ister Ernest Bevin (Henderson, 1982, pp. ix; 113). The French, however, played an equally crucial role, in pressing for a direct US role on the continent: "The French ambassador harped upon the necessity for immediate American military assistance for the Brussels Powers" (Henderson, 1982, p. 38), in contrast to the more distant role initially assumed by American policymakers.
These same themes, with particular attention to the French role, are pursued by I.M. Wall in "France and the North Atlantic Alliance." Wall, like Kaplan, begins by taking to task the parochialism of American views of NATO.
The traditional historiographical view of NATO interpreted it as a response to a perceived military threat to the West by superior Soviet forces. Revisionist historians took the opposite track, stressing an alleged American offensive designed at once to consolidate Washington's sphere of influence in the West and pursue an aggressive policy designed to loosen the Soviet grip on its area of hegemony in the East (Wall, 1992, p. 45).
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