those which undid the isolationist tradition of 150 years.

The decision of the United States to join Europe in a military alliance, no matter how carefully the treaty was disguised, was an anguished one. In retrospect, however, it appears, as Thomas Paterson suggested, relatively easy. The treaty was one of a succession of actions taken by the Truman administration in which Congress and nation played passive and compliant roles.² The Senate votes certainly indicated the administration’s success, but they masked the evasions, hesitations, and fears of all kinds that plagued American planners as they embarked on a new adventure. For the military, an alliance could drain an already weak establishment; for Congress, it could arouse the isolationism which had been so virulent in the past; for supporters of the United Nations, it could undercut the growth of a new world order and lead to the very war it was designed to prevent; and for the administration, it could victimize American wealth and resources as Europeans utilized an alliance to bleed the superior power.

Yet there was no apparent alternative open to the policymakers. Soviet power, although weakened by war, was paramount in Europe: aggressive demands for a nonagression pact with Scandinavia, muscle flexing by powerful Communist parties in France and Italy, and a coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia set the tone. All Europe would be subject to communism and a divided Germany would be reunited under Soviet auspices unless the United States reversed a pattern of foreign relations. It was not that Europeans doubted American willingness to come to their aid; it was that they refused to consider another liberation. Another 1914 or 1939 could be avoided only if an advance knowledge of American involvement would deter a potential act of war—so General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed on the eve of the treaty’s signing.³

Once again, then, the New World would redress the balance of the old. The echoes of George Canning’s evocation of Spain’s America were perceptible. In 1826 he could cite the weakness of Spain in the Indies and Britain’s mobilization of the former colonies to claim that “I called the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.”⁴ While the circumstances in 1948 were vastly different, particularly since the “new world” for Canning was Britain’s for the asking, there was still a kinship in the spirit with which Britain’s foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, and France’s foreign minister, Georges Bidault, wished to manipulate the New World in behalf of the Old. The New World was now considerably more powerful than the Old, and the European leaders had to work harder and more deviously to achieve their objectives. Nonetheless, the New World’s strength could be exploited by the wiser heads of the European partners. Such was some of the reasoning of European statesmen when they framed the Brussels Treaty in 1948, as discussed in chapter 4 below.

But NATO was to be more than just a ploy to enlist the United States in the Western Union. Because of the complexities behind America’s decision, the European partners were required to make concessions, both real and imagined, to accommodate American entry. Much of the language in the North Atlantic Treaty was a product of a felt need to harmonize a Western collective security agreement with global outreach by the United Nations. Resistance to an alliance in the United States was anticipated as much or more from American supporters of the UN than from traditional isolationists. A significant part of the opinion-making elite after World War II was convinced that the United Nations was the way to ensure the future of the world and of the U.S. By seeming to turn its back on the UN, no matter how stymied that body was by Soviet-American conflict, an Atlantic security agreement could arouse sufficient resentment to destroy the arrangement. Hostility from the new converts to the UN, more than from the discredited isolationists of the 1930s, accounted for many of the twists and turns followed by the Truman administration in moving from the Truman Doctrine to the North Atlantic Treaty, as shown in chapter 3. The Truman administration appeared to feel compelled at almost every opportunity to link the UN Charter with the North Atlantic Treaty as if the alliance were an organ of the Security Council or of the General Assembly.

The device succeeded in winning acceptance of the Treaty at the expense of the ultimate reduction of the importance of the United Nations in American decisionmaking. The UN remained a part of the foreign policy process through the next decade of United States predominance. But expectations of the UN as a surrogate foreign office disappeared permanently from the American scene. The alliance became an instrument of other concerns.

Perhaps the most important of these concerns was the resolution of the German problem inherited from World War II. It took a number of forms. First, the existence of NATO rationalized a defense of western Germany and served as an umbrella for its evolution into a Western-oriented ally. It was no coincidence that the Bizonia and Trizonia, the monetarized Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon-French zones of Germany, were the site of a Federal Republic. The abandonment of expectations for a Western-Soviet rapprochement was rendered permanent by the merging of the zones. It was even less a coincidence that the Federal Republic was created a month after the Treaty was signed, or that the West would press for admission of the new republic into other European organizations before the summer of 1949 was over. While it is too much to assert, as some scholars have, that American postwar policy centered on the reconstruction of Germany,⁵ it was obvious that an appropriate reconstruction of Europe itself, economically as well as militarily, required the exploitation of German resources and their incorporation into the West. Germany was the unstated major issue in every meeting of the allies and in most of the planning sessions within the United States, even as it was excluded from a membership role in the alliance. This theme appears sotte voce throughout chapters 5, 6, and 7.

