Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some seventy years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era. In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO. As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.

The North American Treaty Organization (NATO) remains the indispensable link that binds America and Europe in common defense - even after the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union and its satellite countries. The North Atlantic Treaty, which established NATO after its signing in Washington, D.C., in 1949, was one of the West's primary cold war-era countermeasures against the threat of Soviet aggression. Considering a military attack on any member an attack on all its members, NATO has made its way through some 45 years of turbulence from both without and within - the Korean War (1950-53), the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, France's sudden withdrawal from the alliance in 1966 and the subsequent relocation of NATO headquarters to Brussels, SALT and START negotiations, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. In updating his 1987 history of the United States' relations with NATO and the European interests it encompasses, the eminent NATO scholar Lawrence S. Kaplan looks at the challenges the organization faces in the 1990s, arguing that the alliance is still essential for a stable and secure Europe and that it is incumbent on the United States to maintain its NATO troop strength. U.S. participation in NATO marked a fundamental change in America's pre-World War II policy of isolationism, and Kaplan begins this study by examining the postwar mood that led Washington into the unprecedented treaty and then to the maneuvers - especially by John Foster Dulles and Arthur Vandenberg - that facilitated the progress from treaty to organization. Kaplan charts the ups anddowns of U.S. involvement with NATO as he explores NATO's "New Look" in the 1950s, negotiations with the irascible Charles de Gaulle and France's exit from NATO in the 1960s, detente and the Nixon doctrine of the 1970s, the dual-track approach (promoting both new arms and arms control) of the early 1980s, the challenge posed by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, and the shape of the so-called new world order that emerged from the rubble of the Communist empire. The fate of the large nuclear arsenals in Russia and the Ukraine, the rise of nationalism in the former Soviet republics, and NATO membership for the former Warsaw Pact countries are crucial issues remaining on NATO's drawing board, and Kaplan's timely and comprehensive chronicle of this enduring alliance should prove essential reading for anyone interested in what Europe will look like, and how secure it will be, in the twenty-first century.

In this analysis of NATO's formation and early years, Kaplan describes how the Alliance began as a response to European perceptions and initiatives and ultimately led the U.S. to abandon its cherished tradition of non-entanglement. He examines the tortuous negotiations between Europeans and Americans and the bargaining among individuals, factions, and institutions in the United States to show how anguished the American decision to join Europe in a military alliance was. He also describes the early organizational developments and the impact of the Korean War on NATO. He concludes that though several problems that were not settled in the formative years and still plague NATO, it remains a primary means of bringing about a rational organization of international life. ISBN 0-8131-0159-X (pbk.) : $12.00.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.