Military alliances, by definition, are an agreement on the use of force against a rival. But this is not their only, or even primary role.footnote¹ Ensuring internal order, encouraging commerce and disseminating ideology are additional alliance activities, far from exhaustive. As well as offering a framework for collective defence, and thus for coercive diplomacy, they may also serve as pacts of restraint, through which a strong power manages its weaker allies, potential adversaries seek conciliation or contracting parties pledge mutual forbearance.footnote² Since its inception in 1949, nato has assumed all of these functions; each, however, has not been equal in significance, and their relative weight has shifted with time.

From the beginning, the architects of the North Atlantic Treaty were under few illusions as to the military utility of their compact. In the unlikely event of a Soviet offensive on Western Europe, a handful of under-armed American divisions could not be counted on to turn the tide. With the militarization of the alliance at the turn of the 1950s (acquiring its ‘organization’ and integrated command as Chinese troops crossed the Yalu), the forces at the disposal of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (saceur) grew more formidable—by the middle of the decade, equipped with 280mm M65 atomic cannon—but schemes to mount a defence at the Fulda Gap or on the North German plains were always far-fetched and recognized as such. Of greater concern, in the immediate postwar years, was the enemy at home. European leaders looked to nato as a bulwark against internal subversion as much as against the Red Army.footnote³ Such considerations illuminate a further dimension of the alliance. For propagandists then as now, its mandate extended to ‘values’ as well as security. Did the 1949 Treaty not engage signatories not only to ‘maintain the security of the North Atlantic area’ above the Tropic of Cancer but also ‘to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’?

At first blush, a congeries that counted the Estado Novo and colonial French Algeria in the ranks of its founding members might not be thought an advertisement for democratic virtue. Nor was its warranty of civilian control impeccable. Within a decade of joining the alliance, both Turkey (admitted in 1952 alongside Greece, the first case of expansion) and France would see elected governments toppled in coups d’état; in 1967, Greek putschists took the outline for their plot from a nato contingency plan for domestic counter-insurgency operations.footnote⁴ The accession of Albania (2009) and Montenegro (2017) has further tested understandings of the rule of law. Insofar as nato has claim to be an ‘alliance of democracies’, this is best understood in restrictive terms. By design, not flaw, it has effectively limited the exercise of sovereignty on the part of its constituent publics, insulating existential decisions over war and peace from the hurly-burly of electoral politics.footnote⁵ Here, the alliance bears comparison with the institutions of the European Union, which originated in the same conjuncture and matured within the nuclear protectorate directed from Washington.

Untroubled by any immediate prospect of havoc on the Central Front, content to oversee conservative restoration west of the Elbe, us authorities showed no sign of excessive concern for the preamble of the Washington Treaty. Murmurings in Canada, Norway and the Netherlands over the inclusion of Salazar’s Portugal subsided in the face of geostrategic imperatives to reinforce a southern flank. Bilateral arrangements between Washington and Madrid, concluded in a 1953 treaty, sufficed to pre-empt the objections augured by possible accession of Francoist Spain.footnote⁶ At the start, Germany inevitably posed a more intractable conundrum. France, in particular, was loth to agree to the rearmament of its historic rival. The failure of ensuing tractations, which hinged on an alternative scheme for a European Defence Community, resulted in a straightforward quid pro quo, us subvention of French colonial counter-insurgency buying acquiescence to a resurrected Wehrmacht in the nato fold.

With the entry of the Bundesrepublik, formalized in 1955, nato settled the question, in the words of a Central Intelligence Agency analysis, ‘of who is going to control German potential and thus hold the balance of power in Europe’.footnote⁷ Not for the last time, the alliance effectively resolved a problem of its own making. Having opted for remilitarization, the Americans found themselves obliged to garrison hundreds of thousands of troops in West Germany, as much to reassure its neighbours as deter the Soviets. For an outspoken minority in the us foreign policy establishment in the immediate postwar period, this represented a fateful error, binding the country to a neo-imperial policy of dominion, as opposed to leadership in a more pluralistic system.footnote⁸ By the late 1940s, however, such views were out of season. They ignored both the scale of us superiority and the breadth of its interests: the incorporation of the Pacific rim, Mediterranean basin and Europe into a global capitalist order.footnote⁹ nato, in this vast scheme, acted first and foremost to prevent any rival bloc from emerging in the Eurasian heartland, its geopolitical centre the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr. Even critics of the Treaty typically accepted the underlying logic. In the Senate debate over ratification, its most trenchant opponent, Robert Taft of Ohio, proposed instead that the Monroe Doctrine simply be extended to Europe.footnote¹⁰

Other institutions developed in turn to steward postwar reconstruction on the continent, prodromes of the European Community. By relieving constituent states of the responsibility to assure their own defence, nato encouraged this process whilst at the same time furnishing a check against unwanted bids for autonomy. It was both a means towards European integration and a hedge against it. The structure of the alliance, coordinated by the North Atlantic Council and soon endowed with its own parliamentary body, disclosed the balance of influence within it: the title of civilian secretary general has by custom been bestowed on a European; Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (shape) is under American command.footnote¹¹ ‘nato’, a State Department analysis in the mid-1960s concluded, ‘remains essential to the us as a well-established and easily available instrument for exercising American political influence in Europe’.footnote¹² Subsequent decades bore out this assessment. Not that the Atlantic Community, as it came to be called, was free of discord. A refractory de Gaulle, going so far as to withdraw France from alliance integrated command in 1966, was a nuisance. Bulking larger were the exigencies of a resurgent West Germany, flush from its Wirtschaftswunderjahre and tempted by economic opportunity in the east and the siren call of reunification. American officials, who referred frankly to the need to ‘contain’ Bonn, had in nato an indispensable instrument.footnote¹³

A distinctive feature of American imperium, by contrast with British precedent, was the close interweaving of economic, military and ideological spheres, packaged as ‘security’ and retailed as a public good. nato exemplified this development, by linking defence expenditure to member states’ respective national incomes, invigilated in alliance conclaves.footnote¹⁴ From dollar hegemony to international trade, Washington did not hesitate to exploit its military presence for leverage. Threats to withdraw forward-deployed troops secured German cooperation on monetary policy, whilst periodic escalation against the ussr helped thwart bilateral arrangements with the Soviets in defiance of American diktat. Sanctions and embargoes on the Eastern bloc, first mooted as a component of nato strategy during the ‘Second Berlin Crisis’ of 1961—to the dismay of the allies—would prove a trickier issue with Europeans, aware of who stood to suffer the brunt of their impact. At the same time, Europe—and nato—were largely set aside when it came to the ‘hot’ theatres of the Cold War: from Oceania to the Caribbean, Vietnam to the Middle East, the us preferred freedom of manoeuvre.