More obvious because it was always on the surface was the French aspect of the German problem. All Europeans, but the French in particular, had suffered too recently from German bestiality to exorcise the experience from their memory. For the French the threat of communism and of Soviet expansionism always had to be weighed against the German menace. The latter was in fact the substance of the Anglo-French treaty of Dunkirk in 1947 and the nominal object of the Brussels Treaty of 1948. French rehabilitation was a vital element in American association with Europe, all the more so because of the powerful Communist minority which seemed poised to bring down the Fourth Republic. But France throughout this period was a difficult partner, at one and the same time wanting American military support and guarantees against Soviet expansionism, and yet resentful of what its statesmen perceived to be an Anglo-American condominium dedicated to the control of Europe. Moreover, as chapters 7 and 8 will show, the French demanded an active British presence on the Continent as much as an American presence to guarantee against the resurgence of a dangerous Germany.

Important though they were, the French and German issues were hardly the only strains in the ungainly alliance of 1949. It is understandable that nine months of intense negotiations were required before the various pieces could be put together, particularly the U.S.-Western Union sessions in the summer and fall of 1948, as followed in chapter 5. The uneasy association of Norway and Denmark was made all the more difficult by the abstention of Sweden, which had taken the initiative in promoting a Nordic alternative to NATO. While, for Denmark and Norway, memories of German occupation in World War II were more powerful than the allure of neutralism, theirs was a wary decision, accentuated by their distrust of France and hostility to Italy or Algeria within the alliance. Portugal and Iceland, far more than Italy, were meaningful to an “Atlantic” alliance, but the former’s fascist government undercut the democratic base underlying the Atlantic pact, while the latter seemed distant from the concerns of the European core.

Although military aid was an important element in the alliance, it held few long-term implications in 1949. The alliance was emergency application, a band-aid to cope with internal national problems. If there was a military component at this moment it lay in the readiness of the United States Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska, to employ its power on behalf of eleven nations outside the United States. The primary role of military power was to deter the Soviet Union from internal subversion within the member nations and from external aggression against their soil. As the short-term defense plan of 1949 revealed, it was not to create a force prepared to strike eastward, or even to defend a thrust from the east.

While the military component of an alliance ordinarily is the predominant one, this does not seem to have been the case in the creation of NATO. The Benelux countries, prime movers in its earliest stages, as chapter 4 discloses, always held aloft aspirations of a united Europe as a goal of the alliance. In this they were joined by Canada, the most articulate champion of nonmilitary collaboration and, through a speech of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent in 1947, the first member to propose a security pact within the United Nations free from a Soviet veto. If there was a long-run purpose in the North Atlantic Treaty, it was neither the half-hearted claim of strengthening the UN nor the expectation of creating a powerful military establishment. Rather, it was the hope of breaking down the barriers of national sovereignty that had plagued the West since the advent of the nation state and that were held responsible for most of the disasters of the twentieth century.

For an Atlantic association to succeed, the United States had to be engaged as a deus ex machina to do what Europeans could not do for themselves. While compromises among themselves were necessary, the primary concessions in the negotiations for an alliance were made to break down American resistance to membership. Thus Portugal was important for its vital strategic assets in the Azores. Iceland and Canada were not only part of the northern Atlantic communication links between the continents but also served to show latent American isolationists that NATO was more than an entangling European alliance in disguise. Scandinavia and Italy in 1949 were less significant for northern and southern flanks of a potential defense organization than for the weaknesses that made membership in the alliance a psychological prop to their national morale.

The foregoing rationalizations suggest makeshift elements in the creation of the alliance, political trade-offs which explain membership in the alliance of a nation without a border on the Atlantic and a nation with little claim to a common democratic tradition. The charges are justifiable; diplomacy had to address the realities of the time, and the primary reality for Europeans was the necessity to enlist the United States in an alliance. Economic recovery hung on a sense of political and military security that only American involvement could provide.

The price for the Nordic countries was an abandonment of neutralism and the acceptance of distant Portugal and Italy; for France it was a potentially inferior position within an Anglo-American condominium with implications for a German relationship in the future; for the United Kingdom, a dilution of a “special relationship” with the United States. The United States sacrificed a tradition of nonentanglement, and in doing so sought to protect its new investment in the negotiating process. The allies would have to move toward political and military as well as economic integration, and to accept members the core powers of the Western Union would have preferred to reject.

