North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Western collective-defense alliance founded April 1949
Also known as: NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Atlantic Alliance
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established by the North Atlantic Treaty signed at Washington on 4 April 1949 by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, and Portugal. Quigley treats NATO in Tragedy and Hope as the formal military expression of the wartime Anglo-American consensus and as the institutional spine of the post-war Cold War order in Western Europe — the alliance that converted the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the Marshall Plan of 1948 into a permanent peacetime military commitment of the United States to Europe, breaking with 150 years of American policy.
Founding: From the Brussels Treaty to Washington
NATO's institutional ancestry runs through the 1947 Treaty of Dunkirk (Anglo-French), the 1948 Treaty of Brussels (the Western European Union: Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), and the Vandenberg Resolution of June 1948, by which the U.S. Senate signalled that it would accept a peacetime alliance with European partners. The Berlin Blockade of June 1948 to May 1949 (T&H 902–904) accelerated the negotiations; the Washington Treaty was signed on 4 April 1949. Quigley's framing of NATO at T&H 891 emphasises that the alliance was the institutional resolution of the post-Yalta dilemma — once the Soviet Union refused to permit the political reconstruction of Eastern Europe along Western lines, the Anglo-American powers were forced to construct a parallel system in the West rather than across the continent.
Article 5 and the Quigley Framing
Quigley treats Article 5 — the provision that an armed attack against one member shall be considered an attack against all — as the operative innovation distinguishing NATO from the pre-war League system. Where Article X of the League Covenant had merely "pledged" signatories to defend territorial integrity, NATO's Article 5 created a standing pre-commitment, supported by integrated military command (SHAPE, established under Eisenhower in 1951), pre-positioned U.S. forces in Germany, and a unified strategic doctrine. The institutional difference, in Quigley's reading, is that NATO was designed to make the question of whether collective security would be honoured into a non-question: the apparatus was already on the ground.
Internal Politics: Taft, Eisenhower, and the Korean War
Tragedy and Hope devotes considerable space to NATO's first crisis — the American domestic debate of 1950–1951 over whether the U.S. should permanently station ground forces in Europe. Senator Robert Taft and the Republican neo-isolationists opposed both NATO and the deployment; "Senator Wherry, the Republican floor leader" likewise opposed it. "Truman's efforts to send four divisions to Europe and to make General Eisenhower Supreme Commander of NATO were violently opposed, by Taft (who had voted against ratification of NATO) and by Senator Wherry" (T&H 990). The 1950 outbreak of the Korean War effectively resolved the debate: by mid-1951 the deployment was complete and SHAPE was operational. Quigley reads this episode as the moment at which an enduring American military presence in Europe became a domestic-political fact.
NATO, the EEC and the European Order
Quigley discusses NATO and the European Economic Community as two halves of a single post-war Western European institutional architecture, the first providing collective defense, the second economic integration. The relationship between them was repeatedly strained — most notably by de Gaulle's 1966 withdrawal of France from NATO's integrated military command and his 1963 veto of British EEC membership. Quigley treats these episodes (T&H 1293–1299) as Gaullist insistence that European political identity precedes Atlantic strategic identity. The structural fact remained that after 1949 the security of Western Europe was guaranteed by the United States through NATO, and that this guarantee made the EEC's economic project politically possible.
Strategic Doctrine and the Nuclear Question
Quigley's Weapons Systems and Political Stability (1960 and the compiled later materials) treats NATO chiefly as a problem of strategic doctrine. The alliance's initial doctrine of "massive retaliation" (Dulles, 1954) gave way under McNamara to "flexible response" (1962); both doctrines depended on extended American nuclear deterrence to compensate for Soviet conventional superiority in Europe. NATO's nuclear-sharing arrangements, the Multilateral Force proposals of the early 1960s, and the standing tension between U.S. strategic decision-making and European political consultation are recurrent themes in Quigley's writing on the alliance. The deeper Quigley diagnosis is that NATO institutionalized the bipolar military order: it was both the West's principal institutional achievement of the early Cold War and the architecture that, by its very existence, made the Cold War the structural form of post-1949 international politics.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 891 Quigley
the formal military expression of the Anglo-American post-war consensus.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 902 Quigley
Berlin (post-WWII), 806 (capture), 821, 825, 898 (Communist pressure), 903 (division, 1948), 902-4 (blockade, 1948-9).
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 990 Quigley
Truman's efforts to send four divisions to Europe and to make General Eisenhower Supreme Commander of NATO were violently opposed, by Taft (who had voted against ratification of NATO).
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1097 Quigley
Berlin crisis, 1958, 1097-8, 1099, 1102-3 (The Wall).
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1293 Quigley
de Gaulle, 1293-9.
- weapons-systems-political-stability Quigley
Extended American nuclear deterrence under NATO institutionalised the bipolar military order in Europe.