Enduring Alliance

A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order

Timothy Andrews Sayle

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501735523
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Intergovernmental Organizations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some seventy years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era.

In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO.

As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.

1

THE SPECTER OF APPEASEMENT

The fear that drove allied leaders to sign the North Atlantic Treaty was not that of a Soviet invasion of Europe. It was the threat of Soviet blackmail: that Moscow might make demands on a government in Europe, and that the citizens of the country in question, fearing a return to war, would insist their leaders accept the Soviet request. The Soviet Union would not go to war, as Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, put it, because it would not need to: “the Russians seem to be fairly confident of getting the fruits of war without going to war.”1

Bevin had become alarmed by Soviet moves to establish influence in Eastern Europe in 1946 and 1947, the failure of the Soviets to show any interest in genuine solutions to European problems at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in December 1947, and an increasingly “tough” line taken by the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.2 He wrote to US secretary of state George Marshall that the “Russians”—what many British continued to call the Soviets throughout the Cold War—were “exerting a constantly increasing pressure which threatens the whole fabric of the West.” If the states of Europe did not counter this “Russian infiltration,” he warned, they would watch “the piecemeal collapse of one Western bastion after another.”3

In the United States, too, the Soviet expert George F. Kennan warned that the Soviet Union posed a psychological, rather than a military threat. “The Russians,” he said, had identified the means to influence and exploit “the vulnerability of liberal democratic society.” In 1947, in a speech at the National War College, he warned that the “towers of the Kremlin cast a long shadow.” It was “the shadows rather than the substance of things that move the hearts and sway the deeds of statesmen.”4

Toward the North Atlantic Treaty

Bevin had a plan to prevent this slow deterioration, even if it was a bit fuzzy around the edges. He suggested Paris and London sign a defensive treaty with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (the Benelux countries). This “solid core” might then come to agreements with the Scandinavian countries and Italy. Ultimately, Germany and Spain, too, might come to join this Western union.5 It would be “backed by the Americas and the Dominions,” which he later made clear meant an Anglo-American defense agreement.6

Bevin thought such an arrangement necessary to protect gains made by the US-funded program of economic assistance for Europe. Many American officials, like Kennan, had seen the Marshall Plan as the best way of insulating Europe from Soviet pressure. While the economic revival of Europe was crucial, Bevin did not think that, on its own, a better standard of living could help Europeans resist Soviet pressure. A defensive treaty, he argued, was needed to “create confidence and energy on one side,” that is, in those parts of Europe outside Soviet control, and to “inspire respect and caution on the other,” that is, Moscow.7 Bevin’s belief that a defensive treaty would provide a psychological boost to the people of Western Europe was one of the essential, if perplexing, concepts that would drive NATO forward.

Events in February and March 1948 only seemed to prove Bevin correct. In February, the Czechoslovak Communist Party seized power in Prague—the “Prague coup.” The takeover of government, supported by the Communist-controlled police and army, alarmed Western Europeans and Americans alike and caused Washington to wonder whether the coup would stimulate more seizures of power in Europe.8 As early as 1946, President Truman had argued that the Soviet government was really no different from Russia’s czarist government or, for that matter, Hitler and the Nazis.9 Now, after Prague, parallels between Nazi claims on Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the Soviet-backed coup in Prague obliterated any distinction between Hitler and Stalin. Even German politicians from different sides of the political spectrum agreed the Soviets were “a red-lacquered second edition of the Nazis.”10

A month after the Prague coup, the Norwegian government warned British officials that they expected an imminent demand from Moscow to negotiate a pact. Earlier that month, Finland had signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that essentially ceded Helsinki’s security and defense prerogatives to Moscow in exchange for independence on domestic affairs, a relationship described throughout the Cold War as “Finlandization.” During the last war, Norway had been overrun by the Nazis, providing the German navy with wider access to the North Atlantic. A Norwegian-Soviet pact would carry the same strategic threat—perhaps leading to similar demands on Sweden and Denmark, and the making of the Baltic into a “Russian lake.”11 But a “Norwegian defection” from the West to Moscow would also doom any chance for political cooperation in the West, as Moscow picked off states one by one. The result, Bevin said, would be “to repeat our experience with Hitler and to witness helplessly the slow deterioration of our position” until, as a last gasp, “we are forced . . . to resort to war in order to defend or lives and liberty.”12 It was the threats to Norway, rather than simply the Prague coup, that spurred the British and others, including the Canadians, to search for a “bold move” to halt Soviet momentum.13

American officials came to echo British fears that the people of Europe might be so “intimidated by the Soviet colossus . . . to the point of losing their will to resist.” This, US officials judged, is what had happened at Prague: noncommunist forces that might have stood up to the Communists had there been “any sign of friendly external force” simply did not. The Americans worried, like Bevin, that continual Soviet encroachments would finally force Washington and London to take up arms. Stalin, it seemed, was underestimating the “present temper” of Congress and the American public. If the Soviets pushed their “expansionist tactics,” there might be a “forceful American reaction” and a war no one wanted.14

Bevin convinced the Americans that transatlantic cooperation could solve the problem. If Washington could offer “concrete evidence of American determination to resist further Communist encroachment,” then the people of Europe would not be bullied, and the Soviets would avoid major provocations.15 After Prague and the Norwegian threats, Marshall recommended to Truman that the United States begin consultations on how to “stiffen morale in the free countries of Europe.”16

