The real function of NATO

Although its recent 75th anniversary celebrations in Washington resulted in a carnival of self-congratulation - 'the most successful and longest-lived multinational alliance since the Delian League in the 5th century BC' and 'we have kept kept over one billion people safe for 75 years’ - NATO triumphalism often serves to obscure some uncomfortable facts about its origins and ongoing activities.

There is much that could be said in both respects I'd like to focus first on an aspect of NATO policy quite close to home: its function as a obstacle intended to deter Western Europeans from forming their own defence alliance, not including non-Europeans.

The London Review of Books recently published an extensive review of Grey Anderserson's Natopolitanism , a collection of essays and leaked documents revealing less celebrated aspects of Nato’s history. Anderson Anderson argues that even during the Cold War the alliance was never principally a mutual defence pact. Particularly in the early years, ‘European leaders looked to Nato as a bulwark against internal subversion as much as against the Red Army.’ Another function, as Washington saw it, was to forestall the development of an independent European military force. Charles Bohlen, US ambassador to France in the 1960s, warned the then secretary of state, Dean Rusk, that de Gaulle ‘envisaged the emergence of Europe after the war as a third power centre in the world’. Bohlen was confident that ‘it lies within the power of the US and our allies to prevent de Gaulle’s policy from coming into fruition.’ Anderson dates the emergence of modern European Atlanticism to the 1970s, when the US Information Agency, the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantik-Brücke led a reaction against German Ostpolitik. None of this had much to do with the Cold War. In 1966 Zbigniew Brzezinski, then an adviser to Lyndon Johnson, noted that the presence of the US army in Europe would still be useful even if the Soviet threat disappeared, to help build a ‘world order on the basis of closer collaboration among the more developed nations’. In January 1992 a CIA report noted that Nato helped secure European assent on ‘economic security decisions of vital interest to Washington’.

Modern-day Atlanticists, raise your hands! Let's see who you are...