NATO Divided, NATO United
NATO Divided, NATO United

Author: Lawrence Kaplan

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 2004-05-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0275980065

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This history of NATO concentrates on the differences within the alliance, particularly between the US and its European partners. NATO's war against terrorism began on September 11, 2001. Invoking Article 5 was a fitting response to the assault on the United States, but the spirit did not last long. Within a few weeks, old fissures within the alliance re-emerged, threatening once again to dissolve an entity that had survived over half a century. In the first two generations of NATO's existence, the Cold War with the Soviet Union had been the major purpose of its existence. But since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and of the Russian Empire itself, NATO has struggled to seek new raisons d'etre, and has succeeded to some degree in finding them in crisis management in Europe and in areas beyond the boundaries of the alliance. The absence of a traditional enemy to serve as a centripetal force, along with the recognition of the US as the lone superpower, has placed a focus on internal troubles of the alliance that had been obscured in the past by the presence of a common enemy. Too little attention has been paid to such West-West conflicts which arguably have been more frequent and more bitter, if not more dangerous, than the struggle with the Soviet Union. Differences among the allies began with the formation of the alliance itself. Some were resolved, others persisted. Many of them related to out of area issues in which the Soviet Union was not involved or only peripherally concerned. How the alliance managed the unequal relationship in the past may offer insights into the common ground the alliance partners can identify in the 21st century.

Opening NATO's Door
Opening NATO's Door

Author: Ronald D. Asmus

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2004-08-11

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0231502397

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How and why did NATO, a Cold War military alliance created in 1949 to counter Stalin's USSR, become the cornerstone of new security order for post-Cold War Europe? Why, instead of retreating from Europe after communism's collapse, did the U.S. launch the greatest expansion of the American commitment to the old continent in decades? Written by a high-level insider, Opening NATO's Door provides a definitive account of the ideas, politics, and diplomacy that went into the historic decision to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the still-classified archives of the U.S. Department of State, Ronald D. Asmus recounts how and why American policy makers, against formidable odds at home and abroad, expanded NATO as part of a broader strategy to overcome Europe's Cold War divide and to modernize the Alliance for a new era. Asmus was one of the earliest advocates and intellectual architects of NATO enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s and subsequently served as a top aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott, responsible for European security issues. He was involved in the key negotiations that led to NATO's decision to extend invitations to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and finally, the U.S. Senate's ratification of enlargement. Asmus documents how the Clinton Administration sought to develop a rationale for a new NATO that would bind the U.S. and Europe together as closely in the post-Cold War era as they had been during the fight against communism. For the Clinton Administration, NATO enlargement became the centerpiece of a broader agenda to modernize the U.S.-European strategic partnership for the future. That strategy reflected an American commitment to the spread of democracy and Western values, the importance attached to modernizing Washington's key alliances for an increasingly globalized world, and the fact that the Clinton Administration looked to Europe as America's natural partner in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century. As the Alliance weighs its the future following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and prepares for a second round of enlargement, this book is required reading about the first post-Cold War effort to modernize NATO for a new era.

Enduring Alliance
Enduring Alliance

Author: Timothy Andrews Sayle

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 1501735527

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Sayle's book is a remarkably well-documented history of the NATO alliance. This is a worthwhile addition to the growing literature on NATO and a foundation for understanding its current challenges and prospects.― Choice 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.

NATO and the UN
NATO and the UN

Author: Lawrence S. Kaplan

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2010-02-24

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0826218830

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When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed just four years after the United Nations, it provided its members with a measure of security in the face of the Soviet Union’s veto power in the senior organization’s Security Council, as well as a means of coping with Communist expansion. Ever since then, the two institutions have been competitors in maintaining peace in the postwar world. Occasionally they have cooperated; more often they have not. In NATO and the UN, Lawrence Kaplan, one of the leading experts on NATO, examines the intimate and often contentious relations between the two and describes how this relationship has changed over the course of two generations. Kaplan documents the many interactions between them throughout their interconnected history, focusing on the major flashpoints where either NATO clashed with UN leadership, the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other directly, or fissures within the Atlantic alliance were dramatized in UN sessions. He draws on the organizations’ records as well as unpublished files from the National Archives and its counterparts in Britain, France, and Germany to provide the best account yet of working relations between the two organizations. By examining their complex connection with regard to such conflicts as the Balkan wars, Kaplan enhances our understanding of both institutions. Crisis management has been a source of conflict between the two in the past but has also served as an incentive for collaboration, and Kaplan shows how this peculiar but persistent relationship has functioned. Although the Cold War years are gone, the UN remains the setting where NATO problems have played out, as they have in Iraq during recent decades. And it is to NATO that the UN has turned for military power to face crises in the Balkans, Middle East, and South Asia. Kaplan stresses the importance of both organizations in the twenty-first century, recognizing their potential to advance global peace and security while showing how their tangled history explains the obstacles that stand in the way. His work offers significant findings that will especially impact our understanding of NATO while filling a sizable gap in our understanding of post-World War II diplomacy.

