Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order. Timothy Andrews Sayle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Timothy Sayle’s Enduring Alliance, which chronicles the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) history from inception until the collapse of the Soviet Union, is a timely and important book. Since that collapse, NATO has never been more important, as Russia returns to the stage as a revisionist power. European security—and American interests by extension—are in peril more every day, and the challenges facing NATO are also increasing. Most NATO members are not investing in their respective national militaries, polls show Europeans question NATO’s legitimacy, and some European leaders are seeking closer ties with Russia. Finally, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has called for a new European security policy that relies more on Europe and less on the United States. Enduring Alliance attempts to chronicle deliberate policies, events, and personalities that shape NATO throughout the Cold War. Sayle successfully proves that most of the challenges that NATO faces today have existed throughout the history of the alliance.

Successive U.S. administrations have come into office with different policies and strategies and different challenges. One unifying challenge has been the unwillingness of Europeans to invest in their militaries at levels agreed upon by NATO. Congressional leaders in both parties, especially Senators Mike Mansfield and Robert Taft, have pressured recent administrations to reduce the size of U.S. forces in Europe, with the goal of encouraging allies to invest in their militaries. Each administration and President relied on different methods to address these challenges while appreciating the reality that European stability relied on NATO’s strength, which in turn relied on America’s military presence in Europe.

The book covers every American presidential administration from Harry S. Truman to George H.W. Bush. From the beginning, there was a question about what a trans-Atlantic defensive alliance would be. Was it merely a collective defense agreement; a collective security arrangement;or a militarily, economically, and politically integrated community of nations? The vision of the Truman administration, which other allies agreed with, was all these and more. It was to be a community of culturally and geographically Western countries. This meant an emphasis by NATO leaders on their respective shared values. Despite this focus on shared values, the alliance faced a series of connected challenges: points of contention, personalities, and tensions at home and abroad. Nevertheless, shared values allowed for these tensions to resolve through goodwill and diplomacy united behind the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

Points of Contention

At the United Nations, the Europeans and the United States frequently disagreed. During the Suez Crisis, the United States and its two most important NATO allies, the United Kingdom and France, were at odds, which made NATO leaders ask whether the alliance could survive the crisis. During the Yom Kippur War, U.S. support for Israel put it at odds with NATO members, leaving President Richard Nixon and his Assistant for National Security Affairs and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger frustrated to the point that they talked about abiding by the Mansfield Amendment to withdraw the U.S. troops from Europe.[1]

In 1971, the United States ended the gold standard monetary system. This created fear of a trade war between the United States and Europe among NATO allies. Just a few months later, Nixon surprised the world, including NATO allies, announcing an upcoming trip to the People’s Republic of China. Sayle does not explain why these created a rift between the U.S. and its allies, and the reader would have been better served if Sayle had not assumed the reader had a knowledge of NATO members’ preferred China policy and effects of the change in the U.S. monetary policy.

Personalities Matter

The book points out the importance of individual personalities in alliance relationships. Charles De Gaulle was a larger than life figure who was obsessed with national prestige. During the war, he told a British officer, “You think I am interested in England winning the war. I am not. I am only interested in French victory.”[2] This led to his several attempts to create an outsized role for France in the alliance, to the point that he withdrew the French fleet from NATO’s forces on two occasions, withdrew French troops from NATO’s integrated military command, and expelled NATO troops from France.

Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, remarked that NATO’s mission was to “keep the Americans in, the Soviets out, and the Germans down.” Rhetorically, NATO leaders talked about equal partnership. De Gaulle’s push for a larger role for France translated into a French nuclear weapons program, which concerned Western (and Eastern) leaders about the possibility of West Germany’s following the French lead.

Ultimately, a compromise was reached thanks to the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who was the opposite of De Gaulle. The U.S. would deploy its nuclear weapons to West Germany but under U.S. control, and Adenauer pledged not to develop nuclear weapons. Adenauer understood that nuclear weapons were key to West German security, but he also appreciated Europeans’ concern about a German nuclear bomb. This compromise was an extraordinary act of statesmanship that carried the alliance through crisis.

Structural neorealism suggests that outcomes of international disputes are ordained by the actors’ security interests. The advocates of this theory would argue the ultimate outcome of that episode, which kept the alliance together, is a testament to the truthfulness of the theory. Indeed, security interests had a large effect on NATO, but the way these were pursued was shaped by the personalities of the statesman involved. Without de Gaulle, France’s role in the alliance would have been different. It was his persistent advocacy and French nationalism that led to tripartite negotiations between the U.S., the U.K., and France.[3] These meetings increased France’s influence on NATO. In contrast, a de Gaulle-like German leader might have not given up on a German nuclear weapons program, which was a redline for the United Kingdom, and France may well have ended the alliance. Yet, Adenauer’s willingness to compromise to save the alliance and his appreciation of the allies’ concerns for a German nuclear bomb kept NATO intact.

Tensions Abroad and at Home.

