Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO
By Peter Applications
(Forest fire £25,624 people)
During the icy depths of the Cold War, 40 years ago, I pestered my friends in Brussels to get me some NATO bumper stickers for my car. I wanted to irritate and challenge my modern, foolish, gullible Oxford neighbors, victims of Moscow propaganda.
Those neighbors were the same people who have now become war-mongering Blairites eager for us to bomb distant countries. But back then they hated NATO.
They covered their houses with pacifist posters. Many camped at the US Air Force base at Greenham-Common, foolishly protesting the presence of US cruise missiles. They were completely deluded, except for those among them (and there were some) who actively wanted the Soviet Union to dominate all of Europe.
And they failed, although it was by a fairly limited margin. They failed because NATO remained united under great pressure from the Kremlin and the European left. The consequences were enormous.
Polish soldiers hold the NATO flag after a multinational training exercise in Poland in 2022.
Leaders of NATO countries meet at the Palai de Chaillot in 1957. The then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harold Macmillan, is second from the right.
Having exhausted itself in a last-ditch effort to destroy the free West, the Evil Communist Empire fell ill and died. Many things contributed to that death, but I am still sure that the battle over the cruise missiles and NATO’s determination were decisive.
Now here’s the strange thing. The NATO alliance, created in 1949 specifically to prevent a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, still exists almost 33 years after the collapse of the Soviet empire. I can’t think of any other alliance created to deal with a particular threat, which still exists long after that threat has dissipated.
Even more surprising is that NATO has actually gotten bigger since its enemy disappeared. Something needs to be explained here.
We should therefore be very grateful to Peter Apps, British Army reservist and Reuters columnist, for writing a comprehensive history of NATO from its birth in 1949 to the present day.
Czech students take to the streets to express their disapproval of the Soviet Union in 1968. The Prague Spring, as it was called, was suppressed after the Soviet and Warsaw Pact allies invaded
NATO’s founding members maintained influence in countries outside the Soviet sphere of influence. He stood by when Moscow tanks crushed the East Berlin uprising in 1953 (pictured).
The book began its life under the rather exalted working title ‘Sacred Obligation’. But it should be called “The Most Successful Bluff in the World.” Because, like most such security pacts, a bluff is what NATO was and remains.
Apps spends much of his time chronicling the endless unresolved tension between the powerful and wealthy United States, the backbone and muscle of NATO, and Europe, its vulnerable and weak point. Of course, it was this tension that the USSR incessantly attempted to exploit.
NATO’s famous promise that an attack on one would be an attack on all was and remains a very shaky bet. History presents sad examples of such deceptions discovered and exposed.
The normally bellicose Lord Palmerston walked away from the British commitment of 1860 to defend Denmark against Prussia when he realized it would lead to a war we would lose.
Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 guarantee to protect Poland from Germany failed to deter Hitler from the invasion. Worse still, when the invasion came, Britain did nothing.
As for depending on the United States in the era of Donald Trump, be careful. Let us not forget (Trump has not) how fiercely determined the United States was to stay out of European disputes in 1939 and for years afterward.
Washington only went to war against Berlin after Hitler declared war on the United States, and not the other way around. Any careful reader of this book will begin to wonder whether NATO, far from being a promise of help in times of trouble, is actually a good way to avoid any real obligation to fight.
The much-hyped Article 5 of the NATO Charter is not the magnificent guarantee of armed support from the strong to the weak that it appears to be.
Members undertake to assist an attacked nation by “immediately adopting, individually and in common agreement with the other Parties, such measures as they deem necessary, including the use of armed force.” Read carefully, this means that if a NATO member does not “deem” that armed force is necessary, she can send a note of protest or make a fiery speech at the United Nations.
Workers staged an unexpected uprising in East Berlin. It was violently crushed by Soviet forces.
The United States would never have signed or ratified a treaty that forced it to go to war, which is why the clause is so weak. All the small, poor, poorly armed countries on the eastern edge of NATO would do well to read it very carefully.
NATO’s key first 40 years show how cautious, limited and risk-averse it has been. Its recent reinvention as a kind of mini-UN task force has occurred primarily outside its original area, in the former Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan.
Its founding membership was carefully restricted to countries already outside the Soviet sphere of influence. He stood by when Moscow’s tanks crushed the East Berlin uprising of 1953, the Budapest revolt of 1956, and the Prague Spring of 1968. He did little when Moscow ordered Poland’s communist rulers to strangle a democratic and Christian rebellion. imposing brutal martial law there from 1981 to 1983.
When the West confronted Soviet power in Europe, primarily in West Berlin, it tended to be the United States that had most of the resistance. I suspect it’s still pretty much the same.
In a fascinating passage, Apps describes a recent scene at NATO’s Joint Forces Command in the Dutch city of Brunssum.
It says that “officials in its 24-hour operations room described their primary role as preventing the Ukraine war from spreading into alliance territory.” Well, quite a bit.
Because who knows what pressure would be put on NATO if, thanks to some hasty raid or some stray missile, it found itself in direct war with Russia?
Of course, the task of preventing the spread of war into NATO territory would be much easier if NATO had not expanded so far east in the past 30 years. But their leaders were warned.
In 1997, the greatest and toughest anti-Soviet American diplomat of modern times, George Kennan, said shortly before he died: “NATO enlargement would be the most fateful mistake of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” .
Remembering his generation’s successful handling of Soviet power, he sighed: “This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so ruined at the end.”