Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order

by Timothy Andrews Sayle

Liddell Hart was not alone in describing the strategy of the Atlantic Pact as akin to a suicide pact.2 And yet, allied leaders, speaking through the historical record scattered over more than a dozen archives in Europe and North America, make clear that they built and maintained this pact to keep peace. As NATO’s first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, put it, “the business—the paramount, the permanent, the all-absorbing business of NATO is to avoid war.”3

According to Robert A. Ford, a distinguished Canadian diplomat who served as the dean of ambassadors in Moscow and as an adviser to NATO on Soviet affairs, it was a “myth” that what “NATO had actually done was prevent a military invasion.” The real threat to Europe had been the political disintegration of the allies, and this is what NATO had prevented.

The great fear of NATO’s leaders throughout the Cold War and beyond was not that the Soviet Union or Russia would launch an invasion of Europe. Instead, they feared that Moscow might threaten—even imply—the use of force. The very hint of war might drive citizens in Europe to press their leaders to concede to the Kremlin’s demands rather than risk another cataclysm on the continent. Thus what American officials called the “inadequacies and anomalies of NATO, the relative unrealism of the military plans, and the slightly fictional aspects of NATO,” were understood on both sides of the Atlantic to be essential components for providing Europeans with an intangible sense of security.

The democratic nature of allied governments, or some democratic styling of the alliance itself, has long been assumed as the glue that kept NATO together. But the historical records reveal a darker, deeper, and more complex relationship between democracy and NATO. The allies did not maintain NATO because it was an alliance of democracies, but because it offered the best insurance against the dangers of democracy—a fickle electorate that, in seeking peace, might pave the way for war.

Allied leaders built and maintained NATO not simply to deter Soviet military adventures, but to establish what Ismay called a “Pax Atlantica.” Like the Pax Romana, the Pax Atlantica was to establish “a period of peace . . . enforced by arms.”8 The North Atlantic Treaty, the NATO institution, and the integrated military commands established a new system of international relations correcting the errors and omissions of the past, and it all rested on a logic that both predated and outlasted the Cold War.

Lord Ismay is said to have quipped that NATO existed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Many have quoted this explanation for NATO’s existence, even if there is no record of Ismay having made the comment. No matter: it is the best explanation of NATO’s function. Indeed, we do not have to take Ismay’s word for it, for his dictum was repackaged in countless policy documents over the alliance’s long history as an explanation of NATO’s purpose.

The Ismay dictum is, fundamentally, an argument about the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. Buried within the seemingly straightforward sentence, however, is the fact that the most direct threat to any of the three goals lay at the ballot box: a European populace bullied by the threat of war; a resurgent German chancellor; or an isolationist Congress or president.

Nor can there be the suggestion that NATO was simply an alliance made up of democratic states. Despite the treaty language and grand speeches about NATO as an alliance of democracies, many officials, like those in the British Foreign Office, believed NATO’s “democratic ideology” was “tarnished by autocracy in Portugal and the somewhat authoritarian government in Turkey.”14 Canadian officials negotiating the treaty in 1948 warned the whole idea was “ideologically messy” and that the future alliance would be open to “charges of hypocrisy.”

uncertainty of the democratic harvest led to very careful election watching in NATO capitals. The Americans worried that Europeans would elect neutralist, antinuclear, or anti-American governments, while Europeans worried that the people of the United States would find a president on the fringe of the extreme right or left.

Some scholars have suggested the transatlantic relationship rested on a “trans-national élite” or an “Atlantic political culture.” The idea is that a group of influential individuals, either members of government or those with influence over governments, served as a bridge connecting the allies’ values and interests.

Certainly some, but not all, of the most important officials charged with NATO files met regularly at meetings and conferences of organizations like the English-Speaking Union, Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations, Atlantik-Brücke, and parallel unofficial and sometimes informal clubs. Historians and scholars of these organizations, however, have not been able to identify a direct link between these organizations and policy, and even scholars that study Bilderberg’s connections to NATO warn against overestimating the importance of these organizations.

