The United States and NATO: The Formative Years

289 Pages·5.469 MB·English

by  Lawrence S. Kaplan

The United States and NATO
This page intentionally left blank
THE
UNITED
STATES
AND
NATO
The Formative Years
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY
ISBN: 978-0-8131-5297-4
To Rudolph A. Winnacker
and to the memory of
Walter Lipgens (1925-1 984)
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface
1. Introduction
2. The Treaties of Paris and Washington:
Two Entangling Alliances
3. Isolationism, the United Nations, and the
Cold War, 1947-1949
4. Toward the Brussels Pact: December 1947-March 1948
5. Brussels Pact to Atlantic Alliance: March-December 1948
6. Completing the Treaty: January-April 1949
7. Treaty to Organization: April 1949-January 1950
8. The Impact of the Korean War
9. Western Europe in "The American Century"
Bibliographic Essays
Appendix A. Text of the Brussels Pact
Appendix B. Text of the Vandenberg Resolution
Appendix C. Text of the North Atlantic Treaty
Abbreviations Used in the Text
Notes
Index
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
This book has been in progress for over thirty years, almost as long as NATO
has been in existence. The subject was first a by-product of an official study 1
had undertaken in 1951 for the Historian of the Office of the Secretary of
Defense. This culminated in 1980 in a monograph, A Community of lnterests:
NATO and the Military Assistance Program, 1948-1951.
My earliest research had been on the foreign policy of the early Republic,
and the contrast between the isolationism that had yielded a century and a half
of political nonentanglement and the deliberate commitment under the Atlan-
tic alliance was and is of continuing fascination to me. Some of this absorp-
tion is reflected in chapter 2.
That essay and the concluding chapter contain more personal views than
the other, more monographic chapters. Both were originally delivered as
addresses, the former in Washington in March 1978 at the first bicentennial
program of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, and the latter in Los Angeles
as the presidential address for the Society for Historians of American Foreign
Relations in December 1981. I wish to express my appreciation to the Capitol
Historical Society and to the University Press of Virginia as well as to Diplo-
matic History and its publisher, Scholarly Resources, Inc., for permission to
reprint the substance of these papers.
The main body of this volume is contained in chapers 5 through 7,
presenting in some detail the role of the United States in the negotiations for
the treaty in 1948 and 1949. This is material hitherto unpublished. Its inspira-
tion was drawn less from my work with the Department of Defense than from
my collaboration with Walter Lipgens of the University of the Saarland, the
prime mover in an ambitious study of the growth of European political uni-
fication from 1945 to 1950. His first volume appeared in 1977 as Die Anfange
der Europeaischen Einigungspolitik, 1945-1950, vol. 1 , 1945-1 947 (Stutt-
gart, 1977) and in English as A History of European Integration (Oxford,
1982). He is currently preparing a second volume which will cover the years
1948 to 1950. I am indebted to him for his knowledgeable commentaries
expressed in Kent and in Saarbriicken, and in Florence where I joined his
seminar in 1978 at the European University Institute. This work will appear