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“NATO Enlargement” is the subject of this panel, and the very words indicate how gingerly the alliance has approached the issue. The original term, “NATO Expansion,” was abandoned because of sensitivity over the aggressive implications of “expansion.” Enlargement has a more neutral sound. Why these semantic concerns? It is as if the idea of expanding NATO was a new as well as a potentially worrisome phenomenon in NATO’s history. Too many observers have assumed that the concept had emerged as abruptly as Athena springing from Jupiter’s brow. The reality is that a growing NATO is as old as the alliance itself. NATO was and is a work in progress.

It has been a quarter of a century since the Johns Hopkins scholar, David Calleo, wrote that ‘the Supreme Allied Commander has never been the first servant of the Council, but the viceroy of the American president.’ The North Atlantic Treaty Organization itself, he asserted, was ‘the rather elaborate apparatus by which we have chosen to organize the American protectorate in Europe.’1 This was the language of revisionism in 1970, articulating a judgement that NATO was little more than an instrument of America’s imperial power. Whether that power was exploitive, as the foregoing statements imply, or benign, as the United States and many of its Allies believed, the Alliance under American leadership was a success.

There are not many appropriate occasions for a historian to play with counterfactual history. To put it charitably, it is unreasonable for a scholar to venture into a realm where there are no records to provide guidance. For me to attempt to reconstruct a past for the Atlantic Alliance that might have been but never was invites ridicule, if not contempt, on the part of reputable scholars of the past. Despite the stigma attached to such an enterprise, I want to present a history of Europe and America with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after World War II and then to examine the difference that the alliance has made to its members over its forty-five-year history.

If the prospect of a hangman’s noose concentrates the mind wonderfully, the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in August 1990 should have had a similar effect upon the activities of the North Atlantic Council. The breakup of the Soviet empire in 1990 and the concurrent termination of the cold war had required a new look at the justification for NATO’s survival. Since its raison d’etre was the containment of Soviet expansionism its future was in great doubt. And there were voices in all the member nations ready to pronounce eulogies over its dying body. The shock of the Iraqi invasion, however, pointed out the dangers that still lay ahead in the post-cold war 1990s, which NATO might help to contain. The crisis in the Persian Gulf raised to the forefront the question of the ‘out-of-area’ role of the allies, a question that had not been resolved, or fully confronted, in the forty years of NATO’s history.

There is no problem in identifying Dean Acheson with an Atlantic orientation; his heredity, his education, his manner, and even his Guardsman mustache all pointed to the eastern seaboard of the United States, if not to the eastern shores of the Atlantic. The problem is in identifying an ‘Atlantic Community’ as such. The simplest approach would be to equate it with the Atlantic alliance. But even here there are questions which have never been resolved within the alliance or organization. Is there a difference — perhaps even conflict — between a ‘European’ and a broader ‘Atlantic’ component of NATO? This is a subject that few observers of the Atlantic alliance have noted, even though John Foster Dulles pointed the way in 1949 when he suggested that ‘it is possible that the historian may judge that the Economic Recovery Act and the Atlantic Pact were the two things which prevented a unity in Europe which in the long run may be more valuable than either of them’.1

These stirring words from Lord Byron's Don Juan evoked strong emotions among Americans as they witnessed the beginnings of the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire in 1821. Then and later, Greek democracy was regarded as the archetype for American democracy, and this assumption produced two antithetical doctrines-the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the Truman Doctrine of 1947. In the Monroe Doctrine, the inspiration of the Greek revolution celebrated by Byron failed to elicit American intervention and led instead to the triumph of isolationism, in the form of political and military non-entanglement. By contrast, the Truman Doctrine made civil war in Greece the occasion for an involvement that led to

Prince Kaunitz and the Balance of Power; Franz A.J. Szabo The American Revolution in an International Perspective: Views from Bicentennial Symposia; Lawrence S. Kaplan The Reign of Sir Edward Grey as British Foreign Secretary F.H. HINSLEY, ed. British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977. Pp. 702; ZARA S. STEINER. Britain and the Origins of the First World War. New York: St Martins Press 1977. Pp. 305.; Samuel R. Williamson, Jr

(1983). The Treaty of Paris, 1783: A Historiographical Challenge. The International History Review: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 431-442.

Involvement in the Congo crisis of 1960 illustrates dramatically an American dilemma in foreign policy: the apparent incompatibility between the nation's emotional rejection of colonialism and the burdens of world leadership which include the consequences of anticolonialism. In 1960 the United States joined the Soviet Union in expediting the removal of the NATO partner, Belgium, from the Congo, helped to increase the power of the United Nations in the Congo at the expense of Belgian interests, and used its influence to destroy the Western-oriented regime of Moise Tshombe of secessionist Katanga. But in 1964 the United States was largely responsible for replacing the United Nations' forces in the Congo with Belgian troops; in 1965 the United States supported Tshombe's government in Leopoldville; and in 1966 and 1967 the United States joined Belgium in an uneasy vigil over the government of General Joseph Mobutu. It is not surprising that its efforts should have been interpreted by communists as American imperialism, by Africans as neocolonialism, and by many allies either as incorrigible naiveté or as hypocrisy.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has played a central role in the regeneration of West Germany since die Second World War, with the accession of die Federal Republic to NATO in May 1955 marking the official return of Germany to the company of civilized nations. West Germany, in turn, has become a not inconsequential member of the treaty organization. The bulk of NATO'S defense forces is located in die Federal Republic; an increasing amount of NATO'S military contribution is German; and the most controversial issue in Europe confronting the organization stems direcdy from die division of Germany and the exposed position of Berlin.