All of the experiences of NATO officials were different, and some officials came to similar conclusions about the need for NATO based on their study or reading of history, rather than their active participation. But the overarching lesson these officials seem to have taken from their war experience was a belief that peace, however desirable, was not the default human condition.

The thaw in the Cold War, however, undercut public support for NATO defense spending. The late 1960s mark the beginning of a concern that would haunt NATO for the rest of the Cold War: Would allied governments be willing to pay for NATO’s defenses, or would the alliance collapse? This question lingers decades after the end of the Cold War.

Fears of diminishing public support for the alliance became only more acute as the states of Europe sought a unified voice in international affairs. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger worried that the generation of postwar European leaders who had built NATO were being replaced by craven men who would continue to cut defense spending to appease voters. A seeming imbalance in the burdens of defense, plus increasing economic friction between the United States and Europe, threatened an Atlantic rupture.

When, in 1989, George H. W. Bush took office, he and his administration believed the alliance was essential. They left office thinking the same thing—even if during that time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany was unified, and the Soviet Union collapsed. For Bush and his advisers, the logic of NATO both as a bulwark against Moscow’s influence and as a means of preventing the establishment of a shaky system of alliances in Central Europe continued to apply after the end of the Cold War. The need to salt the earth against a potential reconstitution of Soviet power, and the desire to ensure that the former members of the Warsaw Pact did not seek destabilizing alliances of their own, led to early thinking about the expansion of NATO to the east, and the maintenance of a permanent Pax Atlantica.

The fear that drove allied leaders to sign the North Atlantic Treaty was not that of a Soviet invasion of Europe. It was the threat of Soviet blackmail: that Moscow might make demands on a government in Europe, and that the citizens of the country in question, fearing a return to war, would insist their leaders accept the Soviet request. The Soviet Union would not go to war, as Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, put it, because it would not need to: “the Russians seem to be fairly confident of getting the fruits of war without going to war.”1

While the economic revival of Europe was crucial, Bevin did not think that, on its own, a better standard of living could help Europeans resist Soviet pressure. A defensive treaty, he argued, was needed to “create confidence and energy on one side,” that is, in those parts of Europe outside Soviet control, and to “inspire respect and caution on the other,” that is, Moscow.7 Bevin’s belief that a defensive treaty would provide a psychological boost to the people of Western Europe was one of the essential, if perplexing, concepts that would drive NATO forward.

The takeover of government, supported by the Communist-controlled police and army, alarmed Western Europeans and Americans alike and caused Washington to wonder whether the coup would stimulate more seizures of power in Europe.8 As early as 1946, President Truman had argued that the Soviet government was really no different from Russia’s czarist government or, for that matter, Hitler and the Nazis.9 Now, after Prague, parallels between Nazi claims on Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the Soviet-backed coup in Prague obliterated any distinction between Hitler and Stalin. Even German politicians from different sides of the political spectrum agreed the Soviets were “a red-lacquered second edition of the Nazis.”10

A month after the Prague coup, the Norwegian government warned British officials that they expected an imminent demand from Moscow to negotiate a pact. Earlier that month, Finland had signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that essentially ceded Helsinki’s security and defense prerogatives to Moscow in exchange for independence on domestic affairs, a relationship described throughout the Cold War as “Finlandization.” During the last war, Norway had been overrun by the Nazis, providing the German navy with wider access to the North Atlantic. A Norwegian-Soviet pact would carry the same strategic threat—perhaps leading to similar demands on Sweden and Denmark, and the making of the Baltic into a “Russian lake.”11 But a “Norwegian defection” from the West to Moscow would also doom any chance for political cooperation in the West, as Moscow picked off states one by one.

American officials came to echo British fears that the people of Europe might be so “intimidated by the Soviet colossus . . . to the point of losing their will to resist.” This, US officials judged, is what had happened at Prague: noncommunist forces that might have stood up to the Communists had there been “any sign of friendly external force” simply did not. The Americans worried, like Bevin, that continual Soviet encroachments would finally force Washington and London to take up arms. Stalin, it seemed, was underestimating the “present temper” of Congress and the American public. If the Soviets pushed their “expansionist tactics,” there might be a “forceful American reaction” and a war no one wanted.

