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He voiced the view that Nato members should increase defence spending. US vice-president Mike Pence speaks after a Nato meeting in February 2017. Read more | Britain’s nuclear deterrent: a brief history.Nor did France, which also feared American dominance would submerge a European identity, and that Britain’s nuclear relationship with America would condemn France to a subordinate status. The British guarded against the loss of their nuclear independence in a European grouping the UK was afraid that France might become the only nuclear power in Europe, and also did not want a German finger on the nuclear trigger. At the same time, they wanted to keep open the possibility of German reunification, and the Cold War hardened the divisions they hoped to eventually heal. The West Germans worried that, in any war below the nuclear threshold, German lives and territory would be sacrificed. These fears encouraged the maintenance of British and French nuclear forces, and ignited perennial anxieties about the potential consequences of German access to nuclear weaponry.īecause of these concerns, the US and Europe attempted to formulate a more distinctly European grouping within Nato. The Europeans worried that either Nato might not allow a long enough cooling-off period during a crisis before turning to a nuclear response, or the Americans could stand aside and allow Europe to be destroyed. HP: The Berlin and Cuban crises in the early 1960s raised the chilling prospect of global nuclear war. Have Nato members questioned the United States’ commitment to European security in the past? Read more | Why the formation of Nato is crucial to understanding today’s Russia-Ukraine conflict.Three issues repeatedly proved contentious: the balance between nuclear and conventional forces, choices between deterrence and diplomacy or détente, and differences in the relative influence and contributions of the United States and Europe. From its inception Nato was a military pact, committed to defend against attack, and a diplomatic alliance, pledged to deepen institutional and economic collaboration. During the Cold War its members were in almost constant disagreement. Helen Parr: Nato has often been described as an unhappy marriage that not just endured but succeeded. Read more | How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world.In the end, the alliance survived these crises because there seemed no clear alternative – no one was prepared to accept the risks of a world without Nato. At the core of these problems was the fact that the United States was ideologically close but geographically distant from Europe (the opposite was true of the Soviet Union), which meant that Washington and its European allies often saw the world differently.

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For 40 years it succeeded in those three objectives: the United States remained committed to European security, the Soviet Union did not expand into western Europe, and West Germany, though economically powerful and rearmed, did not become a threat to its neighbours.īut despite its long-term success, Nato faced a series of crises, some of them very serious: the postwar division of Berlin, the question of German nuclear weapons, the defection of France from Nato’s military command in 1966, the stationing of medium-range missiles, and many more. James Sheehan: The best summary of Nato’s original purpose was the comment attributed to its first secretary general, Lord Ismay, suggesting that the alliance existed to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. Have Nato’s purposes and strategy always been clear and agreed?

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