But the rewards were more compelling than the drawbacks. Not only would a blanket of American protection be spread over Western Europe but a military assistance program would be set in motion, as much for its psychological impact as for whatever changes it was expected to make on the individual military establishments of the allies. Military aid was high on the agendas of both France and Britain, even though it was a source of misgivings on the part of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. The very fact that the initial military assistance program was introduced in Congress on the same day that the president signed the instrument of ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty was an earnest of the meaning of Article 3; this is a major theme of chapter 7.

Anti-communism served as a lure for American entanglement in Europe. It was a staple in the ideology of many of the European national pressure groups interested in fostering a federated Europe. The horrors of war had energized such units in every country. Enthusiasts such as Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi who had been dismissed as dreamers before the war were heartened by the new interest the European movement aroused among political leaders in France, the United Kingdom, and the smaller countries of the Continent. The time perhaps had arrived to achieve the unity that had almost destroyed everything in World War II, and the United States could be a key, both in encouraging unification by its example and in pressuring for it by its economic and military power.

As presented in chapter 4, the idea of European unity held America’s attention and appealed to constituencies ranging from former isolationists to friends of the United Nations. The North Atlantic Treaty could be conceived as a means of realizing these aspirations. For Americans it would take the forms of weapons standardization among allied armies; of economic planning, quickening of the pace of tariff reduction, customs unions, and even industrial or agricultural specialization. In a revealing memorandum on the eve of signing of the pact, Secretary of State Dean Acheson observed that European economic and political cooperation would be a major potential beneficiary of the Atlantic Pact. The failure of the European Recovery Program to promote instruments of unification could be corrected through the American connection.⁶

The result would be a new Atlantic entity beneath which a European community would arise, which in turn would achieve security from both internal subversion and external attack. And a vital by-product of the benefits that would flow from it would be a gradual solution of the German problem—“giving the Germans a goal,” as Acheson put it, “to work as partners with other Western countries.” Such was the future outlined by President Truman in his opening comments to the alliance’s foreign ministers on April 3, 1949. There was, however, a recognition, and perhaps a saving grace as well, in his statement that “none of us are under any illusions that the Atlantic pact itself is more than a symbol of our common determination.”⁷

Despite Truman’s caveat, there was a euphoria accompanying the signing which would dissipate long before the challenge of the Korean War less than fifteen months later. National sentiments which had blunted the integrative purposes of the Economic Cooperation Act persisted. The empty shell of the proudly named Council of Europe that came into being almost simultaneously with the Atlantic alliance symbolized the difficulties of formally shedding political sovereignty. More forthright was the attitude of Britain, which clearly signaled its refusal to identify itself fully as a continental power, and of France, which, while admitting the importance of a cooperative Germany, had no intention of admitting even the most regenerated Federal Republic into the alliance. The ideal of a military specialization in which each nation would produce only what served the whole rather than what protected its own soil or its arms industry remained verbiage, or if accepted moved at a snail’s pace toward its goal.

It was not that political integration or German cooperation or military standardization was not pushed in the first year of the alliance. These were requirements openly or covertly demanded by the United States in exchange for the military assistance the allies had requested. Actions were taken: an integrated defense plan was accepted; military end items reached European ports before the first anniversary of the treaty’s signing; and committees from London to Washington to Rome were deliberating seriously on how to create a common military, financial, and industrial base for the greater strength of the new organization.

But flaws, some structural, some circumstantial, informed every plan and inhibited many of them. The most immediate in the latter category was the inability of the allies to come up with any proposal that would resolve military insecurity aside from American atomic power, itself threatened by the newly recognized Soviet atomic challenge. Even with American military production at Europe’s disposal, the Soviet Union still would dominate Europe in the short run. Knowledge of this reality gave scope to the traditional anxieties of the allies. Perhaps the most formidable of the circumstantial problems was the inherent imbalance between the superpower on the western side of the Atlantic and the pigmies of the eastern shores. The state of dependence was bound to produce suspicion and resentments on both sides, and they did, in good measure, as evidenced in chapter 7. On the one side the United States was always ready to believe that Europeans wished to throw all the burdens upon the rich American partner. On the other, the European allies could bury their differences over a shared conviction that the United States could not be counted upon in a crisis. Britain’s demand for a “special relationship” with the United States, and France’s rigidity with respect to limits on G...