17, 1948, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg had taken the first steps toward a military alliance by signing the Brussels Treaty, but since the United States then possessed a nuclear monopoly, American participation was essential to give any Western alliance substance. The answer was NATO which was signed in Washington on April 4, 1949 and which came into effect after it was ratified by the U.S. Senate on July 21 of that year by a vote of 82 to 13.
Throughout history, multinational military alliances have tended to be unstable and to break down when the threats which gave them birth diminished. American support for NATO was far from unanimous. The left opposed it as being unnecessarily provocative to the Soviet Union and some conservatives feared the loss of national sovereignty, inherent in Article 5 of the NATO treaty which declared that an armed attack on any of the 12 original signatories (the Brussels Treaty five plus the United States, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Norway and Portugal), was an attack on all and required them to act in their common defense. The Soviet threat, however, held together the Atlantic Alliance until the era of Mikhail Gorbachev. The alliance withstood severe strains, such as the rift caused by the French withdrawal from the NATO command structure in 1966 and the growth of neutralism in Europe and Germany's ostpolitik during the period of detente in the 1970s. The Soviet buildup in nuclear and conventional arms helped Western leaders marshal the necessary consensus, despite considerable domestic opposition, for the placement of American long range nuclear missiles in Great Britain and West Germany in the mid-1980s. By then, moderating influences in Soviet foreign policy and internal weakness within the Soviet Union were generating strains within NATO.
The ending of the cold War placed in question the raison d'etre of NATO, the Soviet military threat. Rosner said that after the Ber...