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 American global policy. "For most students of the Cold War at the time, whether identified as "court historian" or "new left," the framing of the North Atlantic Treaty was a minor matter, subsumed under the major break from isolationism" (Kaplan, 1992, p. 16). This outlook, one might suggest, applied not only to scholars but to Americans in general; opinions of U.S. foreign policy might be deeply divided in that immediately post-Vietnam era, but NATO too wa...