The North Atlantic Treaty Organization came about as the result of the implicit acknowledgment of a colossal geopolitical mistake. It was not to be a combination of imperial behemoth and American welfare case, as the MAGA right—feeling its oats and going in for the kill as a result of the catastrophic Oval Office meeting between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance—would like America to believe right now.
It was actually a kind of historical accident, one that theoretically should have been unnecessary. The creation of the United Nations in 1945 was supposed to address the need for an organization that would work to avoid and resolve wars and conflicts. That delusional conceit met the hard reality of hard power, and things had to be adjusted. NATO was that adjustment. With the conclusion of the Second World War, America tried, and tried quite hard, to leave Europe to the Europeans. It could not do so prudently due to the aggressive actions of its chief adversary, the Soviet Union.
That NATO has lasted 75 years is astonishing. That it might be on its way out now with nothing to take its place is…not a good sign for any hopes of long-term stability in the 21st century.
So let’s revisit how it came about. What I’m about to write here is a Classics Comics version of geopolitical history. It should only whet your appetite for far better and more serious accounts of what happened at the end of and in the wake of World War II. Here’s how I’m going to offer it in brief:
As the conclusion to World War II came into sight, Winston Churchill and a near-cadaverous Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Joseph Stalin at Yalta in February 1945 to come up with a design for postwar Europe.
FDR and Churchill went home triumphant, using language they didn’t even seem to realize had disturbing echoes of prewar appeasement. Roosevelt reported to Congress that “I come from the Crimea with a firm belief that we have made a start on the road to a world of peace” (in our time?). Churchill, who rose to power directly as a result of having been a prophetic voice on the dangers of appeasing totalitarians, told his private secretary John Colville, “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I am wrong about Stalin.”
Once Yalta concluded on Valentine’s Day 1945, Stalin and the Soviet Union moved with lightning speed. They had guaranteed free elections in already liberated Poland and elsewhere under their aegis; that was the major concession Stalin made at Yalta, and it was as false as his handshake. Instantly upon returning to Moscow, Stalin began engineering the permanent installation of a puppet Communist government that had been set up in the city of Lublin. Soviet troops established a terror regime in Poland, committing atrocities against German civilians there and whatever Poles they chose to intimidate. They arrested non-Communist political figures and began jury-rigging the eventual elections that would be held there. Later, Polish opposition leaders were literally flown to Moscow, subjected to a show trial in a nation not their own, and sent to the Gulag, a prison system outside their own country.
Within a month—a month!—Averell Harriman, America’s ambassador to the USSR concluded, “we must come clearly to realize that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know it.”
“Averell is right,” Roosevelt told his confidante Anna Rosenberg on March 23, 1945. “We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” In another two weeks, Roosevelt would be dead, having left the successor he had unforgivably kept in the dark about most things, one Harry S. Truman, with what turned out to be a horrible hand to play in postwar Europe.
It took Churchill and FDR mere weeks to see that they had been rooked by Stalin. FDR had been obsessed with getting Stalin to agree to participate in the United Nations, for which, gee, thanks a lot—and he basically had to give the Russian dictator three separate votes in the General Assembly to secure his participation. Also, he wanted the USSR to help finish off Japan, which proved entirely unnecessary. In exchange, Stalin got…everything.
Like J. Alfred Prufrock, the rueful and impotent intellectual at the center of T.S. Eliot’s greatest poem, the men who led the democracies to victory in World War II were left murmuring to themselves, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”
Having established that he could toss diplomatic nonsense trinkets to the democratic West in exchange for geopolitical facts on the ground with near-impunity, Stalin then applied the lessons of Yalta beyond Poland to other nations and subjugated tens of millions. The following year, in the most important speech of the postwar era, Churchill journeyed to Fulton College in Truman’s home state of Missouri to declare ruefully that an “Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”
Stalin had used Yalta as a green light to establish his dominion over Central and Eastern Europe during the next couple of years before beginning to set his sights on nations not in his “near abroad”—by fomenting civil war in Greece, Turkey, and Iran. The universalist Communist vision was in play. Stalin didn’t just want to create a buffer zone. He wanted to change the world to make it safe for Soviet Communism and spread its message everywhere. In response, the administration promulgated the Truman Doctrine in 1947, specifically aimed at providing “military support to the beleaguered countries of Greece and Turkey.” Walter Lippmann, the most distinguished popular voice on foreign policy, called it “a hasty reflex action driven by the exigencies of the moment.” And he was right. The United States was on the back foot and working to respond to the Soviet Union it had inadvertently empowered with the Yalta arrangement two years earlier.
America found itself compelled to aid Europe, in particular, through the Marshall Plan—a gigantic system of postwar aid for the rebuilding of the ruined continent designed not simply to give them a hand up but literally to restore the European marketplace as a destination for goods produced in America for export.
It was Britain and France together, seeking to end the continent’s millennium of ruinous infighting, that saw the need not only for better economic relations across borders but also military alliances to face down the Iron Curtain. They agreed to the Treaty of Dunkirk in 1947 providing for the common defense against a German attack—but it was well understood that naming Germany was just a way of not naming the USSR as the enemy they had to guard against jointly.
This alliance was welcomed by Secretary of State George Marshall, as was a subsequent joint-defense arrangement called the Treaty of Brussels the next year that brought in Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. But America was not yet interested in joining in any way. It took even more aggressive Soviet action—again in betrayal of the terms of Yalta and the Potsdam Conference that had succeeded it—to turn the tide. The Soviets blockaded Berlin, preventing American aircraft from landing at the city’s airports, and then created a coup in Czechoslovakia that ousted its democratically elected government (probably murdering the country’s foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, in the process).
The story of the politics inside the United States in the year leading up to the NATO pact is very complicated, but suffice it to say that by April 1949, the general sense of looming threat from the Soviet Union was felt on all sides here. There would never have been a NATO had it not been for Soviet imperial and military ambitions, its hunger to spread the Communist doctrine throughout the world, and its determination to steal American secrets to advance its own atomic and nuclear ambitions.
That treaty, in the words of the NATO historian Lawrence S. Kaplan, came into existence with a view that it might come to a relatively quick end: “If the allies could have had their way, the alliance…would last 50 years. Instead, they had to settle for an evaluation of the treaty after 10 years and an ability to withdraw from the treaty after 20 years.” In fact, founding ally France withdrew from NATO’s joint military command in 1966, though it remained part of the overall treaty. No nation has left NATO over the past 76 years, and it has grown in size from 12 to 29 members.
NATO was created to be, and remains, an entirely defensive alliance. The aggressor, with its capital in Moscow, claimed it was only acting as it was acting to protect itself from aggression. In the late 1940s, that argument was deemed acceptable and believable by the far left in the United States, who rallied for the useful-idiot presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace in 1948 in part on the grounds that we were pushing Stalin into belligerency.
Sound familiar? Time is a flat circle. The leftists who supported Wallace have now been reincarnated in the right-wing “realists” whose greatest hope seems to be that we will withdraw from NATO on the grounds that we’re being fleeced and that Vladimir Putin is acting rationally to preserve his nation’s sovereignty. That view was catastrophically wrong then and it’s catastrophically wrong now. History is rhyming.
