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Reviewed by:
  • NATO after Sixty Years: A Stable Crisis ed. by James Sperling and S. Victor Papacosma, and: NATO before the Korean War: April 1949–June 1950 by Lawrence S. Kaplan
  • Vojtech Mastny
James Sperling and S. Victor Papacosma, eds., NATO after Sixty Years: A Stable Crisis. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2012. 281 pp.
Lawrence S. Kaplan, NATO before the Korean War: April 1949–June 1950. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013. 216 pp.

Taking stock of history's longest-lasting alliance at ten-year intervals has been a regular but increasingly daunting exercise for scholars focusing on the North Atlantic [End Page 237] Treaty Organization (NATO). The scope and pace of developments to be considered has multiplied since the Cold War days when U.S.-Soviet rivalry was paramount and seemed permanent. Whatever can be said today tends to get dated quickly. The Arab Spring intrudes, the Eurozone crisis happens, the War on Terror winds down, Russia's war in Ukraine drags on, Donald Trump comes and goes. Trying to explain why the alliance is still here and where it might be heading is a challenge, and the answers are bound to differ.

NATO after Sixty Years includes contributions originally prepared for a conference in 2009 (on the sixtieth anniversary of NATO's formation) but published three years later, during which time the international environment changed considerably. But because all but two of the twelve contributors are from the United States and only one is a historian, their concern is more with the United States than with other allies, mostly during rather than after the George W. Bush administration. The chapters that remain most topical are those that take a longer view and whose authors avoid the temptation to write in the present tense.

In the introductory essay, which applies the conceptual arsenal of international relations theory, James Sperling attributes NATO's longevity "as a collective defense organization" to the "confluence of common interests, common values, and a manufactured common identity" (p. 9). He explores the alliance's capacity for adaptation as well as for "exaptation"–a term from paleobiology that refers to an organism's performance of roles for which it was not originally equipped. However, his assertion that NATO "may be in a perpetual crisis, but … a stable one" (p. 22) lacks clarity, for instability is an integral feature of any crisis.

The subsequent chapters examine the roles NATO assumed in response to various crises it was facing. Lawrence Kaplan, who died in 2020 at age 95, provides here a lucid account of the Iraq war and its impact on the alliance. The chapter is especially effective in exploring NATO's possible rapprochement with a revitalized United Nations (UN). Kaplan reminds us that "it was not NATO and the UN that were at loggerheads in 2003. The prime struggle was within NATO itself … played out in the UN" (p. 196). Kaplan emphasizes that the two organizations worked closely together during the initial reconstruction of Iraq, even while admitting that "a negative prognosis for both" of them "would be understandable" (p. 202). NATO's intervention in Libya has since demonstrated the organization's potential to act on the UN's behalf, but the tragedy in Syria lends more support to the skeptical prognosis.

NATO's "out of area" venture in Afghanistan would seem to justify Stanley Kober's verdict that the unhappy outcome could put the alliance "out of business" (p. 81). But NATO has done a greater amount of business in its own area, especially in the Balkans, where the stakes for the alliance's European members were higher than anywhere else. Weighing carefully what could be and what has been accomplished there, Mark Webber convincingly writes that the results of the operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia were suboptimal but "good enough," adding that "good enough is good enough" (p. 57). Indeed, despite continued problems in the western Balkans, his warning against a relapse to violence has lost its urgency. [End Page 238]

Doomsayers more recently turned their attention from NATO to the European Union (EU) because of the crisis of the eurozone in the 2010s and the rift between Germany and Greece...

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