In 1956, and during the Suez Crisis, NATO was facing an existential crisis, with its key members on the opposite sides of a conflict. The tensions were so high that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had decided not to attend a NATO ministerial meeting. In the meantime, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to crush its revolution. Tensions eased, Dulles changed his mind, and attended the meeting. Sayle writes that “the Hungarian invasion provided a stark reminder of the strength and proximity of Soviet armor to the capitals of many NATO allies.”[4] Similarly, in 1968, tensions over Europeans’ unwillingness to invest in their own militaries were back, as the Johnson administration expanded the war in Vietnam and sought to spend less in Europe. Again, there was an uprising, this time in Czechoslovakia prompting a Soviets invasion of Czechoslovakia to protect their client government. Sayle does not explicitly link this episode to the end of tensions, but the remainder of the chapter shows that tensions relaxed. He writes that European leaders “knew that NATO was necessary to maintain the Pax Atlantica, and that they would benefit if this order was maintained and expanded.”[5]

Domestic politics also affected NATO member relations. In 1980, Europeans believed an extremist warmonger, Ronald Reagan, had come into office.[6] Four years later, they feared Reagan had become a pacifist. Sayle writes that what the Europeans feared about Goldwater and McGovern, they had gotten both in Reagan. They worried about Reagan’s rhetoric in 1980, and during Reagan’s second term, they worried about his outreach to, and arms reduction negotiations with, the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev. This episode highlights the importance of political leadership, which includes attentiveness to allies’ concerns. Indeed, Reagan never compromised European security, nor did he start a hot war with the Soviet Union.

The end of the Cold War raised the question of whether NATO’s purpose endured since the threat that brought it into existence had evaporated. As Ismay had put it, keeping the Soviets out was only one-third of NATO’s purpose. There was more to what conceived NATO than the USSR. Sayle shows that it was also the Europeans’ distrust of each other and the hope for an integrated Western union. To these was added a fear of Russian backsliding. Hence, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, talks of enlargement began. The end of the Cold War was not the end of NATO but an opportunity to strengthen it. Sayle ends his chronicle with a brief overview of the post-Cold War politics of NATO and how the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defunct Warsaw Pact members’ desire to join the West created an opportunity to enlarge NATO.

Throughout the book, Sayle shows that Americans have always been in favor of the alliance.

The debates over NATO today are similar to the debates during the Cold War. Throughout the book, Sayle shows that Americans have always been in favor of the alliance, with 80 percent of them supporting it today.[7] The Europeans were always skeptical of NATO, just as they are today, and the wounds from World War II are still fresh enough to favor some degree of accommodation with Russia to keep the peace—even though this sometimes irritates the Americans. Competing national interests have also been ever-present in NATO’s history. Finally, just like his Cold War predecessors, Vladimir Putin, with his invasions in Georgia and Ukraine and his meddling in liberal countries’ politics, frequently serves as a reminder to the allies of NATO’s importance.

Conclusion

In his powerful and brief conclusion, Sayle explains how most of NATO’s contemporary challenges are reminiscent of the Cold War. Americans always wanted allies to contribute more, and allies always refused. Competing national interests, an aggressive Russia, and tension between personalities are not new stories. What is different is America’s current President, Donald Trump. Never in NATO’s history has a member state’s head of government, let alone the head of the government of NATO’s leading power, been so hostile towards NATO. Even though the administration’s policies have mostly been pro-NATO, the president in his rhetoric and actions have not. Sayle points out that this is most infamously exhibited in his refusal to endorse NATO’s Article 5 policy in May of 2017.[8] The book makes a strong case that, during the Cold War, NATO’s survival was indeed due to the Soviet threat in great measure, but it was also due to the statesmanship of its leaders, including successive U.S. presidents who managed to overcome their disagreements with other NATO allies. Above all, Sayle writes that what brought the allies together—liberal democratic values—is itself a threat to NATO due to the election of NATO-skeptic leaders, which the alliance’s leaders had feared in the past.[9]

As the book’s title suggests, NATO has been an enduring alliance. It has survived several crises, some of which seemed existential at the time. This is in part because its leading power, the United States, engaged in constant alliance management over the decades. As former Secretary of State George Shultz has said, maintaining an alliance is like gardening and takes constant attention.[10] In political terms, most of the major parameters remain roughly unchanged, especially American interest in a Europe that remains whole and free and countering the threat Russia poses. This does not mean, however, that NATO will necessarily survive, like it did in the past.

Shay Khatiri is a writer and a graduate student of Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

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Header Image: NATO Leaders at the Beginning of the Alliance (NATO)

Notes:

[1] Timothy Sayle, Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), chap. 8, Apple Books.

[2] Julian Jackson, Charles de Gaulle, (London, UK: Haus Publishing Limited, 2003), 16.

[3] Sayle, Enduring Alliance, chap. 3; Anand Menon, France, NATO, and the Limits of Independence 1981-97, (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 11.

[4] Sayle, Enduring Alliance, chap. 2.

[5] Sayle, Enduring Alliance, chap. 6.

[6] Sayle, Enduring Alliance, chap. 9.

[7] Michael Smith, “Most Americans Support NATO Alliance,” Gallup News, February 17, 2017, accessed June 28, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/204071/americans-support-nato-alliance.aspx. Lydia Saad, “Americans Have Long Seen NATO as Good for U.S.,” Gallup News, December 2, 2019, accessed June 28, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/268913/americans-long-seen-nato-good.aspx.

[8] Sayle, Conclusion.

[9] Sayle, Conclusion.

[10] Richard Haas, “A Conversation with George P. Shultz,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 29th, 2013, accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/event/conversation-george-p-shultz-0.