The solid core of Bevin’s plan was formed in March 1948 with the Brussels Treaty: Britain, France, and the Benelux states agreed to a defensive alliance and joint military organization. In response, the State Department worked with Senator Arthur Vandenberg to prepare a congressional resolution publicly advising the president to associate the United States with “collective arrangements”—such as the Brussels pact. This provided the political cover for discussion for a new such collective agreement.17 Within a week, officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada began a series of “security conversations” to discuss “the establishment of an Atlantic security system.”18 The shape and form of such a system were anything but settled; nor was its membership easily or quickly agreed. The Americans, British, and Canadians did settle on the term “North Atlantic” in an effort to prevent Latin American countries or Australia from asking to join, but they believed the term also gave them flexibility to determine a broader membership.19

In the first security conversation in March, the British representatives suggested the primary function of the security system, whatever its name or shape, was to offer “a firm commitment on the part of the US to aid militarily in the event of any aggression in Europe.”20 American military officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff worried that such a commitment would be biting off more than the postwar United States Army could chew. But officials from both the State Department and the Foreign Office agreed that military capabilities were essentially secondary. The true “objective of the Pact approach was to stop the Soviet Communist advance, and that this would probably be accomplished by the fact of a drawing together of free nations in their own defense.”21 It was not the military power of the pact that would matter so much as the pact itself.22

Discussions would stall and start repeatedly throughout 1948. Stalin’s decision to blockade Berlin would reinforce the perceived need for transatlantic cooperation. At the same time, however, the British, understanding that a presidential election year was a sensitive time to discuss the United States engaging in its first entangling alliance in a century and a half, carefully dialed back their approaches.23 But the delays were not owed only to politics. The State Department counselor Charles “Chip” Bohlen and the director of policy planning, George Kennan, both had doubts about the true necessity of a new security system or treaty, and made their views plain. Indeed, their views were likely considered in Moscow, too, as the interlocutor on these matters was the British diplomat and Soviet spy Donald Maclean.24 Kennan told some of the diplomats visiting Washington that a formal treaty was unnecessary, as it would be “unthinkable that America would stand idly by” if the Soviets made “an aggressive move against any country of Europe.”25 Such arguments meant little to those who remembered events in Europe in 1939 and 1940. What the British, Canadian, and Europeans sought was more than just a unilateral assurance from American diplomats, or even from the president himself. Even at this early stage, the future allies of the United States knew how easily presidents, and their commitments, could change. They wanted an agreement that would survive the transition from one president to the next.26

The implication of Kennan and Bohlen’s arguments, that the United States did not truly need to be bound to the West Europeans to achieve its foreign policy goals, would forever hang over the alliance. But the greater lesson for the Canadians and Europeans in the delays of 1948 and into 1949 was the primacy of American domestic politics in the formulation of policy. Going forward, the other allies would have no doubt that the politics of presidential elections and the parochial interests of Congress were the most important bellwethers for the American commitment to Europe.

Despite these wrinkles, the Americans agreed to host a working group of diplomats from the United States and their colleagues from Belgium (also representing Luxembourg), Canada, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. The group agreed to a report arguing that the best solution to security problems in Europe was an alliance, and they submitted the report to their governments for consideration. The report argued that while the Marshall Plan had helped improve the economic situation in Europe, a new arrangement was “needed to counteract the fear of peoples of Western Europe that their countries might be overrun by the Soviet Army before effective help could arrive.” They noted that while there was no evidence Moscow was planning an invasion, the Soviet Union was maintaining Soviet military strength to “support the Kremlin program of intimidation designed to attain the domination of Europe.” They worried that Moscow would exploit the “justified sense of insecurity among the people of Western Europe” and that only a treaty offered a solution.27 A treaty would transform the United States’ relationship with Europe and mark the US as a European power. As Bevin told the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, he, Bevin, was “anxious not to make the same mistakes” as after the First World War, “when the opportunity of getting America right into the affairs of Europe had been lost.”28

The North Atlantic Treaty negotiated in late 1948 and early 1949 was so obviously directed at Moscow that the drafters joked the treaty’s preamble should begin as a letter to Stalin: “Dear Joe . . .”29 But the diplomats who agreed on the need for the treaty were, in many ways, thinking about the wars of the past. Repeatedly, diplomats and politicians spoke about the treaty as did one Canadian diplomat on the working group: “If a pact along the lines of that currently under discussion had existed in the later 1930’s, there would have been no war in 1939, and that a similar pact probably would have prevented the outbreak of the war that began in 1914.”30 Of course, there had been treaties in 1914 and in 1939. But none had included the United States.

In November 1948 Truman was reelected, and the movement toward a treaty, slowed by the American political season, gained momentum. Again, Kennan offered one of his penetrating, if frustrating, analyses of the prospects and limits of a treaty between the North Atlantic powers. Alan Bullock, a historian and biographer of Bevin, is right to say Kennan’s memorandum put the case for NATO even better than the treaty itself: Kennan pointed out what all agreed—that the fundamental issue in Europe was the threat of Soviet “political conquest.” All the talk about defense coordination was secondary, for “military force plays a major role only as a means of intimidation.” Thus any Atlantic pact, focused as it would be on defense and security, would affect Europe’s “political war only insofar as it operates to stiffen the self-confidence of western Europeans in the face of Soviet pressures.” This was precisely why the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, why NATO was formed, and why president after president and prime minister after prime minister would reaffirm his or her state’s commitment to the alliance. But Kennan’s argument was frustrating in that it identified a fundamental problem—indeed, NATO’s main problem—without a solution: the “preoccupation with military affairs” at the treaty’s heart and in the minds of NATO diplomats, officials, and generals, he argued, was “regrettable,” for it “addresses itself to what is not the ...