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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2009
In confronting any question about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the late sixties one is uncomfortably aware of insistent questioning as to how much it all matters. Is NATO a device to meet horizontal challenges when the new challenges are vertical? Is “the West,” whatever that is, defending the Elbe when the struggle is going on in its own streets? These challenges from within are not the subversion directed from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which NATO subcommittees had always taken into their calculations. Insofar as they are Communist in inspiration at all, they are the consequences of the disruption of the Muscovite International. What makes them serious is that they have their roots in Western society itself. Perhaps the West has been too much preoccupied with interstate relations and the creation of superstates when the essential problems are internal—not isolated national phenomena certainly, but eruptions which ignore boundaries, in some cases intensely nationalistic and at the same time dedicated to removing the barriers between peoples. The new rebels are deeply skeptical of that “way of life” the West has insisted it was defending through NATO and believe nothing could be more irrelevant than a military alliance to defend it.
1 The logic of an influential American, George Ball, is still clearly distorted by the Design, as revealed again in his recent book,The Discipline of Power: Essentials of a Modern World Structure (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968)Google Scholar.
2 A. F. W. Plumptre, at the Conference on the Future of the Atlantic Alliance, Scarborough, Ontario, March 3–5, 1967.
3 Rostow, Eugene, “The Road Before Us,” Atlantic Community Quarterly, Summer 1967 (Vol. 5, No. 2), p. 162Google Scholar.
4 Ibid.
5 Duchène, François, “The Decade of Anxiety,” Interplay of European/American Affairs, 06–07 1967 (Vol. 1, No. 1), p. 6Google Scholar.
6 Brown, Neville, “British Arms and the Switch Towards Europe,” International Affairs, 07 1967 (Vol. 43, No. 3), pp. 475–477CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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8 The effect of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia on this disposition could not prudently be estimated at the time of writing.
9 Testimony before U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Armed Services, Hearings on Military Posture, 88th Congress, 1st session, 1963, p. 297Google Scholar.
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17 This trend could be reversed by changing military technology, as, for example, AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control Systems).
18 A point to be borne in mind by Europeans contemplating defense production sharing arrangements is that in the absence of an assured consensus as to who the common enemy is going to be, they breed trouble. Canada is so deeply and profitably enmeshed in such arrangements with the United States that it is now embarrassed by its inability to disengage itself from this kind of participation in the American war in Vietnam.
19 Kissinger, p. 234.
20 Fox, p. 310. See the final chapter for a dioroughly documented case for the functional approach.
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22 In the Czechoslovak crisis of the summer of 1968 NATO played a useful role in restraining members from hysteria or provocation in the interest of maintaining the essential minimum of detente.
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