Читать книгу From Disarmament to Rearmament - Sheldon A. Goldberg - Страница 8

Foreword

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is fast approaching its seventieth anniversary and one may conclude that the alliance is showing its age. What started as a Cold War organization aimed at deterring the Soviet Union, first by demonstrating political resolve and then, in the wake of the Korean War, by creating more potent armed forces, has far outgrown its original geographic and strategic dimensions. NATO is now an almost all-European coalition that ties the continent to North America (and vice versa) and even acts far outside of its own territory (for example, in Afghanistan). NATO is facing challenges from Russia in Eastern Europe and could well get drawn into the vortex of Middle East conflicts. In the United States, politicians have repeatedly questioned the purpose of an alliance in which the United States outspends all other members. Today is thus a particularly important moment in time for Dr. Sheldon Goldberg to present a book that invites us to reconsider the foundations of the transatlantic alliance, so that we can weigh its less obvious strengths against its evident problems.

When NATO was founded in 1949, West Germany was not a member, France was the most important American ally on the European continent, and the alliance had no military command structures and very little by way of armed force. Just four months after the original twelve members signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, the Soviets broke the Americans’ monopoly on atomic weapons and in short succession China fell to Communism and war broke out in Korea. Whatever NATO was supposed to be, it was no longer sufficient in 1950, and leaders of the alliance readily agreed to install General Dwight Eisenhower as the first supreme allied commander, Europe. They built a headquarters in France as well as regional ones in Norway and Italy, and armed themselves for World War III or, better, the deterrence thereof. In that context, as the United States ramped up its direct investment from just one to six combat divisions in southwestern Germany, and with French and British forces distracted by wars of empire in Southeast Asia, it became clear that a realistic defense posture and credible deterrent could only be attained with a West German army.

This evolutionary, albeit sometimes stumbling process of building an alliance marked a departure from peacetime policies of the United States that had largely adhered to the advice of the Founding Fathers and avoided entangling alliances. Until World War II, Americans had been safely ensconced on the North American continent and in the Western Hemisphere, protected by the expanses of two oceans. With the advent of new enemies and long-range bombers, that sense of security vanished and the advent of atomic weapons made outright military preparedness necessary. The new strategic environment required the United States to project power across those oceans east and west. Containment of Communism and the Soviet Union became the new strategic objective and the NATO alliance one of its means. Sheldon Goldberg’s book tells an important piece of that larger story.

Just half a decade after the end of the Second World War, rearming Germany was an almost unthinkable proposition. Strategic calculus was one thing, but political sentiments and intensely fresh and raw memory of the brutality of the recent war were quite another. Germany had occupied seven of the original twelve NATO nations, either entirely or in part, and German air, sea, and ground forces had done much harm to almost all of Europe, Canada, and the United States. Sheldon Goldberg carefully traces the politics, diplomacy, and military decisions on both sides of the Atlantic that made it possible for deep-seated fears and hostility to take a back seat to military necessity. This was not simply a story of the interests of entire nations pitted against one another, but one in which there were deep divisions in the United States (especially between the state and defense departments), France (where leading generals favored German rearmament), Britain, and Germany (where the majority of the people were opposed to taking up arms again so soon after the war). Skillful diplomats, blunt military men, and cagey politicians ultimately worked out a solution, albeit one that took five years to implement from the fundamental decision in autumn 1950 to rearm West Germany to that country’s accession into NATO and the standing up of the first postwar German armed forces.

NATO could have taken a very different turn in 1954. For some time, the US government supported French plans for an integrated European Defence Community (EDC), an organization that would have included a close intertwining of armies. The point behind EDC was to prevent a German national army but take advantage all the same of the manpower pool and of the military expertise that generations of Germans had gained in the world wars. It was perhaps never realistic, from a military and cultural perspective, to expect small units from one country to perform well under commanders of entirely different nations. But it seemed in the early 1950s a feasible political compromise, and the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, with the active work of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, threw its weight behind these plans. For Eisenhower, who had seen the American commitment to NATO grow firsthand, this offered a way to balance fiscally responsible defense expenditures with the need to stand tall in Europe. When it did not come to pass, when the national assembly in Paris voted down the EDC, Eisenhower and Dulles reluctantly lined up behind the proposal of a more conventional alliance structure by Anthony Eden’s administration in London. West Germany got its own army and a greater degree of sovereignty, and national autonomy in military matters became a core principle of the alliance for better or worse. The US military would be deployed in Europe in much greater numbers and for much longer than Eisenhower had hoped.

Dr. Goldberg’s study blends military, diplomatic, and political history. The dividing lines between these three fields are somewhat arbitrary, and, particularly when we consider strategy in the twentieth or twenty-first century, it is not advisable to emphasize one over the other. Sheldon Goldberg strikes the right balance in his book. From Disarmament to Rearmament reminds us how much of recent American history has played out overseas. It provides great insights into the inner workings of alliance building and showcases the expertise of bureaucrats and military officers as well as diplomats and statesmen. Goldberg demonstrates how unlikely that central axis of the NATO alliance, the relationship of the United States and Germany, really was. In 1948, when the first military officers in the United States—as well as, rather surprisingly, in France—raised the specter of German rearmament, it seemed unlikely that a resulting alliance of recent enemies could last. One may ascribe what followed entirely to perceived Soviet aggression, but, somehow, the NATO alliance has persisted well past a time when Europeans assumed the Soviet Union had hostile intentions. And it has now outlived its supposed sole raison d’être by over twenty-five years. In the process, NATO has reinvented itself more than once. Goldberg’s study considers the first such transformation as being caused and affected by the United States: the practical military and diplomatic workings of the shift from a political pact to a military alliance.

Ingo Trauschweizer

Cincinnati, Ohio

December 2016