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THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE: ____ AN ENDURING RELATIONSHIP? David P. Calleo JFor over thirty years the Atlantic Alliance has been the principal foundation for the postwar Pax Americana.1 nato's military alliance was, to be sure, only part of a more comprehensive and extended structure, a world system, including not only Japan, but much of the old European colonial order. Institutions like the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (gatt), the International Monetary Fund (imf), the World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (oecd) gave the system its economic structure and doctrine. Nevertheless, the alliance—the special European -American military relationship—was and has remained the core of the postwar system. The durability of the Atlantic Alliance is impressive, particularly when compared with Europe's political and economic instability after World War I. In the conventional nato view, by no means limited to Americans, the alliance's longevity can be explained by its appropriateness. In this particular era, American leadership is, according to this perspective, essential to a stable world. After World War I, when the United States refused to accept its historic fate, the breakdown of international order into World War II is seen as the natural consequence. Equally natural is the relative stability of the 1 . Article is derived from the author's working paper for theJohn F. Kennedy Institute Colloquium, "Allies in a Turbulent World: Will Cooperation Endure?", held in Endoven, the Netherlands, November 11-14, 1981,to appear in F.A.M. Alting von Geusau, ed., Allies in a Turbulent World: Challenges to U.S. and Western European Cooperation (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1982). David P. Calleo is Professor and Director of European Studies at SAIS. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is The Imperious Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), an analysis of American domestic and foreign economic policy in the 1960s and 1970s. He is currently working on a study on the Atlantic Alliance. 27 28 SAIS REVIEW American-led order that has followed World War II. nato, more than any other institution, is seen to lock the United States into its indispensable role as leader. In particular, it makes the United States the dominant power in Western Europe. Without this hegemonic American role, Europe, it is believed , would have been left prey to Russian ambitions and its own ancient rivalries, while the rest of the world would have drifted into chaos. Thus, the longevity of the alliance can be explained by the durability of American power and commitment, as well as by Europe's inability to find a substitute. From this conventional perspective, the principal threat to stability lies in American weakness or withdrawal. The principal problem is to keep America involved, on terms acceptable to itself and to Europeans. The task has always been difficult. Analysis regularly finds nato's long life "troubled," in "disarray," occasionally in "crisis." The basic problems have remained remarkably constant. These may be expressed as four broad questions: 1 . Does the United States have the means and the will to defend Western Europe from a Soviet attack? 2.Do the Western Europeans have the means and the will to carry a share that makes the nato burden acceptable to the Americans? 3.Is the scope of the alliance adequate in view of European and American interests in the world beyond Europe? 4.Does the alliance genuinely serve the longer-range national interests of the European states, singly or collectively, or of the United States itself? The issues are familiar. The fear of American reversion to neo-isolationism urgently preoccupied Europeans in the early postwar period. The creation of nato was meant to put that fear to rest. When, in the late fifties, Sputnik made the United States itself a possible nuclear target, the question of America's commitment once again came to the fore. An America directly threatened demanded a strategy of selective response rather than massive retaliation, a shift requiring upgraded and expanded conventional forces, as well as a new emphasis on tactical nuclear forces. The shift brought into prominence our second question regarding Europe 's own contribution. European states had ignored the goal of one hundred...

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