Abstract
This is the first comprehensive study of the formation and the early years of NATO’s Southern Flank. Chourchoulis discusses the national, regional and international level, as well as the political, strategic, military and economic factors which shaped the policies of the members of the Southern Flank (Italy, Greece and Turkey), the USA and Britain, and the attitudes of the alliance as a whole.
The book is a notable contribution to the new historiography on NATO, which has examined the alliance not only as a military structure, but also as a union of like-minded and sovereign (though unequal) states, drawn together to defend territory as well as values. NATO continued to be haunted by internal dissent, but its processes were instrumental in the forging of the postwar, institutionalized West. Moreover, scholars have taken their studies beyond the obvious case of NATO’s Central Front: new works have dealt with the Northern Flank, as well as with the national policies of the smaller members. Chourchoulis now expands the discussion to the Southern Flank as a whole.
The book is noted for a profoundly international perspective. It is based on exemplary multi-archival investigation. The author has made exhaustive research in the hugely valuable but still rarely used NATO Archives (both the International Staff and the Military Committee). He has consulted the US State Department archive, the records of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the archives of the Eisenhower Library (White House Office, Eisenhower, Dulles, Gruenther papers and Norstad papers). Research in the British archives included the records of the Foreign Office, Dominions Office, War Office, Admiralty, the papers of the Chiefs of Staff and of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the Prime Minister’s papers, and the Cabinet papers. The author has also consulted the archives of the Greek Foreign Ministry and the personal papers of the Greek Prime Minister and of leading Greek diplomats. Last but not least, he is excellently informed regarding the historiographical discussions on NATO.
The book examines NATO’s strategy in the region, threat perceptions, military policy and planning, international politics in the Southern Flank, its position within the wider NATO structure, and the relative position of its members towards their Soviet bloc adversaries. Chourchoulis stresses that the Southern Flank lacked geographical cohesion, and consisted of several separate fronts, in which different NATO forces would be expected to face different adversaries: Northern Italy; Greek Eastern Macedonia; Greek and Turkish Thrace and the Straits area; and Anatolia. The Southern Flank’s proximity to the Middle East points to another crucial geographical peculiarity: it was always possible that a crisis in that region could involve Turkey, thus triggering the guarantee of Article Five. Moreover, neutral Yugoslavia also raised the possibility of a crisis in another ‘out-of-area’ region. The book shows that the attempts to coordinate NATO and Middle Eastern defense always left much to be desired, and were ultimately inconclusive exactly because they could not fully meet the challenge of planning for, or acting in an out-of-area crisis. This raised an important additional security consideration in the Southern Flank, which did not appear in the Central or the Northern regions.
Chourchoulis argues that the formation of the Southern Flank did not lead to the emergence of a credible Western defense in the region: at no time during the 1950s were the NATO forces in the area capable of repelling a Warsaw Pact attack, especially one in which Soviet forces would participate. Thus, the alliance planned to concentrate in defending some pivotal points, mostly the Northern Italian area, covering the flank of NATO’s Central Front. NATO also hoped to be able to hold parts of the central Anatolian plateau in Turkey. But the other areas of the Southern Flank were considered essentially indefensible. In other words, the book establishes that the Southern Flank was not a military priority for the alliance, which mostly had to deal with its crushing military inferiority in the main battlefield of a projected war, the Central Front. However, despite its constant military vulnerability, the Southern Flank was part of a crucial NATO/Western strategy: it provided for deterrence, by extending the NATO trip wire mechanism to the Eastern Mediterranean; and integrated within the Western system an area which otherwise would have been much more vulnerable to Soviet bloc attack or pressure. Moreover, the Southern Flank became a crucial aspect of the policies of Greece and Turkey, which were accepted as full members of the defense system of the West.
Chourchoulis’ book is a landmark for the study of the Southern Flank and NATO’s relation with the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, it forms a pivotal part of the new historiography which discusses NATO as a crucial medium for the ascent of the international processes of the postwar West. Projecting a deeply knowledgeable, calm and critical analysis, the book points to the many important research opportunities which exist in the study of the Atlantic Alliance, and the multiple perspectives of the Cold War.