NATO before the Korean War: April 1949–June 1950 by Lawrence A. Kaplan (review)
- NATO before the Korean War: April 1949–June 1950 by Lawrence A. Kaplan
Lawrence Kaplan, the distinguished expert on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has written a new book that addresses what he sees as a neglected corner of NATO studies—namely, the transition from the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT) to NATO. How and why there came to be an O in NATO is the subject of Kaplan’s latest book.
In pursuit of this topic, Kaplan has done extensive research in the U.S. National Archives, the British National Archives, and the NATO archive in Brussels. He has also read extensively in the secondary literature on NATO. NATO before the Korean War is thoroughly researched and carefully crafted.
This kind of detailed empirical study is both a blessing and a curse. Kaplan reveals all sorts of details about the evolution and growth of NATO-the-organization—details that other authors either missed or deemed not sufficiently important to merit including in their published products. Kaplan fills in numerous small gaps in our knowledge, but that is about all he does in this book. If you are looking for the proverbial “big picture” about how NATO changed over a period of years or even decades, this is not the book to consult. But if you already know a lot about NATO and want to pursue a deeper knowledge of the organization during its first year, this is the book for you.
Concerning how and why NATO changed during its first year, Kaplan does not address, much less challenge, any of the explanations that other scholars have attached to NATO’s first year. His approach instead is very conventional. He illuminate the issues at stake among NATO members by looking ever more deeply into the wealth of archival materials that have been released in recent years. Kaplan does not attempt to align his new book with one or some of the theories that NATO scholars have created in recent years to explain various puzzles about the alliance, such as why it outlived the Cold War, bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, and sent armed forces to help the United States in Afghanistan. [End Page 128]
