On the Great NATO Alliance

This review essay was completed in May 2025. This statement is relevant and for two reasons. One, what I wrote will not likely appear in print for some time to come. Two, whether NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was established in 1949, will still exist in its current form is a serious question.The two books covered here are very different from one another. The first is a collection of twenty-two essays that were published in a variety of journals and newspapers between 1994 and 2022. Together they constitute what is basically a polemic against the NATO idea. However, contributors to this volume do not engage in the kind of “America First” argument made by President Donald Trump. His anti-NATO animus amazingly ignores the history of pre- and post-World War II international relations and sees the Alliance as an unacceptable waste of US defense funds and human resources. As an old-fashioned student of international relations, I have to disagree in exclamation points.Grey Anderson, in his introduction along with several of the essayists, is critical of NATO from the start—not only since the end of the Cold War, as the title of this work puts it. He, and they, go on to argue that NATO might well have been dissolved with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but for the fact that the US-dominated Alliance took on a series of new and mistaken missions in the years after.The first of these errors, they argue, was to bring in new members from the former Soviet-controlled states in eastern and east central Europe—due to some sort of emotional obligation felt by President Clinton—and made, in their view, with nearly no public debate (p. 70). Based on my experience from 1991 to 1999, I have to disagree. A second error involved the Alliance's engagement in a series of dubious peace keeping operations beginning in the war-torn former Yugoslavia, followed by Afghanistan and Libya. Yet a third, was the decision to unthinkingly create the conditions for a new cold war with post-Soviet Russia, first in bringing the Baltic states into the Alliance and then in pushing for the entry of the post-Soviet independent republics of Ukraine and Georgia (pp. 196–197). This is another debatable point.Anderson and the contributors to his volume lament the Europeans’ failure to construct their own European Union-based military capability. However, one of the contributors calls this the “Yeti”—the name for a much-talked about powerful creature that no one has ever seen. (This may change in the future, though.) In the book's concluding essay, Thomas Meany at last tells the reader what the word “Natopolitanism” in the book's title refers to: “a form of extreme apathy, a pathology wrapped in an empty ideology that only knows what it is against” (p. 353).But even if it is so, what was (and is) wrong about uniting in opposition to the threat of Soviet and post-Soviet aggression? In fact, the NATO states did hold together through thick and thin from 1949 to 1991. The United States and its NATO allies did overcome their differences, which were understandable due to the obvious fact that the Alliance had brought together a number of sovereign democracies (sixteen before the first expansion in 1999), each having its own internal, legitimate political dynamics and outlook.What is more, the Soviet Union did collapse. Its implosion came much like the great foreign affairs thinker George Kennan of “containment” fame had foretold in 1946 (but who, incomprehensibly to this reviewer, became a life-long critic of both NATO and NATO enlargement). Most significant perhaps—NATO pulled itself together in 2022. Its members, thirty-two by 2024, united on behalf of the independence of non-member Ukraine. In so doing, its members saw Russia's unjustified invasion as a palpable threat to the peace and security of the NATO world itself.A true European Union defense force may indeed come to be—but if it does it will most likely be in response to the failure of the United States, NATO's prime mover, to remain true to its historic and still relevant mission.Peter Apps’ massive and well documented history of NATO—for some reason he calls it a “biography”—is impressive in a number of ways. It provides readers with an appreciation of the rationale for the Alliance and gives due credit for its creation to a number of far-sighted individuals. Going beyond the usually recognized public figures, most notably US President Harry Truman (in office from 1945 to 1953) and former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Apps gives special recognition to British Cabinet Minister Ernest Bevin, US Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, attorney and future US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and two little remembered State Department officers—Jack Nickerson and Theodore Achilles (pp. 53 ff.) for their role in NATO's birth. Unfortunately, another key figure, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was “present at the creation” (the title he gave to his memoir), is nearly ignored and even incorrectly identified as a former Illinois governor! General and World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower comes in for great praise for his early leadership of NATO prior to his election to be President of the United States in 1952 and for his commitment to its mission in the years after.In a book of thirty chapters, twenty-five are devoted to the history of the Alliance—from 1949 to 2024, its seventy-fifth anniversary. In them, the reader gains an impressive review of international politics, the Soviet-American competition, and their confrontations, with the role of NATO brought in to complete the picture. The author makes it abundantly clear that the story of NATO is political in nature and not just a matter of military strategies, maneuvers, and meetings.Prior to the end of the Cold War in 1991, the positions taken by the main European NATO members, Britain, France, and West Germany, receive the greatest attention, along with the positions expressed by the key civilian and military leaders of the Alliance. With the expansion of NATO and Vladimir Putin's rise to power, the “frontline states” (particularly Poland and the three Baltic republics) are shown to be truly energizing forces within the Alliance. The chronic problem of America's allies’ contributions to the Alliance is discussed in some detail and is shown to go back to its beginnings—particularly during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. In short, this problem did not arise with Mr. Trump! The great crises of the Cold War receive much deserved attention—including those of Berlin in 1958–1961, Cuba in 1961–1962, and the 1983 shooting down of the South Korean passenger plane. How close the world came to Armageddon in 1962 is vividly presented. The issues of post-Cold War international politics—Yugoslavia and the crisis of Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and of course Ukraine—are dealt with impressively.In his conclusion, the author, a truly remarkable individual himself, provides the reader with a wealth of somber food for thought about the future—not only NATO's, but the world's. In sum, this work belongs on the bookshelf along with the best biographies of American presidents starting with Truman and the writings on post-World War II politics and diplomacy by the likes of Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.