NATO before the Korean War: April 1949-June 1950

Historiographical Reflections

Historiographical Reflections In my study of the origins of NATO, NATO 1948: The Birth of the Transatlantic Alliance (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2007), I was able to provide a historiographical essay on the subject. No such essay is possible for NATO before the Korean War. Scholars have touched on the period, but only cursorily in monographs covering NATO’s sixty-year history. For the most part they have concentrated on specialized studies in such areas as the Suez crisis of 1956 and France’s withdrawal from the military structure of the organization in 1956. Those that do examine NATO before the Korean War have been official U.S. military studies—my A Community of Interests: NATO and the Military Assistance Program, 1948–1951 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, Historical Office, 1980); Steven L. Rearden’s History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Formative Years, 1947–1950 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, Historical Office, 1984); and Kenneth W. Condit’s The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, 1947–1949 (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1979). Chester J. Pach Jr.’s thorough study of U.S. military assistance, Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), complements the foregoing monographs. Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, wrote an official history of the organization’s first five years, NATO’s First Five Years 1949–1954 (Paris: NATO Information Service, 1954), and understandably concentrated on his tenure, which began in 1952. Only a few pages were given to the first year, and then primarily to identify NATO’s committee structure and strategic concept. Robert E. Osgood, whose pioneer history of NATO in 1962, NATO: The Entangling Alliance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), recognized the importance of NATO’s early years, as did another political scientist, Timothy P. Ireland [Creating the Atlantic Alliance: The Origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981)]. Osgood lacked access to documents of the period while Ireland consulted only printed materials. Journalist 153 154 historiographical reflections Don Cook’s sprightly history of the formative years, Forging the Alliance: NATO: 1945–1950 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989), lacked documentation. More sophisticated was historian Melvyn P. Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), which is a comprehensive examination of U.S. security policy in the Truman years. NATO rated space in this able study, but not in the context it warranted. David Calleo’s provocative The Atlantic Fantasy: The United States, NATO, and Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970) had a light touch on everything NATO. Although he was not particularly interested in NATO’s first year, he confidently asserted that Korea was responsible for converting NATO from a “transitional mutual assistance treaty into an integrated military alliance, run by the United States” (pp. 25–26). Douglas L. Bland’s The Military Committee of the North Atlantic Alliance: A Study of Structure and Strategy( New York: Praeger, 1991) offered a Canadian perspective on a major committee formed in NATO’s first year. The impact of the Korean War was minimal in this monograph. Wallace J. Thies’s Friendly Rivals: Bargaining and Burden-Shifting in NATO (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003) gave little attention to prewar NATO, but his perceptive evaluation of the bargaining process showed that it was present from the beginning of the alliance. It is worth noting that most of the scholarship on NATO has been produced by political scientists, not by historians. Some have been sensitive to the historical context; others have been more interested in NATO’s contribution to alliance theory rather than in assessing NATO’s place in the larger scheme of things. Some years ago I remarked about the lack of interest among American historians in the history of the alliance, and speculated about its reasons [“After Twenty-five Years: NATO as a Research Field,” AHA Newsletter 12 (November 1984): 6–7]. The absence of documents was undoubtedly a factor, but more important was a sense that NATO was subsumed under the Truman Doctrine as part of the machinery mobilized to cope with the Soviet challenge. Primary materials are no longer a problem, and yet NATO as a significant part of American diplomatic history in the last...