I. The Beginnings

Why is NATO no longer needed, or at least NATO as we know it today? At glance at its origins gives us an irrefutable answer: because the world has changed. It has changed so completely that it is no longer possible to deduce in the style of a prayer wheel a justification for “business as usual” by referring to the historical roots of the Atlantic alliance.

Let us think back for a moment to the situation four years after the end of the Second World War. Anxieties about a resurgence of German militarism had subsided; at any rate, they were increasingly overshadowed by a new nightmare, the Soviet threat. The alliance was founded in order to deal with this problem. On 4 April 1949 the foreign ministers of twelve Western countries met in the auditorium of the State Department in Washington and put their signatures to the North Atlantic Pact, which was NATO’s birth certificate.

The then US Secretary of State Dean Acheson described the scene in his memoirs, “Present at the Creation.” Whilst the assembled dignitaries waited for the start of the signing ceremony, he related, the Marine band added an unexpected touch of realism. It so happened that it played two songs from George Gershwin’s musical “Porgy and Bess,” which was popular at the time. They were entitled “I got plenty of nothing” and “It ain’t necessarily so.”

These two hits described the initial state of the Atlantic alliance with startling clarity. After 1945 the member states had swiftly disarmed, and the United States had withdrawn most of its troops from the European continent. The West Europeans also demobilized. They collected the peace dividend and turned their attention to reconstructing their devastated countries.

But then all of a sudden they experienced the truth of an old saying. “The most pious man cannot live in peace if his evil neighbour thinks it’s wrong.” From year to year it became increasingly clear that Stalin’s Soviet Union was not only trying to extend its sphere of influence, but to expand the area over which it held sway far beyond its own borders. In February 1946 Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, deplored the installation of totalitarian regimes in the whole of eastern Europe, and added that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” In quick succession communists seized power in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and, finally, in February 1948, in Czechoslovakia. Democratic parties were suppressed and their leaders were persecuted. Show trials, ruthless purges and brutal terror turned the countries which had just been liberated from Hitler’s yoke into Soviet satellites. Eastern Germany – which later became the GDR – had to toe the line from the very beginning. In Greece communist guerrilla units under the command of General Markos unleashed a bloody civil war. Moscow pressed Turkey to accept a Soviet military presence on the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. And the Kremlin put pressure on Tito’s Yugoslavia to submit to Stalin’s diktat. September 1947 saw the foundation of Kominform, which was supposed to coordinate the actions of communist parties in western Europe. These included strikes and propaganda campaigns which in the winter of 1947–48 made it seem that a communist seizure of power in France and in Italy could not be entirely ruled out.

Moscow’s aggressive tendencies were a cause of great concern in the West. The response came rather quickly. First of all, the Marshall Plan, which was announced in June 1947, and the ensuing European Reconstruction Programme were supposed to make the Europeans immune to the communist temptation. Yet it became more and more apparent that it would be necessary to contain Soviet expansionism on a military level. After the end of the war the Soviets had not sent their armies home, and had rearmed and modernized them. This need first found expression in the Treaty of Brussels, which was signed on 17 March 1948 and later led to the Western European Union (WEU). True, in this document Britain, France and the three Benelux countries promised to take any measures that might be necessary “in the case of a renewed German policy of aggression.” But this was the last time they said anything of this kind. And in the preamble it was impossible to overlook the emergence of a new reason for the alliance, namely to join forces in order to resist “any policy of aggression.” This phrase clearly pointed a finger at the Soviet Union.

It was Stalin’s increasingly aggressive policy on Germany and Berlin which goaded the West into action. Three days after the West German currency reform on 20 June 1948 the Russians began to interrupt the movement of goods and people to West Berlin. They argued that West Berlin was a part of their zone of occupation. The Western allies for their part insisted on their rights and on 26 June initiated the airlift, which until May 1949 brought the bare necessities of life to West Berlin.

The Berlin Blockade finally prompted the West to embark with some urgency on the establishment of a defence organization. That meant first and foremost bringing the United States into the Treaty of Brussels and attempting to establish a multi-national army in order to be able to stand up to the Soviets. The Vandenberg Resolution of 11 June 1948, which received bipartisan support from the Democrats and the Republicans in the US Senate, made all this possible. As early as July negotiations between the US, Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg began in Washington on an ambassadorial level. In February 1949 they were joined by Norway, and in March Italy, Denmark, Iceland and Portugal – a fascist government but in possession of the strategically important Azores, were also invited to join. On 4 April the Treaty was signed by the foreign ministers and ambassadors of the twelve original member states. In a short speech President Truman expressed the hope that the North Atlantic Pact would “create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression – a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”

The principal provisions of the Treaty of Washington, which continues to be in force unchanged to this day, are contained in Article 3, on the basis of which the parties to the treaty are “to maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack;” in Article 4, which provides for consultations if one of the parties thinks that its political independence or security is threatened; and above all in Article 5, which sets forth the real security promise. The twelve signatories agreed that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” In the event of such an armed attack all the other parties to the treaty were to assist the party “so attacked.” Of course, this duty to provide assistance was formulated in a far more low-key manner than in the WEU Treaty of Brussels. The individual members of the pact were able to decide what kind of “action … including the use of armed force” they deemed necessary “to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” The reaction to the attack could have ranged from a letter of condolence to dropping a nuclear bomb on Moscow. Nevertheless Stalin got the message. Four weeks after the foundation of NATO he lifted the blockade of Berlin.

