Air University Review, March-April 1968

The Future of NATO

Dr. Thomas C. Schelling

Until this year, there was a strong tradition about how to begin a speech on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The accepted form ran something like this: “NATO finds itself today in greater disarray than ever before in the six years—eight years, ten years, twelve years (whatever the year in which the speech was being given)—since it was established.” An alternative version was: “NATO is in deeper crisis today than ever before since it was established in 1949.” On the one hand, disarray; on the other, crisis.

Actually, this year they aren’t making either statement about NATO. I read recently a speech I received in the mail from an old friend, Harlan Cleveland, who is our Ambassador to NATO. It was a buoyant speech. He’s a buoyant man, but not so buoyant that he could give that kind of a speech about NATO unless he felt that way. And I asked myself, “Why is it that this year is not a gloomy year for NATO?”

One possibility is that when you’ve accomplished a successful move from, say, Paris to Brussels, you have such a sense of accomplishment that you forget that you didn’t want to move originally. Another is that the war in Southeast Asia diverts attention from all the NATO problems. Possibly it is that General de Gaulle was an enormous preoccupation as long as he could threaten to be beastly, but once he’s actually been beastly he doesn’t hold much over us any more. And part of the explanation may be that NATO is like the man who had been hitting himself on the head with a hammer for so long that it felt good when he quit. NATO was banging its head hard for several years until, about a year ago, it stopped; and the relief is spectacular.

The second of the General Thomas D. White Lectures was presented at Air University on the evening of 18 October 1967, continuing the general subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Dr. Thomas C. Schelling, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, gave his audience the benefit of broad firsthand acquaintance with European problems, and here his message has been adapted for the readers of Air University Review.

The Editor

In any case, things are quiet, if not encouraging. And there is probably a certain recognition that no matter what General de Gaulle says, and no matter what changes take place in the world, it is almost as hard to discontinue an organization as to initiate one. NATO, therefore, won’t really go out of business on the 20th anniversary because there isn’t that much initiative in the world. SO NATO has a future, whether it likes it or not.

There are those who say it isn’t really NATO any more: with France out, in any effective operational sense, how can it be NATO? One thing we may have learned in the last year is that France’s being in or out does not make quite all that difference. But this depends a little on what NATO is—whether it is essentially a military force, a basis for political collaboration, a commitment to each other’s security, or a cultural institution carrying on the Marshall Plan.

I am not going to talk about NATO’s future over the next two, three, or four years. It is more interesting to think about what NATO was when it started almost twenty years ago. That is a long time—almost as long as it takes a baby to grow up and reach voting age. The world has changed since then. If NATO is to go on for another two decades in one form or another, we ought to think about the decades rather than the few years just ahead.

What was NATO to begin with? It was not really a military organization. It was not a defense force. NATO initially was a scheme whereby the United States got itself obliged to defend Europe, with nuclear weapons if necessary. NATO was a technique for getting the United States committed to participation in the defense of Europe. This fact shows up clearly in the testimony that went into the Senate ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty and the Congressional authorization for stationing, indefinitely, American troops abroad in peacetime. The Administration’s argument was not that six American divisions by themselves could defend Europe. The argument was not that six American divisions added to indigenous European forces would make a decisive difference between weakness and strength in the defense of Europe. The argument instead was that six American divisions would make clear to the Soviet Union that if there were a war in Europe the United States would be in it, whether it wanted to be or not.

Six divisions located in defensive positions cannot look the other way, cannot gracefully evacuate, cannot die unnoticed; and one way to make clear to the Soviet Union that if Europe is attacked the United States cannot stand idly by is to put troops there that will be actively engaged. It has even been facetiously remarked that it was not just 250,000 troops that mattered but their wives and children, too. If the object is to show the Soviet Union that it cannot attack Europe without involving the United States, civilians may be almost as useful as troops.

This is the principle that we have seen all along operating in Berlin. We have had in Berlin some seven thousand American troops; together with the French and British the number was about twelve thousand. What can seven thousand troops do, surrounded by twenty or more Soviet divisions? What they can do is to die—to die suddenly and dramatically. There is no place to go, no escape. By threatening to die in a manner that could not go unnoticed, a handful of American troops has made Berlin, for twenty years, one of the most impregnable military bastions that the world has known.

