Abstract
Lawrence S. Kaplan has pursued an estimable lengthy scholarly career focused primarily on NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the wider community of Atlantic area nations. This useful book describes the initial year of the new North Atlantic alliance in the context of the much longer-term development of relationships among the countries involved. An important theme is the comprehensive, disciplined approach taken by Truman administration officials to persuade the American people and Congress to move beyond deeply rooted isolationism.
Creation of NATO followed a series of more limited steps, preliminary building-blocks on which the final structure was erected. Indirectly, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter encouraged such a regional security treaty. More concretely, in March 1947 the British and French signed the Treaty of Dunkirk. The main potential threat noted at that time was Germany. The text of the treaty mentioned that the signatory nations would protect one another from any threat ‘arising from the adoption by Germany of aggression’. There were also growing tensions between the Western allies and the Soviet Union. A year later, in March 1948, the Dunkirk alliance was widened into the Brussels Pact. The resulting Western Union included Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and was a positive precursor to the European Economic Community established in the following decade.
Britain played an important role in effecting this marriage of European powers and eventually bringing in the United States as well. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin kept the far left of the governing Labour Party at bay. He was effective in dealing with Jean Monnet and others in forging the European Coal and Steel Community and wider Atlantic alliance. As through past history, Britain was acting as effective catalyst among disparate nations, even while remaining true to tradition in refusal to join supranational economic institutions.
American journalist Walter Lippmann was instrumental in promoting the new international commitments. As he described to great public impact, the British had come to terms with their European concerns and were using this new stance, albeit after two devastating wars, to broker an attachment between the US and Europe. Kaplan rightly underscores Lippmann’s extraordinary influence by describing how the pivotal Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg sent a letter to him regarding Republican (later Democratic) Senator Wayne Morse’s insistence on linking the security alliance to arms aid to Europe, a politically complicating factor for US advocates of NATO.
The Berlin blockade represented a fundamentally important event in the evolution of the Cold War. After the crisis, Germany – hitherto divided into four zones occupied by the Allies – was consolidated into two opposing halves. The ‘Iron Curtain,’ as Churchill described this division of Europe, had emerged as the single great dividing-line. Before the Berlin crisis, there could be credible argument that fairly open interplay among Europe’s nation states could be restored. After the blockade, this hope was no longer realistic. In the United States, both Democratic and Republican party leaders supported the new international engagements and, especially, the new European security pacts, though the ongoing public debate remained intense. In the 1948 presidential campaign, bipartisan internationalism was effectively confirmed. The foreign policy of the Truman administration played no controversial role in the otherwise intense and divisive contest with internationalist Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey.
The NATO treaty was negotiated on the US side by Secretary of State George Marshall and his successor Dean Acheson, and was ratified by the Senate on 21 July 1949. The key elements were Article 5, which declared that an attack on one nation would be considered an attack on all (and which was first activated following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001), and Article 6, which set clear territorial limits to the treaty – limits which have faded with the expanding roles of the alliance following the end of the Cold War. The influential American foreign policy veteran George Kennan, who generally disliked the automatic character of most security alliances, was persuaded to support this one and did so publicly.
The Korean War provided a major shock to the nervous system of the emerging Atlantic community. First, the war was immediately interpreted by US and other leaders in terms of the dangers and importance of Atlantic area relationships. This was part of the motivation for General Omar N. Bradley’s statement in Congressional hearings that the Joint Chiefs of Staff would not support an expansion of the war, because ‘this strategy would have involved us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy’. Second, in the United States the Korean War contributed directly to a sense of betrayal and internal Communist menace that would be exploited in the arena of domestic politics, and not just by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Secretary of State Acheson had seemed to declare in a major policy speech that Taiwan and Korea were outside the defence boundaries of the United States.
The unpopular Korean War drastically undercut President Harry Truman at home, while transforming the Cold War from European to global conflict. Extremely unpopular at the end of his administration, he is now generally highly regarded by both scholars and the public. His decisiveness, clarity of purpose, and good sense are well represented in this worthwhile study.