Michael Howard

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.

Henry Kissinger_s eleventh book, Diplomacy, is a magnificent survey of power politics over more than three centuries. He contends that the great statesmen, Richelieu, Metternich and (of course) Nixon, have tried to purchase international stability with judicious realism, while paying political debts to ideological constituents. But Diplomacy fails to transcend eloquent nostalgia; Kissinger_s brand of realism is ill-suited to today_s interdependent world.

America is mad about Churchill. And if Sir Winston does not deserve such uncritical applause, he still emerges from two recent scholarly treatments with his reputation intact.

"1989 has been an 'annus mirabilis': a truly wonderful year", yet some might fear that its instabilities could lead to the disasters that followed those of 1789. "The lesson of 1789 and 1848 is not that events repeat themselves in some Thucydidean fashion. It is that during long periods of peace, such as those which Europe enjoyed from 1763 to 1789, 1815 to 1848, and 1945 to 1989, economic and social development engenders a political dynamic of its own. If governments are not responsive to that force they will sooner or later be swept away. Paradoxically, the man who discerned and explained this process most clearly was Karl Marx himself -- a great European philosopher whose works appear to have been as little studied in the Soviet Union as they are in the United States... Gorbachev was thus no fortuitous 'deus ex machina'... Unless they imitate Gorbachev's courage in embracing the future, the Chinese leaders will be faced, sooner or later, with other Tienanmen Squares... Even to chronicle the events of 1989 leaves one breathless". In Europe, the pace and confidence of German moves towards re-unification swept all expectations aside. President Bush, despite unfortunate tendencies of his officials at the outset of his administration, and despite absurdly archaic cries for US 'leadership' from Congress and the media, displayed "prudence, caution, concern for allied susceptibilities and a thorough understanding of the issues... as appropriate to the new conditions in Europe as President Truman's rugged courage had been forty years earlier". Although the end of East-West ideological confrontation will reveal the vast dimensions of residual problems, notably the disparity of wealth between North and South, it may well bring an end to proxy wars and unwise interventions. On balance, it is unlikely that the events of 1989 will produce the same instabilities and catastrophes as followed those of 1789. Professor of naval and military history at Yale University, and president of the IISS.

Historians who attempt to look into and prescribe for the future are professionally inclined to offer as much past history as they think they can get away with, and as little prophecy and prescription as they think their readers will accept. Historians have seen too many confident prophets fall flat on their faces to lay themselves open to more humiliation than they can help. We know that all we can do is to help diagnose the problem or, better, expose false diagnoses. We also believe that in doing this it is helpful to consider how a situation has developed, in this instance in casting a backward look over the origins and development of the Western Alliance to see how we have got to where we are now. There is little point in considering where we should be going if we do not first decide where we are starting from.