Open Access Kent State (OAKS)

A reexamination of the formative years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Conventional wisdom has the Korean War putting the “O” in NATO. Prior to that time, from the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, to the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, the Treaty allies were just going through the motions of establishing an organization. Historian Lawrence Kaplan argues that this is a mistaken view, and he fills significant blanks in the record of 1949 and 1950, which NATO officials and analysts alike have largely ignored.

When the Treaty was signed, the United States hailed the end of its isolationist tradition, as it recognized the necessity of devising new means to cope with the menace of Soviet-led Communism. It was interested in creating a new order in the Old World that would open the way to a united Europe. Toward this end, the allies crafted a transatlantic bargain. In its simplest form, the bargain involved a

U.S. commitment to rebuild, economically and militarily, a Western Europe devastated by World War II. In exchange for America’s abandonment of its customary abstention from Europe, the Western allies would take steps to end Europe’s traditional divisions and integrate its resources on every level. The sheer magnitude of the mutual obligations received widespread attention on both sides of the Atlantic as well as within the Communist bloc. The Korean War’s impact on the development of the organization marginalized the prewar history of NATO.

Kaplan asserts that the Korean War was not needed to convert the alliance into an organization, as it was already in place on June 25, 1950. The progress of NATO’s development was often improvised and untidy, and “the first crude tools of the organization,” as Dean Acheson noted, had been cast by the end of the London meeting of the North Atlantic Council in May 1950. The seeds of major changes took the form of the supreme allied commanders, and a civilian coordinating body could be found in negotiations conducted during the winter and spring of 1950. The origins of the “O” in NATO are found in the text of the North Atlantic Treaty, in Article 9, under whose auspices new responsibilities were justified.

Experts analyze NATO’s successes

NATO after Sixty Years addresses the challenges of adaptation confronting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the early twenty-first century. Comprised of essays from a range of experts, each chapter examines an aspect of NATO’s difficult adjustment to the post–Cold War security challenges within and without its treaty-based responsibilities and competencies.

In the book’s introductory chapter, James Sperling establishes the framework and analytical themes to be developed and explored. The first set of essays discusses the changing operational and strategic purposes of the alliance. Sean Kay examines the problem of sustaining the deterrent capability and collective defense function of the alliance, particularly the debate over ballistic missile defense. Mark Webber considers the expanded role of NATO peacekeeping operations in the Balkans and its implications for NATO as a military alliance, while Stanley Kober discusses the negative impact of Afghanistan on alliance solidarity and credibility.

The second section examines the expanded geographical reach and responsibility of the alliance. Melvin Goodman traces the engagement of the alliance with the Russian Federation, and Yannis A. Stivachtis explores NATO’s role in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Stephen J. Blank covers allied interests in the Black Sea region and the potential liabilities and benefits of an active NATO engagement in that region. Nathan Lucas delivers a skeptical analysis of NATO’s ability and need to claim the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean as strategic areas of operational responsibility.

The final chapters position NATO in the institutional context that will shape its evolution as a security actor in the new geostrategic environment. Lawrence Kaplan establishes the potential role of NATO as an agent for the United Nations. Dennis Sandole focuses on the complementary relationship between the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and NATO. Stanley Sloan investigates NATO’s fraught institutional relationship with the European Union, particularly the emergence of the latter as an increasingly effective security actor. Finally, Jamie Shea reflects on the difficulty of crafting a new strategic concept that would ensure NATO’s continuing viability and credibility as the primary security institution for the nations of the North Atlantic area.

This volume offers the basis for guarded optimism that NATO will persist and continue to perform its twin functions of collective defense and deterrence into the foreseeable future, despite the periodic crises that temporarily cast its future into doubt. An in-depth exploration of research and emerging ideas, NATO after Sixty Years is essential reading for those interested in NATO’s past and present as well as looking to its future.

A comprehensive history of the relationship between the United States and reformist Uruguay

Despite its fascinating history, the attention paid by North American historians to Uruguay, a nation nestled in the corner of South America between Argentina and Brazil, is scant when compared to that shown to its neighbors. A major portion of the Uruguayan story revolves around the figure of two-time president José Batlle y Ordóñez, who was the nation’s dominant political figure between 1903 and 1929. Historians have credited Batlle with creating the hemisphere’s first welfare state. Under his guidance, Uruguay passed laws in the area of workers’ rights, unemployment compensation, public education, public works, and voting expansion. Ever ambitious, Batlle sought to make Uruguay the world’s “model country.”

Uruguay and the United States, 1903–1929 is the first study to look at the political, social, and commercial relationship between Batlle’s Uruguay and the Progressive Era United States. Using government records from Montevideo and Washington, as well as newspapers, the personal papers of many of the key actors, and a variety of other sources, author James Knarr examines how this ideological and harmonious relationship developed between Batllistas in Uruguay and Progressives in the United States.

Through his analysis of diplomatic, commercial, and cultural bonds, Knarr comprehensively explores how Batlle’s liberal ideas, partially built on U.S. concepts, resulted in a relationship that brought rewards for both the United States and Uruguay. This work is a must read for historians of U.S. foreign relations and Latin America.

