In the Anglosphere, Nato’s history remains bound up with a mythology of the Second World War that ascribes victory to Anglo-American co-operation. The conditions for the creation of the alliance were established by Britain’s survival in 1940 and its role as a springboard for Eisenhower’s ‘Crusade in Europe’. And if the new world’s liberation of the old had to continue as a lengthy military occupation, that was because of the threat of the Soviet Union. But as the Nato official Jamie Shea observed in an address delivered for the sixtieth anniversary of Nato in 2009, the impetus for its creation was never simply Soviet military strength. It was also formed at a moment of anomalous American strength and devastating European weakness. Few international military alliances have involved quite so lopsided a balance of power among their members. Nato is far more top-heavy than the ‘definitive treaty’ signed by Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia after the defeat of Napoleon in November 1815. And it is not unique in its rhetorical commitment to high-minded ideals: even imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere professed ‘mutual co-operation’ in the service of constructing ‘an order of common prosperity and well-being based upon justice’. The obvious comparison is the Warsaw Pact. But to see the two alliances as in any way similar invites the thought that Nato might not be so benign after all.
It is sometimes argued that the US was hoodwinked into forming Nato by clever Europeans seeking to surrender military responsibilities in exchange for wealth and comfort. Donald Trump expresses something close to this sentiment in his complaints about European free-riders. Others attribute its origins to the persuasive powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur Vandenberg in search of British genius, the story doesn’t fit. Secret meetings between the US, UK and Canada to set up the alliance began at the Pentagon just five days after the Treaty of Brussels was signed in March 1948, leading to plans known as the ‘Pentagon proposals’. Nato’s founding treaty was delayed until April 1949 so that Harry Truman could fight off a challenge from Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 US presidential election. Britain requested that the treaty be signed in Barbados; Portugal suggested the Azores as a symbolic mid-Atlantic location; but the US insisted on Washington and so it was. Say what you will of the Delian League, at least its early congresses were held in Delos rather than Athens.