The true “objective of the Pact approach was to stop the Soviet Communist advance, and that this would probably be accomplished by the fact of a drawing together of free nations in their own defense.”21 It was not the military power of the pact that would matter so much as the pact itself.22

Kennan told some of the diplomats visiting Washington that a formal treaty was unnecessary, as it would be “unthinkable that America would stand idly by” if the Soviets made “an aggressive move against any country of Europe.”25 Such arguments meant little to those who remembered events in Europe in 1939 and 1940. What the British, Canadian, and Europeans sought was more than just a unilateral assurance from American diplomats, or even from the president himself. Even at this early stage, the future allies of the United States knew how easily presidents, and their commitments, could change. They wanted an agreement that would survive the transition from one president to the next.

Repeatedly, diplomats and politicians spoke about the treaty as did one Canadian diplomat on the working group: “If a pact along the lines of that currently under discussion had existed in the later 1930’s, there would have been no war in 1939, and that a similar pact probably would have prevented the outbreak of the war that began in 1914.”30 Of course, there had been treaties in 1914 and in 1939. But none had included the United States.

But Kennan’s argument was frustrating in that it identified a fundamental problem—indeed, NATO’s main problem—without a solution: the “preoccupation with military affairs” at the treaty’s heart and in the minds of NATO diplomats, officials, and generals, he argued, was “regrettable,” for it “addresses itself to what is not the main danger.”31

The allies would never find a direct solution to what they believed to be the greatest threat they faced: that the voters in one or more allied countries might elect leaders who in turn would accede to, even champion, policies advantageous to Moscow.

Both the Americans and the British had initially assumed that NATO military planners would develop a “global strategy.” But their thinking changed very quickly when it was clear that the French, too, wanted NATO to be responsible for a worldwide military strategy, and that France expected to play an equal role in developing any such plans. The British and Americans quickly backed away from such a vision, jealous of their own global prerogatives and fearful that the French could not keep secrets.

From early days, the British and Americans would work to keep NATO focused on regional military planning for Europe, while France would continue to press for global planning.40 The Soviet atomic explosion in 1949 led the allies to expect the Soviet Union would be capable of launching a surprise attack by 1954, and planning proceeded on this basis.41 Still, on June 15, 1950, Bernard Montgomery surveyed the state of European defense: “As thing stand to-day,” if Western Europe were to be attacked, “there would be scenes of appalling and indescribable confusion.”

McCloy’s recommendations for a European army, improved by suggestions from Douglas in Britain and the American ambassador in France, David Bruce, were not based on purely military considerations but on their appreciation of the psychology of European citizens. Much of the American thinking, and indeed that of European officials, was focused on the concept of the “will to fight.” Now, in war-ravaged Europe, wrote Douglas, Europeans’ will lay “dormant, not because the great majority of the French people and of the German people and of the Belgians and the Dutch prefer communism, but because they doubt that the Soviet hordes can be resisted.”

It also represented the fear of European leaders that their citizens would not trust their armies to stand up to Soviet threats. As Paul-Henri Spaak, a former Belgian prime minister and future NATO secretary-general, pointed out in 1951, the armies of Western Europe had been crushed in the last war. “Europeans,” he said, “have no confidence in their national military establishments.” Only American participation and leadership could provide that confidence.48

The great debate was won by those who advocated sending troops across the Atlantic. The US divisions were deployed to Europe, along with Canadian and British troops. But Eisenhower made clear that the troops were in Europe “temporarily.” He and his senior staff believed that in “the long run it will not be feasible to have, in times of peace, large American ground forces stationed in Europe; they will be withdrawn eventually.”54 Off the record, Eisenhower told newspaper editors that US divisions would likely begin to return to America in about three years, once Europe was in “a very fine state.”

Upon arriving in Europe, Eisenhower was struck by the “poverty, the extreme poverty of Western Europe.”56 He also found that the American troops being deployed to Europe were not as welcome as he had expected.57 The two issues were related. Officials like Marshall, now secretary of defense, and Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized that pushing Europeans on military expenditure could undermine the fragile, if recovering, social, economic, and political systems in Europe. In the wealthy United States, more taxation caused by defense expenditures might mean the difference between citizens buying radios or televisions; in Europe, it meant the difference between “white or black bread.”