A timely historical analysis of a persistent global problem

Since its declaration in the early 1970s, the American drug war has spanned the globe in a quest to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. Explaining the conceptual framework within which policymakers understood illegal opium production and trafficking, Seeing Drugs examines the genesis of the war on drugs during the Nixon and Ford administrations when the United States developed the policies that set the parameters of subsequent American drug control abroad.

Faced with rising heroin use in the United States and the fear of drug-addicted Vietnam veterans carrying their affliction home and propelled by the belief that heroin addiction spreads like a contagious disease, U.S. officials identified three Third World nations—Thailand, Burma, and Mexico—as the primary sources of illegal narcotics servicing the American drug market. Author Daniel Weimer demonstrates that drug-control officials in these countries confronted a host of interlocking factors shaping the illicit narcotics trade and that, in response to these challenges, policymakers applied modernization and counterinsurgency theory to devise strategies to assist the Thai, Burmese, and Mexican governments in curbing drug trafficking. The Nixon and Ford administrations sincerely believed their policies could rein in the narcotics trade and diminish addiction within the United States. In the end, however, the drug war only guaranteed continued American intervention in the Third World, where the majority of illegal drug crops grew.

Through interdisciplinary and comparative analysis, Seeing Drugsexamines the contours of the burgeoning drug war, the cultural significance of drugs and addiction, and their links to the formation of national identity within the United States, Thailand, Burma, and Mexico. By highlighting the prevalence of modernization and counterinsurgency discourse within drug-control policy, Weimer reveals an unexplored and important facet of the history of U.S–Third World interaction.

“Essential reading for anyone interested in both the history of U.S. drug policy and the process of modernization during the Cold War.” – William O. Walker III, author of Drug Control in the Americas and Opium and Foreign Policy

“Seeing Drugs explores the dramatic effects of post-1945 U.S. modernization and counterinsurgency efforts, joined with Cold War imperatives, on the United States’ war on drugs. The war on drugs was carried by American dollars, social scientists, officials, and technology into the poppy fields of Mexico, Thailand and Burma. Dan Weimer deftly demonstrates the layered ways in which beliefs about drugs as threat and symbol of antimodernism prompted Americans to forcibly transform drug-growing areas, sometimes with support from indigenous elites. His story, based on impressive research and capacious understanding of theory, reveals both the contradictions in the United States’ war on drugs as well as many reasons for its devastating effects. This work joins much of the most exciting new work in U.S. foreign relations, in taking serious interest in the transformative consequences of U.S. foreign policy for other nations. Seeing Drugs joins Al McCoy’s classic Politics of Heroin as a ‘must read’ for understanding the United States’ war on drugs.” - Anne L. Foster, author ofProjections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941

“Weimer persuasively demonstrates that discourses of modernization and counterinsurgency helped to shape both U.S. counter-narcotics policy abroad and domestic drug policy at home along coercive lines. An important and timely book with much to teach us about the contradictions of the ‘war on drugs’ in Afghanistan, Colombia, and elsewhere.” – Brad Simpson, Princeton University

The struggle to define U.S. national identity through a political conflict in Spain

“An unusually original book that challenges established assumptions and reveals the complexity of American reactions to the Spanish Civil War.”—Stanley G. Payne, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In 1938 the United States was embroiled in a vicious debate between supporters of the two sides of the Spanish Civil War, who sought either to lift or to retain the U.S. arms embargo on Spain. The embargo, which favored Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalist regime over the ousted Republican government of the Loyalists, received heavy criticism for enabling a supposedly fascist-backed takeover during a time when the Nazi party in Germany was threatening the annexation of countries across Europe. Supporters of General Franco, however, saw the resistance of the Loyalists as being spurred on by the Soviet Union, which sought to establish a communist government abroad.

Since World War II, American historians have traditionally sided with the Loyalist supporters, validating their arguments that the pro-Nationalists were un-American for backing an unpalatable dictator. In Arguing Americanism, author Michael E. Chapman examines the long-overlooked pro-Nationalist argument. Employing new archival sources, Chapman documents a small yet effective network of lobbyists—including engineer turned writer John Eoghan Kelly, publisher Ellery Sedgwick, homemaker Clare Dawes, muralist Hildreth Meière, and philanthropist Anne Morgan—who fought to promote General Franco’s Nationalist Spain and keep the embargo in place.

Arguing Americanism also goes beyond the embargo debate to examine the underlying issues that gripped 1930s America. Chapman posits that the Spanish embargo argument was never really about Spain but rather about the soul of Americanism, the definition of democracy, and who should do the defining. Pro-Loyalists wanted the pure democracy of the ballot box; pro-Nationalists favored the checks and balances of indirect democracy. By pointing to what was happening in Spain, each side tried to defend its version of Americanism against the foreign forces that threatened it. For Franco supporters, it was the spread of international Marxism, toward which they felt Roosevelt and his New Deal were too sympathetic. The pro-Nationalists intensified an argument that became a precursor to a fundamental change in American national identity—a change that would usher in the Cold War era.

Arguing Americanism will appeal to political scientists, cultural historians, and students of U.S. foreign relations.