NATO at Fifty: Did NATO Win the Cold War? Looking over the Wall
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.
Vojtech Mastny is a Senior Research Scholar at the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and heads the project on the parallel history of NATO and the Warsaw Pact at the National Security Archive. His most recent book is The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity.
Before rushing to celebrate NATO as the most successful military alliance in history, it is only fair to ask what tangible accomplishments justify that celebration, and how they might compare with NATO's failures.
European war has been avoided; who deserves the credit for that, as with anything that did not happen, will remain forever uncertain. Did NATO deter intended Soviet aggression? Did it curb the bellicosity of Germans and keep the lid on crises? Did it shorten the Cold War, bringing it to a happy end? Did it keep the nuclear genie safely under control while the conflict lasted? Did it husband its other military forces well? And has it drawn the right conclusions for the future from all its experience?
With the Cold War over, evidence is now available to broaden the judgment on NATO and help provide answers to questions like these. The much-vaunted nuclear capability of NATO turns out, as a practical matter, to have been far less important to the eventual outcome than its conventional forces. But above all, it was NATO's "soft power" that bested its adversary.
THE ELUSIVE SOVIET THREAT
On the fundamental question at NATO's creation, the Soviet archives, as so far examined, give every indication that the Soviet Union never seriously planned an unprovoked attack on Western Europe. The evidence is circumstantial, but would seem to vindicate such critics of NATO as George Kennan, who considered the alliance superfluous, even harmful, because it gave the Cold War a military dimension it did not otherwise have. Why, Kennan imagined the Soviet leaders asking, was the West justifying its rearmament by suspecting them of intending to do "the one thing they had not done," namely, "conduct an overt and unprovoked invasion of Western Europe?" Could it be that they therefore really believed, as they were publicly saying they did, that NATO was created to attack them?
This is a premium article
You must be a logged in Foreign Affairs subscriber to continue reading. If you wish to continue reading this article please subscribe , or activate your online account to get full online access.
Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.