Yet the bulwark of which Truman had spoken was not as yet very impressive. In West Germany and Berlin there were two US divisions, two divisions of the British Army of the Rhine, and a few smaller units of the French Army. They were armies of occupation largely concerned with administrative matters, and territorial defence was not their task. However, at the end of 1949 the twelve decided to build up the joint defence organization envisaged in the Treaty of Washington. The North Atlantic Treaty was transformed into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NAT into NATO. A joint headquarters, joint planning and operations staff and several regional commands were established in quick succession. At the end of 1950 US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later became President of the United States, became the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and in the middle of 1951 he moved into Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). In the years that followed more and more troops were placed under his command.

When in June 1950 the North Koreans with the blessing of Stalin attacked the southern half of the Korean peninsula, there were fears in Europe and in North America that this might well be the prelude to an attack on western Europe. Everyone was painfully aware of the military weakness of the West. The Americans, the British and the French, making a radical break with their traditions, had already introduced conscription in peacetime after the start of the Berlin Blockade. Now the permanent deployment of Western troops along the Iron Curtain was perceived to be unavoidable. NATO, as someone remarked with a sneer, was still like the Venus of Milo, all SHAPE and no arms. However, the aggressive nature of Soviet policies forced the Western allies to strengthen their occupation troops in West Germany and to give them a new task. At the same time it became increasingly clear that the Federal Republic of Germany, which had been proclaimed six weeks after the foundation of NATO, would have to make its own contribution to defence. The slightly flippant phrase coined by NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, about the aim of the young alliance increasingly lost its validity with regard to the Federal Republic: “To keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”

“The danger we face exists not only in Korea,“ President Truman declared on 6 December 1950. “The menace of Communist aggression threatens Europe as well as Asia.” The upshot of all this was that armed forces for the defence of Europe had to be set up rather quickly. A “Forward Strategy” was adopted, which stated that an attack was to be repulsed as far east as possible. This meant that Europe had to be defended on German soil. This in turn led logically to a necessity to incorporate the young Federal Republic into the Western defence front in political and military terms. For this reason people in Western capitals began to toy with the idea of rearming Germany. Bonn was no exception. “What to do when the Russians come?” was the question at the heart of the “Himmelroder Denkschrift” (Himmelrode Memorandum), which Adenauer’s military advisers presented to the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic in October 1950. It was, as it were, the founding document of the German Army, although it took another five years before it was actually set up. Greece and Turkey joined the alliance in 1952. Finally, in May 1955, the Federal Republic also became a member of NATO, six months after the European Defence Community project had come to grief in the French National Assembly. The defensive shield of the alliance in Western Europe was visibly acquiring form and strength.

Originally NATO wanted to deploy 96 divisions. They were to counter the putative 175 Soviet divisions, twenty of which were stationed in East Germany. Later on there was only talk of 75 to 85 Soviet divisions. At the Lisbon conference in 1954 the allies then cut back their target to 30 divisions. The deployment of tactical nuclear weapons was supposed to make up for the shortfall in conventional armed forces. NATO strategy envisaged their use directly after the start of hostilities.

For four decades half of West Germany’s eastern border – 1,346 kilometres with the GDR and 356 kilometres with Czechoslovakia – would have been defended by Allied troops in the event of hostilities. At the time of the great upheavals in 1989–1990 there were still almost as many Allied soldiers in the Federal Republic as Germans, that is, 242,800 Americans, 69,700 Britons, 52,000 French, 26,600 Belgians, 7,100 Canadians and 5,700 Dutch. In addition there were half a million men in the West German Bundeswehr which, in the event of a war, would have reached a mobilization strength of 1.3 million men. Arrayed like a layer cake from north to south, troops from six countries – Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, the United States and France – would have fought side by side with the Federal Army. This multinational presence on the Federal territory expressed the indivisible nature of the Atlantic alliance. Its conventional defence potential was underpinned by the American nuclear deterrent.

Deterrence was also the purpose of the 7,000 tactical nuclear weapons which at times were stationed on West German territory. 4,000 warheads were still deployed there at the beginning of the 1980s. Since 60 percent of these weapons had a range of under 25 kilometres, they would only have been able to devastate one’s own territory, a fact which the NATO manoeuvre Carte Blanche 1955 demonstrated with chilling effect. The actual effect of these so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons – which were no more than a suicide option – was self-deterrence rather than deterrence of the enemy. Helmut Schmidt later occasionally hinted that he would have hoisted the white flag of capitulation as soon as one of these weapons had been used on German soil. It is quite probable that no other German Chancellor could have done anything else.

In retrospect one may say with a sigh of relief that the deterrence concept of the Western alliance worked. The protective shield held firm, and after 40 years of confrontation NATO was able to celebrate a victory won without war.

What is the point of this long prehistory? Let me repeat: Because it demonstrates in a very striking way why the “West” emerged as a military alliance, indeed, why it had to emerge in order to defend itself against the existential threat of an openly hostile “East,” and to hold its ground. A comparable threat that is as massive and direct as this does not exist today. That alone justifies the assertion: This NATO is no longer needed.

II. Radical Change and Transformation