This special issue examines NATO’s past with an eye to better understanding its present and its future. NATO’s history, now running over seventy years, can no longer be framed in Cold War terms alone. Nor can the organization be understood fully as a post-Cold War institution. Today’s NATO is a product of both of these eras. A reconsideration of NATO’s place in history encourages us to consider NATO’s past, even its contemporary past, from different angles. The articles in this special issue move away from studying NATO’s relationship with any one particular geopolitical event or crisis and instead examine how NATO developed over years and over decades. This effort to draw back the historical lens has had revealing results. It opens new vistas for explaining how NATO thrived and survived for decades, and pondering whether it will survive for many more.
This issue begins with the chronologically most recent pieces and works backwards to the early days of NATO. Repositioning the end of the Cold War as a mid-way point in NATO’s history to date, rather than – in the more commonplace treatment – as an ending or starting point, allow us to recalibrate the organization’s history of the late 1980s and 1990s. Several articles in this issue connect NATO’s post-Cold War future with the alliance’s Cold War past and lead us to understand American, European, and Russian policy in the broader context. Several articles, moreover, focus on aspects of the alliance’s development during the Cold War and deepen our understanding of how and why NATO existed in the form it did at the end of the Cold War and beyond. They demonstrate that NATO was not static from 1949 to 1989, but the site of constant change and contestation over its raison d’etre, its mission, its strategy, capacity and functions.
Indeed, if there is one theme running through this issue, it is the constant contestation over NATO’s modus operandi and, more fundamentally, its very identity. Was NATO, and is NATO, a defensive alliance that meets the military-security needs of its member states? Or is the organization a community of core values bound together to uphold and strengthen those very core values? These questions were emphatically posed and vigorously debated by the allies during the Cold War and after it ended. And while posed, they have not been answered conclusively. The articles in this issue thus sensitize readers to the complexity of NATO’s history, a complexity spurred further by near constant attempts to shape and re-shape the alliance. While few if any of the historical actors in the pages that follow questioned NATO’s development into a seemingly permanent and crucial fixture of transatlantic security, almost all were involved in an effort, either collegial or adversarial, to reconfigure what NATO did, and why.
This historical pattern points to at least three major implications for today’s world and NATO’s role in it. First, from the outset, NATO’s history has been a site of reassessment and debate over the purpose and the purview of the alliance, and there is no reason to think that this debate is not going to continue. NATO has always been a venue where allies try to smooth out differences between themselves. It is a place to at least try to find solutions, and solutions always begin with problems. A second point stems from the first: The NATO allies have sought to use the alliance to resolve disagreement or disparities in confronting security challenges, and as a result there has been regular adaptation in how the alliance operates to shifting interests, capacities and geopolitical challenges. While, in today’s world, there is room to argue over whether NATO should continue or not, or whether it should exist in its current form, insisting that the alliance is ‘obsolete’ would be to ignore the unceasing efforts of allies to shape the alliance to their needs and wishes. Third, and finally, the articles in this issue point to the enormous resources, measured in terms of time and energy, that have been invested in building NATO over the last seven decades. To be sure, it is important to avoid the sunk-cost fallacy: no one should argue that these resources must not be abandoned simply because they have been invested. But the larger point is to recognize the sheer effort that must be constantly injected into an international security system to maintain it, despite the shifts in power both within the alliance and without. NATO’s past has been hard work, and if NATO is going to have a future, there should be no expectation it will require anything less.
In his contribution to this volume, Sergey Radchenko looks at Moscow’s reaction to NATO’s eastern enlargement in the 1990s. He argues that enlargement was not seen as a priori threatening or unacceptable. The key issue was Russia’s own (non-)involvement. The Russian leaders at first sought to join the alliance, seeing membership as a form of their country’s acceptance as a part of the West. Recognition of Russia as America’s post-Cold War partner had an important role in the legitimacy narrative of the Russian political elites. Moscow’s pushback against enlargement was a consequence of the realization that Russia’s membership was not in the cards. Meanwhile, tacit recognition of Russia as a real or potential adversary of the West also had a legitimizing aspect; rejected as partners, the Russian policy makers drew legitimacy from being recognized as defending their national interests in the face of Western bullying. Yet, as the article shows, these ‘national interests’ were never immutable; they were defined and redefined by the shifting narrative of political legitimacy, which itself was a product of the interplay between the West’s perception of Russia and Russia’s perception of itself.
