NATO at Fifty: An Unhappy Successful Marriage: Security Means Knowing What to Expect
Article Summary and Author Biography
A special commemorative section on the alliance that won the Cold War and its search for identity in triumph's aftermath. Michael Howard takes a look back; Vojtech Mastny gives the view from the other side of the Iron Curtain; and Robert E. Hunter and Michael E. Brown offer dueling perspectives on NATO's future, in a section edited by Peter Grose and copy-edited by Alice H.G. Phillips.
Michael Howard is a former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale. He is the life president of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
NATO was always intended to be both more and less than a military alliance. The original idea was the brainchild of Britain's foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin. In January 1948, confronted by a Western Europe still in ruins and a Soviet Union triumphantly consolidating its conquests, Bevin suggested to Washington that it would be possible to stem the further encroachment of the Soviet tide only "by organizing and consolidating the ethical and spiritual forces of Western civilization." Peace and safety, he maintained,
could only be preserved by the mobilization of such moral and material force as would create confidence and energy on the one side and inspire respect and caution on the other. The alternative was to acquiesce in continued Russian infiltration and watch the piecemeal collapse of one Western bastion after another.
Cynics may allege that this downplaying of material and emphasis upon ethical force was deliberately tailored to the susceptibilities of isolationist members of Congress, but at that time the threat from the Soviet Union was not perceived primarily in military terms. The real danger seemed to lie in the moral and material exhaustion of a Western Europe that, in spite of Marshall Plan aid, still looked like a pushover for communist infiltration and propaganda. A purely military alliance did not seem the appropriate answer, but what did?
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