NATO was a bluff. As Denis Healey, a future British defense minister, observed in his memoirs, ‘for most of the Europeans, NATO was worthless unless it could prevent another war; they were not interested in fighting one’. The originality of the Treaty lay not so much in what it could achieve but in what it represented: like the Marshall Plan—and the Brussels Treaty from which it sprang—NATO illustrated the most significant change that had come over Europe (and the US) as a result of the war—a willingness to share information and cooperate in defense, security, trade, currency regulations and
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