5221. NATO's Past, NATO's Future
- Author:
- John Lewis Gaddis
- Publication Date:
- 08-2000
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Geneva Centre for Security Policy
- Abstract:
- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization stands at a crossroads. Critical choices lie ahead that will determine its future. I begin my paper this way because it is customary to begin pronouncements on NATO with this kind of statement. Indeed papers and speeches on NATO have been beginning this way through the half-century of the alliance's existence - and yet NATO never quite reaches whatever crisis the speaker or writer has in mind. NATO seems to have a life of its own, which is remarkably detached from the shocks and surprises that dominate most of history, certainly Cold War history. And NATO's members, both actual and aspiring, seem bent on keeping it that way. So what is a crossroad anyway in historical terms? Most of my colleagues, I think, would say that it's a turning point: a moment at which it becomes clear that the status quo can no longer sustain itself, at which decisions have to be made about new courses of action, at which the results of those decisions shape what happens for years to come. The Cold War was full of such moments: the Korean War, Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech, the Hungarian and Suez crises, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Six Day War, the Tet offensive, Nixon's trip to China, the invasion of Afghanistan, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War itself. What strikes me as a historian, though, is how little impact these turning points had on NATO's history - even General deGaulle, who tried to turn himself personally into a turning point. The structure and purposes of the alliance today are not greatly different from what they were when NATO was founded. Which is to say that NATO's history, compared to that of most other Cold War institutions, is uneventful, bland, and even (let us be frank) a little dull. That very uneventfulness, though, is turning out to be one of the more significant aspects of Cold War history. It surprised the historians, who have been able to cite no other example of a multi-national alliance that has had the robustness, the durability, the continuity, some might say the apparent immortality, of this one. It has also surprised the international relations theorists, for it is a fundamental principle of their discipline that alliances form when nations balance against threats. It follows, then, that as threats dissipate, alliances should also - and yet this one shows no signs of doing so. An instrument of statecraft, which is what an alliance normally is, has in this instance come to be regarded as a fundamental interest of statecraft. That requires explanation, which is what I should like to attempt here.
- Topic:
- Security, Defense Policy, and NATO
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan, Russia, United States, China, Europe, Asia, Soviet Union, Germany, and Berlin