Periphery or Contact Zone? The NATO Flanks 1961 to 2013 ed. by Bernd Lemke (review)

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was searching for a new mission after its Cold War adversary had vanished, Senator Richard Lugar famously admonished it to go “out of the area,” lest it find itself out of business. The alliance complied, extending its reach not only into its Mediterranean periphery but also as far as Southwest Asia. NATO remained involved in Europe as well, intervening in the Balkans and bringing in new members from the former Soviet bloc. A quarter century after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, an unexpected array of possible new missions on NATO’s former flanks makes a book about their transformation over the past fifty years timely reading.

This volume, which originated at a conference organized in 2013 by the Potsdam Center for Military History and Social Sciences, has been published in English by a publisher in Germany, though unfortunately with scant attention to linguistic accuracy. It succeeds in not being “Germanocentric” but does not provide the promised “supranational and also global perspective” (p. 11). It considers neither NATO’s security policies in relation to those of the European Union nor the alliance’s role as an accessory of the United Nations, and it does not include missions combating “non-traditional” security threats.

Instead, the book aims to analyze continuities and discontinuities in NATO dealing with “traditional” threats, as defined by its post–Cold War transition “from ‘pure’ deterrence based on avoiding ... military conflict to active military engagement” (pp. 22–23). The diverse chapters are intended to explain the military and political challenges the alliance faced at its periphery during the Cold War and new challenges that have emerged in its “contact zones” since. Inevitably, the essays in the volume have suffered collateral damage from the Russian aggression in Ukraine, which some of the authors tried to take into account by inserting last-minute revisions, but without elaborating on the consequences for NATO’s strategy.

Most of the chapters pertaining to the Cold War period are well grounded in archival evidence, much of it previously unknown. The two about the northern flank–Agilolf Kesselring’s on the “Nordic balance” and Gjert Lage Dyndal’s on battle scenarios–explain the complex interplay of military and political considerations in the strategies of the different Nordic states and NATO. Without explicitly making a connection with more recent developments, the authors complement each other in emphasizing two enduring qualities of the Nordic strategy: Kesselring the balance between restraint and strength, including its nuclear dimension; and Dyndal the adaptability of the perceptions and scenarios to the changing Russian threat.

The chapters discussing the southern flank dwell retrospectively, albeit not always convincingly, on the region’s underrated strategic significance during the Cold War. Francesca Zilio’s essay on the disruptive influence of Mediterranean issues on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe centers on the episode when Malta was able to paralyze its progress. Stefan Maximilian Brenner examines the debilitating effect on NATO of the Greek-Turkish conflict over Cyprus in 1964– 1965. Dionysios Chourchouliss discusses the futility of NATO’s forward strategy on its “secondary front” in 1964–1974, manned by the two quarreling allies. Gaetano La Nave documents the crucial role of Italy during the same years, but beyond this time frame he merely notes that Italy remains of “considerable importance” (p. 115).

GökhanÖzkan’s more broadly conceived overview of Turkey’s formative relationship with the United States and NATO after the country’s admission to the alliance in 1952 is the best in relating the Cold War background to later developments, in this instance to Turkey’s turn from “a one-dimensional” toward “a more balanced and multi-directional foreign policy” (p. 55). Although the essay was written before the aftermath of the Arab Spring (especially the civil war in Syria) frustrated Turkey’s ambition to serve as a bridge between the West and the Muslim world, it documents the deeper...