s regarded as American, not as a distinct entity in which non-US participation was consequential. This attitude, indeed, remains very much alive today; the political divisions over the Kosovo war might be startling to a time traveler from 1974, but it is regarded as an American war, not a NATO war.
In view of this pervasive American outlook, it is startling to learn that in Kaplan's view, NATO was essentially a European initiative, initially entered into only reluctantly by the United States. "In essence, the British and French, having put together a 50-year treaty with the Benelux countries, expected the United States to join it" (Kaplan, 1992, p. 18). So much was this the case, Kaplan observes, that out of deference to Congressional and public sentiment, "Europe" was hardly mentioned in the North Atlantic treaty (Kaplan, 1992, p. 20). This, in Kaplan's view, only underlines his central thrust of NATO as a European creation.
The same theme is developed by a British diplomat, Sir Nicholas Henderson, in his book The Birth of NATO. The book was written in 1982, at the time of one of NATO's proclaimedly recurrent crises. As Henderson writes,
A case-study of the processes surrounding a highly important event such as the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty may, if it sets out objectively the facts--the power equation at the time, the pressures and personalities involved--remind one of the immutability of certain truths governing international affairs. It can console one to recall how present-day crises, perilous though they seem, may not be worse than those of an earlier generation (Henderson, 1982, p. vii).
His work is in fact derived from notes Henderson took at the time, in the late 1940s. What comes out in this work, as in Kaplan's, is a Eurocentric view of NATO's origins, again in startling contrast to the conventional American perception. In Henderson's view, the prime mover was British foreign mi...