NATO
NATO

Author: Jennifer Medcalf

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1780741693

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A thorough and straightforward overview of the full spectrum of NATO's military and non-military activities since the Cold War, this accessible study also provides valuable insight into the issues and problems facing NATO in the post-9/11 and post-Iraq War world. Author Jennifer Medcalf clearly and concisely discusses each of the main areas on NATO's agenda and also looks at the future of the organization.

NATO's Return to Europe
NATO's Return to Europe

Author: Rebecca R. Moore

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1626164894

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NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept officially broadened the alliance’s mission beyond collective defense, reflecting a peaceful Europe and changes in alliance activities. NATO had become an international security facilitator, a crisis-manager even outside Europe, and a liberal democratic club as much as a mutual-defense organization. However, Russia’s re-entry into great power politics has changed NATO’s strategic calculus. Russia’s aggressive annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its ongoing military support for Ukrainian separatists dramatically altered the strategic environment and called into question the liberal European security order. States bordering Russia, many of which are now NATO members, are worried, and the alliance is divided over assessments of Russia’s behavior. Against the backdrop of Russia’s new assertiveness, an international group of scholars examines a broad range of issues in the interest of not only explaining recent alliance developments but also making recommendations about critical choices confronting the NATO allies. While a renewed emphasis on collective defense is clearly a priority, this volume’s contributors caution against an overcorrection, which would leave the alliance too inwardly focused, play into Russia’s hand, and exacerbate regional fault lines always just below the surface at NATO. This volume places rapid-fire events in theoretical perspective and will be useful to foreign policy students, scholars, and practitioners alike.

Beyond NATO
Beyond NATO

Author: Michael E. O'Hanlon

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 0815732589

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In this new Brookings Marshall Paper, Michael O'Hanlon argues that now is the time for Western nations to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in eastern Europe to stabilize the region and reduce the risks of war with Russia. He believes NATO expansion has gone far enough. The core concept of this new security architecture would be one of permanent neutrality. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc, from Europe's far north to its south: Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; and finally Cyprus plus Serbia, as well as possibly several other Balkan states. Discussion on the new framework should begin within NATO, followed by deliberation with the neutral countries themselves, and then formal negotiations with Russia. The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to help uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner; after that, corresponding sanctions on Russia would be lifted. The neutral countries would retain their rights to participate in multilateral security operations on a scale comparable to what has been the case in the past, including even those operations that might be led by NATO. They could think of and describe themselves as Western states (or anything else, for that matter). If the European Union and they so wished in the future, they could join the EU. They would have complete sovereignty and self-determination in every sense of the word. But NATO would decide not to invite them into the alliance as members. Ideally, these nations would endorse and promote this concept themselves as a more practical way to ensure their security than the current situation or any other plausible alternative.

NATO and the Warsaw Pact
NATO and the Warsaw Pact

Author: Mary Ann Heiss

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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Drawing on recently declassified information, this is a study of the various intrabloc tensions that plagued both the NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War and how those tensions affected the working of the alliances.

What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it
What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it

Author: Mark Webber

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-03-16

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0745682650

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NATO, the most successful alliance in history, is beset by unresolved tensions and divergent interests that are undermining its cohesion, credibility and capability. In this new book, Mark Webber, James Sperling and Martin Smith explore four key post-Cold War developments that threaten NATO's survival: an overextended geostrategic reach and an unwieldly security policy portfolio; a failure to address capability short-falls and meet defence spending benchmarks; US weariness and European wariness that call NATO into question; and intra-alliance discord over Russia’s place in the European security order and how to deal with Moscow’s destabilization of Georgia and Ukraine. The authors propose in response a range of policy options that could reinvigorate NATO, but conclude with a note of caution. Alliances come and go and most are cast into the dustbin of history. If NATO is to avoid this fate, it must not only address the major problems that trouble it, but also get to grips with future challenges to alliance cohesion and credibility, from Brexit to the emerging contest with China.