Happy Birthday, NATO: April 4, 1949

I do not imagine the history I produce here or elsewhere to function as a direct response to misinformation or propaganda. Such an approach is itself reactionary. But insofar as misinformation proliferates, and bad-faith policymakers continue to distort history, I do believe that historians maintain some duty to combat propaganda. The past several years have born witness to many officials directly or indirectly endeavoring to weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a collective defense alliance that appears to have served the signatories well for over seventy years. I treat Dutch participation in NATO in various places in my book, most extensively in Chapter 5. I thought I’d share a couple relevant excerpts, after the break:

In Chapter 2 I show that the idea for a collective defense system had begun to emerge in London, among the exiled small powers that had been victimized by Nazi occupation during World War II. I write: 

A tentative internationalism had begun to incubate during the occupation. Innovative were the ideas of Foreign Minister Eelco van Kleffens, who found time, even as he desperately tried to stitch together Dutch relevance in the world of the great powers, to imagine new postwar schemes for Dutch security. The vulnerability of small states to large ones, at a time of total war when his country was occupied by an increasingly brutal power, was paramount to Van Kleffens. He decried the world of realpolitik where small states lived often at the mercy of large states. He came to recognize the insuperability of the power of large states, but increasingly sought means for small states to avoid coming into a “dependent position.” It was a perfect encapsulation of the Dutch position, where neither neutralism nor realpolitik vouchsafed Dutch interests. Nor would alliances do in the new world of democratic idealism, since simple alliances did not respect the priorities and prerogatives of small states who were dependent on them. Van Kleffens began to advance the idea of a western security arrangement even before the Americans involved themselves in the war. The logic of clientelism was coming into view.

Dutch Foreign Minister Eelco N. van Kleffens. Van Kleffens was one of the principal architects of postwar Dutch-American friendly relations.

In Van Kleffens’s mind, an alliance was a bilateral, two-party arrangement, wholly insufficient to the small powers’ global security needs being made visible by the war. Several iterations of a larger collective concept would begin to evolve, soon after the conclusion of the war and accelerated by the new threat from the Soviet Union. After the war, just as the superpower conflict was coming into focus for most observers, Dutch officials approached new US Secretary of State George C. Marshall with loose proposals for a western defense collective. In Chapter 4 I observe:

In April 1947 Dutch officials approached Secretary Marshall, then in Moscow for the Council of Foreign Ministers, with proposals for a scheme that Dutch Foreign Minister Van Boetzelaer had rejected the previous year, a Western defense union that would join Western Europe to American security commitments. This was before British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s more robust plan in December of that year [1947] that would soon become the Brussels Treaty [of Feb, 1948]. In April it was an odd thing for the Dutch to offer. . . . Marshall rejected the overture out of hand, but it is clear that the [Foreign Ministry in The Hague] was seeking points of alignment with the Americans.

That alignment between Dutch and American interests would ripen after 1948, as the Marshall Plan knit the economies of the trans-Atlantic world more tightly together. The negotiations for NATO would commence that year and be finalized one year later, on April 4, 1949. That agreement, as I show in Chapter 5, produced beneficial results for both the Netherlands and the US. For the Dutch, NATO solved their security problem, and it also hastened the solution to their German problem, i.e., how to integrate a healthy German economy back into Europe without producing an unhealthy German military threat. For the United States, NATO extended the umbrella of security against their chief rival, the USSR. While the US undertook a significant economic burden by financing much of the Western allies’ military contribution to NATO, those costs were substantially lower than if the US had to shoulder the entire security burden itself.
 
There has always been tensions among the NATO partners, the US wishing that the Europeans would contribute more, the Europeans only too eager to offload the economic burdens onto Uncle Sam. There is nothing new about that tension. But NATO has also kept the peace between East and West, allowing the West to rebuild after the war, and then flourish in the decades thereafter.
 
If NATO continues to be weakened from within, there is every reason to believe that global tensions, and the threat of war, will increase, not decrease.

​--David J. Snyder