Future of NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, is more in the news in mid-1999 than it has been in many years, perhaps in its history. The 50th anniversary of the organization, expected to be an occasion for celebration, the admission of three new members, and only subdued discussion of the alliance's future, turned out instead to be a strategy session for its first shooting war. The outcome of the Kosovo war will surely, in one way or another, play a central role in shaping the future of NATO, but it is all the more appropriate to consider its first half-century. The following essay explores nine historical perspectives, offered by eight different writers, on the history and development of NATO.

Lawrence Kaplan, in "After forty years: reflections on NATO as a research field," reflects back from the perspective of c. 1990 on the state of scholarly discussion of NATO as it stood in 1974, on the occasion of NATO's 25th anniverary, when the alliance was just half its present age. As the first "entangling alliance" entered into by the United States since its brief 18th century alignment with France, writes Kaplan, "NATO should have been a magnet for American historians. But this was not the case in 1974. The contribution of historians to the enormous body of NATO literature has been minimal" (Kaplan, 1992, p. 15).

This paucity of American historical consideration of NATO, he suggests, reflected an outlook in which NATO was seen as merely an incidental aspect of overall A

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ouches so nearly on historical issues as to be appropriate for consideration in this essay. Beaufre approaches the question of NATO from the perspective of European integration, a persistent theme of postwar French thought and diplomacy. To Beaufre, An Atlantic community with the United States is without question a reasonable and desireable idea, but this community would be very dangerous if it were effected under present conditions, with a divided Europe. In my opinion European union is the prerequisite to a reunion with the United States (Beaufre, 1966, p. 6). Beaufre restates the European origins of NATO (1966, pp. 15-16), and then goes on to present the uneasy European views of developments in American nuclear strategy. In the 1950s, American policy had been based on "massive retaliation," an all-or-nothing response by the US nuclear forces to any serious aggression. Under Kennedy, this policy was shifted to "flexible response," scaled to the level of threat, and including conventional and tactical nuclear options. Beaufre approves of much in Kennedy's strategy, but flexible response was alarming for Europe, holding out the specter of a war fought with Western Europe as nuclear battlefield, while the nuclear su

Category: Government - F