Building on his earlier celebrated foray into the subject of NATO enlargement, Joshua Shifrinson argues that long before Bill Clinton embraced the idea, the Bush Administration looked to future enlargement as an important vehicle for assuring America’s political and military dominance in Europe and forestalling Russia’s and, indeed, the European Union’s challenge to this dominance. Shifrinson’s argument challenges a very popular strand of historiography, represented (in this special issue) by Andres Kasekamp, that sees enlargement as essentially a response by the idealists in the Clinton Administration to prodding by the Central and Eastern Europeans. There is little such benevolence in Shifrinson’s account: he sees Washington as above all a cynical actor, playing for political preeminence in the uncertain post-Cold War world. Shifrinson’s approach to NATO as a tool for undercutting real or potential American rivals stands to contribute strongly to the present resurgence of Realism in IR.
Liviu Horovitz and Elias Götz argue, by contrast, that the Bush Administration’s key priority in Europe was making sure that the continent would remain willing to accommodate America’s plans for expanding the global economy. In this sense, continued US military presence in Europe (as part of NATO), and NATO’s enlargement to the East (something that both the West and the East Europeans were interested in) were primarily a quid pro quo for strengthening Europe’s economic interdependence with the United States. One could perhaps contend that the argument is not incompatible with Shifrinson’s take; after all, Washington’s effort to pre-empt Europe’s distancing itself from the US-led economic order can be construed as part and parcel of a broader effort to preclude Europe’s rise as America’s geopolitical competitor. In either case, as, indeed, Horovitz and Götz persuasively argue, Russia’s position on NATO enlargement, or the need to stay engaged with Moscow (or otherwise) were not all that important in Washington’s hierarchy of foreign policy imperatives.
Differently from both Shifrinson and Horovitz/Götz (who are mainly interested in Washington’s rationale for enlarging NATO), Andres Kasekamp brings to the fore the applicants’ side of the story – in his case, the efforts of the Baltic three (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) to join the alliance. Focusing on the late Clinton and early Bush years, Kasekamp shows how the Balts overcame improbable odds to win their admission tickets to NATO, which entailed the pursuit of domestic policies that would win approval in the West (for example, in relation to better treatment of ethnic Russians, or combatting corruption) and enthusiastic support for, and participation in, US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kasekamp argues that without such proactive engagement, it is unlikely that the Baltic states would have joined NATO. Even as he gives considerable agency to the Balts themselves, Kasekamp notes that a general improvement of US-Russian relations in the early 2000s in the context of the ‘war on terror’ helped dissipate fears of Moscow’s hostile reaction to this new round of enlargement.
The challenges that NATO encountered in the 1990s were completely inconceivable in the 1980s. That decade began with a deep freeze in East-West relations. The Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan. Detente collapsed. Martial law was imposed in Poland. NATO had taken the decision to upgrade its nuclear forces in Europe. One would think that such tensions would help forge solidarity in NATO. Yet, as Susan Colbourn shows in her contribution to this special issue, this was far from being the case, as the US and some of its European allies (in particular West Germany) found themselves at odds over how to respond to the Soviet challenge: by engaging Moscow, or by playing tough. Ronald Reagan’s combative rhetoric did not endear the American President to the West European public opinion that was more inclined towards reigniting detente. Eventually a compromise was found that was inspired by the 1967 Harmel Report: it combined elements of both approaches. This compromise, worked out in 1984, set the stage for re-engaging with the USSR on arms control when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.
