Suchergebnisse

From the time of the Marshall Plan to the present, American policy toward Europe has been guided simultaneously by two aspirations. One has been to see western Europe unified, the other—stemming from the conviction that the fate of the United States is inextricably tied to that of Europe—has been to create strong bonds among the Atlantic nations. Until quite recently it was believed that these two aspirations stood in a kind of predetermined harmony to each other: the more tightly the European nations would band together, gaining strength and prosperity from their union, the better it would be for all members of the Atlantic Community; and the more intimately Europe was linked with the United States, the more Europe, as a unit, would stand to gain.

Pressures to extend the activities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into fields other than the military, or actually to shift the emphasis to political, economic, and cultural objectives, have been so strong in recent years that one wonders whether there has not been a growing tendency, particularly in Europe, to lose sight of the purpose for which NATO was established and which makes it vital to the United States. Essentially, NATO is a multilateral military alliance for the protection of western and southern Europe against Soviet conquest, a means of denying these areas and their resources to the Soviets. If the members of the alliance, on one side or the other of the Atlantic, were ever to reach the conclusion that the threat of military attack from the east had vanished or that it could not be countered effectively by common military effort, NATO would have lost its original raison d'être, though it might be continued for the sake of what today are secondary non-military functions, such as political conciliation and economic collaboration. It should be added that the primacy of the military purpose of NATO, as it exists today, does not preclude the desirability or even the necessity of extending its scope beyond purely military matters. As Ruth C. Lawson has pointed out, there is little hope for reliable military collaboration among countries ohat do not succeed in attaining a reasonable degree of harmony between their political aims and policies. Cyprus, Suez, and Algeria are symptomatic of the problems NATO faces in the political field.