Abstract
In March of 1949, the Washington policy community was busy preparing a lavish reception to celebrate the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty. Secretary of State Dean Acheson made one notable contribution to the planning. He asked the US Army band to play “It Ain’t Necessarily So” during the festivities. After a year of difficult negotiations, Acheson’s cynicism was understandable. But even if the treaty talks had been easier, Acheson would have had ample reason to question the future of NATO. History provided him with few reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for a large, voluntary alliance system in peacetime. As a student of international relations he recognized that the term unconditional alliance is an oxymoron, and that such arrangements usually collapse due to the inevitable tension between the general interest which brings the signatory nations together and the differing particular interests which are always right beneath the surface.
The fundamental defect of the
Atlantic Alliance …
is that it is merely — Atlantic. 1
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Notes
Elizabeth Sherwood, Allies In Crisis, (New Haven: Yale, 1990) p. 184.
George Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 402, quoted in Stuart and Tow, Limits of Alliance, p. 33.
For background, see Robert Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Albrecht Randelzhofer: ‘Article 51’, in Bruno Simma (ed.): The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 664.
Cited in Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance (New York: Continuum, 1980), pp. 131–2.
See Lord Ismay, Nato: The First Five Years, 1949–54 (Paris: North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 1954), p. 194.
See in particular Georgette Elgey, Histoire de la IV Republique: La Republique des Contradictions, 1951–1954 (Paris: Fayard, 1968), p. 149.
See Alistair Home, A Savage War Of Peace: Algeria, 1952–1954 (New York: Penguin, 1977).
Quoted by Donald Neff, Warriors at Suez (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 390.
Quoted by Alfred Grosser, Affaires Exterieures: La Politique de la France, 1944–1984 (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), p. 149.
Quoted by Dwight Eisenhower, Waging Peace (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1965), p. 77.
Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 62.
George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) pp. 536–561.
Kofi Annan, ‘UN Peacekeeping Operations and Cooperation with NATO’, Nato Review, #5 Vol. 41, (October, 1993) p. 5–7.
Javier Solana, ‘NATO’s Role In Bosnia: Charting a New Course for the Alliance’, in Nato Review, #2 vol. 44 (March 1996) p. 3.
Ivo Daalder, ‘Bosnia After SFOR: Options for Continued US Engagement’, in Survival, #4 Vol. 39 (Winter 1997–8) p. 12.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Stuart, D.T. (2001). The United States and NATO Out-Of-Area Disputes: Does the Cold War Provide Precedents, or Merely Prologue?. In: Schmidt, G. (eds) A History of NATO — The First Fifty Years. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-65576-2_9
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