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1 I N T R O d U C T I O N Nature of the Relationship There is no more contentious subject in the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) than its relationship with the United Nations (UN). Granted, NATO’s efforts were devoted primarily to coping with the Soviet empire and communist expansion during the Cold War. Involvement with the UN was not the focus of NATO’s or the United States’ attention in those years. Although the UN inevitably was present at NATO’s creation in 1949, over the next forty years for the most part NATO went its own way. When their paths did cross, it was rarely an amicable connection. The UN repeatedly asserted its ultimate authority over an indifferent or often hostile NATO. Yet at critical moments in the Cold War, the UN served as an arena for NATO partners to work out their differences , as in the Suez crisis in 1956, and NATO served as an enforcer in support of UN peacekeepers, as in the Congo civil war in the early 1960s. When the Soviet empire imploded in 1991 there was a dramatic change in the relationship, which brought the two organizations closer together. Sometimes in harmony but often in discord, they collaborated in efforts to manage global crises in unstable environments. As NATO enlarged its scope in the 1990s, it needed the UN to give legitimacy to its activities even as it chafed against the claims of the world organization. Internal frictions within NATO frequently inhibited its efforts to function independently of the UN, as in the Balkans Wars of that decade, and in the unilateral actions of the United States in the twenty-first century. The war against Iraq since 2003 and the ongoing war against the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2001 have tested NATO’s ability to collaborate with the UN in the management of crises. In Iraq both organizations initially played minor roles as a consequence of the U.S. decision to overthrow Saddam hussein. Yet as Iraq descended into chaos, both the UN and NATO agreed to provide modest support for reconstruction of the country, and the United States retreated from its unilateral stance. More prominent was the presence of both organizations alongside the United States in the war against the Taliban forces in Afghanistan that generated terrorist actions against the West. here too the unilateral U.S. control NATO and the UN / 2 of operations in 2001 yielded to the UN, legitimizing NATO and U.S. efforts to defeat common adversaries. While questions of ultimate authority have not been settled, NATO is no longer simply a regional organization (as the UN has periodically proclaimed), and the UN is no longer an irrelevance (as NATO has identified it in the past). A symbiotic relationship between the two organizations prevails at this time (2009) in such a critical area as Afghanistan. From the very beginnings of the Atlantic alliance the United Nations occupied a prominent place in NATO’s perception of its role in the world. The initial inspiration for the transatlantic alliance itself was the product of the UN’s difficulties in fulfilling its obligation to provide the security its framers had anticipated. The Soviet Union’s repeated use of the veto in the UN Security Council, where unanimity among the victors in World War II was written into the UN Charter, frustrated the Western powers. The division between east and West had been evident since the Yalta agreements in 1945, and it was only through the veto that the Soviet Union as a seeming permanent minority in the organization could find its voice. The three votes in the General Assembly held by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Ukraine, and Belorussia, combined with the few east european countries within the Soviet orbit, were vastly outnumbered by those UN members in the Western camp. While the United States had only one vote in the General Assembly, this was by choice; there was no need in 1945 to accept the three seats allotted in the Yalta agreements. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in order to circumvent the veto power of the Soviet Union, with the expectation that its creation would invigorate the world organization. NATO was intended to protect its members within the provenance of the charter but outside the veto challenge of the communist adversary. When the USSR—along with many American supporters of the UN—judged the alliance to be a...

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