NATO Success and Failure in an Evolving Relations

Success and Failure in an Evolving Relationship

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was established by treaty in 1949 as a joint defense pact among Canada, the US, the UK, France, and several smaller Western European countries. The broad objective was to prevent another general European war; the more specific objective was to forestall any possible aggressive action by the Soviet Union. France, the UK, and the Benelux countries had a year previously signed their own mutual defense pact, the Treaty of Brussels. NATO effectively superceded this arrangement, converting a Western European defense arrangement into a transatlantic one.

It may be noted that whereas the unidentified but probably US-oriented author of the online Wikipedia open-source encyclopedia sees the Treaty of Brussels as the direct predecessor of NATO, a European source speaks of NATO as "ironically" a component in the emergence of European joint defense (Braillard and Schwok 5). The question at issue is not one of facts, but of perspective, as will be seen at some points below.

The following discussion is primarily concerned with the elements of success and failure in the history of NATO. It will consider the role of NATO during the Cold War era, its surprisingly active role since the end of the Cold War, and its future prospects.

NATO was and is first and foremost a military alliance, and the ultimate test of its success or failure is there

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ibute, respectively, three battleships or tank divisions, two, and one, their combined strengths of six battleships or divisions embodied twice the power - whether for actual combat or for deterrence - than even the strongest of the three could achieve on its own. It is for this reason that the ancient Chinese military sage Sun Tzu recommended strengthening one's alliance while undermining the enemy's. Even a single deliverable nuclear weapon, however, can obliterate a city, thus serving as a formidable deterrent. (This can be seen today in contrasting the delicate US policy toward North Korea with its invasion of Iraq.) The UK and French nuclear deterrent forces, though far smaller than Soviet forces, were arguably sufficient to restrain Soviet adventurism that might threaten those nations' survival. Certainly the US, with its large nuclear arsenal, had no direct need of its allies' smaller forces in order to provide an overwhelming deterrent. It might be argued that the traditional additive calculus of conventional forces still applied to those forces, even in a nuclear age. However, as alluded to above, at no time during the Cold War were NATO's conventional forces in Europe regarded as fully capable, to a high level

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