Having imposed restraint toward de Gaulle on his administration in the MLF crisis, Johnson could no longer be seen as the wrecker of the alliance. Yet the most severe transatlantic crisis of the Johnson years still lay ahead – and much would depend on how the Texan would deal with it. On March 7, 1966, de Gaulle informed Johnson that France would end its military participation within NATO. In addition, he requested the removal from France of troops not under French command. This chapter will examine Johnson's response to this blunt challenge to the postwar architecture of Western defense.

De Gaulle's distaste for NATO, of course, was not new, nor was his distinction between the alliance and the organization (even though this distinction rarely occurred to Americans). De Gaulle stressed that he favored military alliance with the United States as long as there was a Soviet threat – and that France would therefore remain party to the North Atlantic Treaty. But NATO's integrated military structure did not fit his strong belief that a nation – certainly France! – must be in charge of its own defense. De Gaulle also objected to the subjection of French armed forces to a system of military integration under American dominion. NATO was, in de Gaulle's unsentimental view of international relations, above all a tool for US hegemony. What is more, de Gaulle argued that the institutionalized character of the alliance codified the bipolar system in world politics and perpetuated the Cold War. NATO was certainly incompatible with de Gaulle's oft-cited aim of persuading “the states along the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees to form a political, economic, and strategic bloc” and “to establish this organization as one of the three world powers and […] as the arbiter between the Soviet and Anglo-American camps.” While de Gaulle had been willing to admit that NATO had been useful when there had been a plausible threat of a Soviet military attack on Western Europe in the early 1950s, he had long since argued that events had overtaken NATO's usefulness. If anything, he considered NATO an impediment to the gradual political rapprochement with the Soviet bloc that would usher in an end to the Cold War and the creation of “a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.”