concern.
NATO is an extraordinary anomoly, not only in American history, but in world history. The call to avoid "entangling alliances" remains the most familiar phrase from George Washington's famous Farewell Address, and until after World War II it remained a basic principle of U.S. foreign policy. But the U.S. was scarcely alone in avoiding "entangling alliances" in peacetime.
Traditionally, alliances were something nations entered into only as a wartime contingency; only in the late nineteenth century did developments in international relations and military technology make quasi permanent alliances among nations a regular feature of world affairs.4 Indeed, to find an alliance comparable in scope and endurance to NATO it is necessary to look back over two thousand years, to the Delian League formed in 479 BC by Athens and other Greek city states to resist Persian (and later Spartan) aggression. NATO has indeed been called "the Delian League of modern history."5
However, the evolution of NATO has in a sense been opposite to that of the Delian League. The Ionian city states liberated from Persia, unlike the nations of Western Europe after World War II, required little economic and political reconstruction. The Delian League began as an alliance of near equals, and gradually developed over three generations into something close to an Athenian Empire.6
The development of NATO has been in the opposite direction. In the late 1940s, Britain was exhausted and continental Western Europe shattered. Only the U.S. was "on its feet," and in a position to extend its military and economic capabilities to assist Western Europe to rebuild its society and infrastructure, and resist Soviet aggression. In the four decades since that time, America's NATO partners have become stable democracies, economically prosperous, well armed, and in the cases of Britain and France, independent nuclear deterrent powers.
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