The Americans were frustrated that their European colleagues had not convinced their publics of the necessity of sacrifices to strengthen NATO’s military power. They resented that European governments had let their citizens think of NATO’s defense buildup as akin to “castor oil which has to be taken.”58 But they hoped that, eventually, the Europeans would recover. In the meantime, the United States would not push them to the breaking point.

Indeed, by 1951, he thought the worries of European citizens voting directly for “the communistic ticket” in elections had passed. Eisenhower’s main worry, and the problem that would cause the greatest concern in NATO for the next four decades, was the Soviet effort to convince the Western Europeans that they had no need for defense and that they should quit NATO and become neutral.

In 1953, by what one American official called a “magical coincidence,” the allies decided that, after fulfilling two-thirds of the troop-level goals set after the outbreak of the Korean War, NATO had all the troops it would need. London, ultimately with the acquiescence of Washington, persuaded the other allies to adopt a strategy and force plan designed to deter the Soviet Union, not to defend Western Europe.68 The idea, as Montgomery put it, was that the Soviet Union would never contemplate a war with Europe because “they would suffer great damage and much loss of life—equally as great as we would.”69

The main challenge to NATO in 1956 came not from Soviet troops on NATO’s borders. Quite the contrary: the great challenge to NATO’s survival in the mid-1950s was the absence of an imminent Soviet threat to Western Europe. NATO, seemingly as soon as it had completed its tasks of absorbing West Germany and thus establishing a reasonable military deterrent against the Soviet Union, looked like it might have put itself out of business. Stalin’s death, and the efforts by his successors to portray the Soviet government as champions of peace, ushered in a new era of East-West relations inimical to NATO.

In response, some allied leaders expected NATO to help protect their imperial possessions or aid their colonial struggles. But these issues divided NATO deeply. Some allies, especially the Nordic countries and the Canadians, insisted that NATO had no responsibility for problems abroad. Critically, Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, were unwilling to see NATO’s thumb rest on the scales in support of colonial powers. As Eisenhower, speaking of African independence movements, told his National Security Council, “he would like to be on the side of the natives for once.”2

The American inhibition against using NATO to fight the global Cold War was more than simple moral conviction. Both Eisenhower and Dulles thought that the people of the United States would not support continued participation in an alliance or organization that fought for imperial ends and against independence movements. If NATO tried to fight the crises of empire, American domestic support for the alliance would evaporate, and NATO would crumble, leaving Western Europe as vulnerable to Soviet political pressure as it had been in the late 1940s.

The change in Soviet tone after Stalin’s death in 1953 was dramatic but suspicious. The Kremlin abandoned its threats of war and instead emphasized conciliation with the governments of Western Europe. The Soviet Union signed a peace treaty with Austria and withdrew the Red Army. Moscow issued a disarmament proposal, sent a mission of top Soviet leaders to Yugoslavia, and accepted a meeting with Britain, France, and the United States to discuss European issues. At the same time, the Soviet Union increased its “political action” in European countries, inviting scholars, politicians, and business leaders to visit the USSR.6 A group of experts on the Soviet Union met at NATO headquarters Paris to discuss the Soviet “peace offensive,” and concluded the Kremlin was seeking to “lull, rather than to alarm, the West.”7

The allied governments remained convinced that the Soviets’ “basic purpose” was to “destroy NATO and get foreign forces”—that is, American, British, and Canadian troops—“withdrawn from Europe.” Lester Pearson, the Canadian foreign minister and the first NATO foreign minister to visit the USSR, reported back to the allies in 1955 that the Soviets expected NATO would “fall apart” in a period of lessened tension between East and West.8

The deployment of US troops, it seemed to the Americans, had not stiffened the European resolve sufficiently. General Alfred Gruenther, NATO’s supreme commander (SACEUR), privately accused European politicians of being negligent by not encouraging support for the alliance.13 Eisenhower worried there was a “new feeling growing abroad that NATO may be unnecessary.”14

By the end of 1955, NATO foreign ministers from the Netherlands, Portugal, and France were all pushing for NATO to take a more active interest, and perhaps active policy, outside Europe.18 These three countries wanted help in Indonesia, Goa and Africa, and North Africa, respectively. But they were joined by non-colonial powers, including the Italians and Germans, who wanted NATO to ensure the Soviet Union did not gain allies in the developing world.