Dealing with a broadly similar subject but from a very different perspective, Andreas Lutsch in his contribution to the special issue explores the seeming contradictions of NATO’s dual-track decision, which paved way for the deployment of Pershing IIs and ground-launched cruise missiles, while allowing for their complete elimination through the so called “zero option.” Lutsch shows that these weapons were judged to be necessary for strategic stability in Europe, most of all by West Germany and Britain, and yet it was through the efforts of the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt that the possibility of “zero” was not ruled out in the final decision. Schmidt understood the importance of the weapons, which shored up the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent but for reasons that had to do with his domestic coalition politics, and with his hopes of maintaining at least some momentum in Soviet-West German relations, he felt the need to allow for the theoretical possibility of eliminating new deployments in NATO. This was in part a function of his belief that the Soviets would never consider the “zero” option. When they did – concluding the INF treaty in December 1987– NATO’s transatlantic security link was severely undermined.
Ruud van Dijk and Stanley R. Sloan, meanwhile, address another persistent issue in alliance politics – the gap between NATO’s ostensible democratic values and the retreat into right wing populism if not hardline authoritarianism in several member states. They compare and contrast the way NATO dealt with the authoritarian regime in Greece in the late 1960s – early 1970s, and the debates over Turkey’s backsliding towards dictatorship under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Van Dijk and Sloan focus on the role of the Dutch Foreign Minister Max van der Stoel who, in the early 1970s, spearheaded the allied effort to confront the Greek government on the issue of its authoritarian proclivities even while realizing that this effort had to be contained within certain parameters that would preclude Athens from being expelled from the alliance. The idea here was that expelling Greece was unlikely to help its transition to democracy even while undermining NATO strategically. This is a lesson, they argue, that could be applied to Turkey as well as other backsliders: persistent but quiet diplomacy works best. They add, however, that in the longer term, NATO’s very survival depends on its members’ adherence to common values.
Timothy Andrews Sayle’s contribution to this volume takes us back to the Cold War beginnings. In his exploration of nuclear information sharing – or lack of sharing – within the alliance, he details how the United States changed its policy toward nuclear secrets. In the alliance’s first years, it was clear to some American leaders that restricting information about the atomic arsenal that served NATO would create tensions within the alliance, but there were numerous obstacles to any real debates or discussions over nuclear strategy in the North Atlantic Council. Only in the late 1960s, during the Lyndon Johnson administration, did Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara settle on the need to establish a formal organ to tackle NATO’s nuclear problems. The Nuclear Planning Group that McNamara created has been in existence for over 50 years. But that it was almost two decades in the making reveals the importance of studying the evolutions and changes in the alliance with a broad lens.
Finally, Jeffrey H. Michaels writes of early NATO visions of a possible war with the Soviet bloc. These visions, rather unsurprisingly, drew heavily on the experience of the Second World War. The working assumption of American planners was that the Soviets, if and when they invaded, would promptly overrun Western Europe, which would then have to be reclaimed from the enemy from the UK, Spain or North Africa in what would become a long, drawn-out war. Substantive American involvement was not even envisaged in the early phases of the conflict. The planners assumed that the prospect of America’s ability to mobilize its superior strength over the longer-term would suffice to deter the Soviet Union (Michaels calls this ‘deterrence by alliance’). Unfortunately, this was hardly reassuring to the countries that would be first in the line of the assumed Soviet attack, so the strategic thinking eventually allowed for the placement of US troops closer to the frontline, not so much to deter the Soviets as to reassure the allies. This underlying prioritization of reassurance over deterrence in Alliance strategy, he argues, is still very much at the center of NATO’s thinking about a possible war with Russia.
This special issue consists of a selection of papers presented at the conference, ‘NATO’s Past and Present,’ held at King’s College London on 6 December 2019. The conference was co-organized by the Centre for Conflict, Security and Societies at Cardiff University, the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War at KCL with support of the Engelsberg Applied History Programme, and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. The co-editors would like to thank Pieter Biersteker, Danielle Macdivitt, Joe Maiolo, Leopoldo Nuti and Simone Tholens for the time and effort expended on organizing this conference.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.