In 1955 and 1956, allied foreign ministers believed Soviet activity and influence in North Africa and the Middle East, especially Egypt, posed the greatest threat to NATO. Nearly all the petroleum that fueled and lubricated NATO’s armies transited the Suez Canal. More important, the oil and other products from the region provided much of the fuel and energy for Western Europe’s recovering, but fragile, economy.21 In the middle of June 1956, Dulles and his French counterpart, Christian Pineau, agreed that the NATO allies must consult on Egypt’s future. Nothing was coordinated or agreed between the NATO allies by July 1956, however, when the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized and restricted access to the Suez Canal and closed off Egypt’s oil pipelines.

Dulles also made sure to remind Eisenhower that the United States had ratified the North Atlantic Treaty with the clear proviso that the treaty “was not to be construed as endorsement of the colonial policies of other NATO countries.”29 The treaty, which had been heatedly contested in the Senate, was still only seven years old. If Congress were to believe that the administration had baited them with an agreement for the protection of Europe and switched it for a global commitment to maintain crumbling empires, the administration would get no more support for NATO.

Soviet tanks helped revive NATO. In the first week of November, the Red Army rolled into Hungary to crush an uprising. While NATO’s response to the Hungarian crisis amounted to little more than council discussions about what each country was doing to aid refugees, the Hungarian invasion provided a stark reminder of the strength and proximity of Soviet armor to the capitals of many NATO allies.

Lester Pearson, the Canadian secretary of state for external affairs, expected that the ministerial in December would help smooth things over, both in discussions within the North Atlantic Council, but “particularly outside” the formal NAC meeting—that is, in the hallways, the cocktail parties, and the dinners.38 Pearson was right. According to Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak, his colleagues met in Paris “more NATO-minded than ever before.”

It was remarkable how quickly the NATO allies were to put their differences behind them.59 Part of the explanation lies in the juxtaposition of the Suez and Hungarian crises. A common enemy and common outrage often cauterized the alliance’s wounds. But the extent to which members looked to NATO as a possible solution to their problems outside the European area offers another explanation for the rapid healing.

Privately, Macmillan and the Foreign Office prioritized Anglo-American coordination far higher than expanding or deepening NATO into anything much bigger than an organization responsible for the military defense of Western Europe. They wished to operate, as much as possible, in secret, to prevent encouraging the jealousies of allies left out.78 After Suez, they believed that the defense of the West required a “less spectacular approach; and to begin by welding more closely together those countries which have the greatest practical contribution to make,” that is, to link more closely Anglo-American policy, particularly by developing “machinery.”

But fears about the cohesion of the alliance were not exaggerated; they were felt deeply in Europe, especially Bonn. Chancellor Adenauer told John McCloy that if the treaty members did not find new inspiration, “this would be the end of NATO.”113 Adenauer harbored doubts about American resolve to defend Europe, especially given the Soviet launch of Sputnik, and even entertained a secret French invitation to join with the Italians to develop a nuclear capability.114

Dulles complained about the pressure from the Germans, but settled on two concrete gestures of reaffirmation: an offer to provide European allies with IRBMs and a plan to equip European NATO forces with nuclear warheads.117 As the heads of government meeting approached, the supreme allied commander, Lauris Norstad, had urged the United States to take up plans for a “nuclear stockpile” whereby it would maintain nuclear weapons in Europe that would, on the president’s say so, be released to NATO commanders for use in war.

Marc Trachtenberg has made the case that the atomic stockpile plan was “perhaps the most important policy initiative undertaken by the Eisenhower administration.”127 It fundamentally transformed the capability of NATO forces and undoubtedly helped to build the trust of European leaders in the American commitment to Europe. At the same time, the plan sowed the seeds of a major dispute in NATO with the French. And it was an entirely different approach to transforming NATO in comparison with Stevenson’s aborted ideas for nonmilitary solutions.