This kind of “trigger” is what NATO was originally. Notice that, in contrast to most military alliances in recent history, NATO was not, in spite of what we have always declared, really a mutual-defense or reciprocal-defense arrangement. NATO was an arrangement whereby the United States got itself committed to the defense of West Europe.

The example of Norway is interesting. Norway is indeed strategically important. But the reason why it was important that Norway be in NATO was not that Norway could make either a military or a geographic contribution to the Treaty; it was that the United States wanted to be obliged to treat Norway as part of a North Atlantic area that we were committed to defend, so that the Russians would know we were obliged, and so that Norway would then not be fair game for Russian aggression.

Two events gave rise to NATO. The first was a simple one. The British, in February 1947, said they could not finance the Greek government any longer in its war against Communist guerrillas. This announcement crystallized what later came to be known as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. I doubt whether NATO could have existed without the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan created an institution, a tradition, a set of work habits among nations, that made NATO as an organization possible. The second event was the blockade of Berlin and the ensuing 18-month airlift, which convinced Americans and Europeans that the Russians were not only potentially but actually a menace.

These two events gave rise to NATO the treaty and NATO the cooperative association. What gave rise to NATO as a defense program was the Korean War. That war occurred because the United States did not know how to articulate its intentions—possibly because it did not know its own intentions. The Secretary of State, you may recall, had spoken of a United States strategic defense perimeter that excluded South Korea. He then said that for other reasons we were obliged to defend South Korea. The manner of his saying this may have seemed to damn with faint praise our obligation to defend Korea; and North Korea launched an attack that I think would not have been launched had it been clear what the United States would do.

It was hard for them to know what we would do, since we probably didn’t know ourselves. Had we attempted to articulate what our response to the Korean War would be, it would have been exceedingly difficult to make a threat that might deter the Soviet Union. Because the one thing we probably could not have said—because we did not anticipate it—was that we would quadruple our defense budget. This was the era of defense budgets that were crawling down toward about 13 billion dollars per year. A year or two earlier the Joint Chiefs of Staff had felt they needed the preposterously large figure of 22 billion dollars for defense; Secretary of Defense Forrestal says in his diaries that he thought that would bankrupt America and play into the Russian hands but that we needed at least 16 or 17 billion dollars. Under his successor, Louis Johnson, the figure was getting down toward 13 billion. With the Korean War it boomed quickly to 65 billion dollars. No great harm, no great strain: the economy reacted with vigor and elasticity. But who could have told the Russians that the Korean War would launch an arms race in which our defense budget would never fall below 50 billion dollars per year and that this would happen only a few months after we were talking about 15 billion or so as the upper limit? It was this boost in the defense budget that really led to the conception of NATO as not merely a U.S obligation to defend Europe but a major military program for the armament and defense of Europe.

The Truman Doctrine stated the basic premise on which American foreign policy was to rest: that the northern half of the globe was divided into two parts, one part Communist and one part threatened by Communism. The Communist part was credited with a discipline that the “free” part lacked, had a drive toward expansion without scruple as to means, a goal of total world conquest, a willingness to risk violence and engage in war if necessary, and a political capacity for imposing on conquered areas a regime that could neither be overthrown nor separated from the Soviet bloc. The Soviet bloc was credited with a capacity for never losing what once it gained, so that, even if its foreign adventures alternately succeeded and failed, it would win when it succeeded and hold its own when it failed.

As so commonly happens, the menace was oversimplified. Unity in the Communist world was taken for granted while disunity in the Western world had to be continually, and never successfully, striven against. Soviet threats were credited absolutely while the “credibility” of the American counterthreat was perpetually debated. Nationalism was expected to be smothered by Communist ideology throughout the Soviet bloc while in the West an appealing successor to European nationalism was always an aspiration, never a reality. Soviet army strength appeared so large in relation to the uniformed manpower of the Western countries as to cause a sense of almost hopeless inferiority that no rational population count was ever able to dispel. And Communist China was seen to be a militant extension, eastward and southward, of a bloc centrally directed from Moscow and adding enormously in manpower and territory to a single monolithic menace.

The world is different now, and looks different, from the way it was and the way it looked in the early 1950s. Most important of all, we have learned that coexistence without major war is possible. We are now more than two-thirds through the decade of the 1960s, a decade at the beginning of which a noted scientific author proclaimed it a “mathematical certainty” that nuclear weapons, even if only by some kind of accident, would blow up the world within ten years. Twenty years without nuclear war is no guarantee that we can extend it to 120 or even to the next 20; it is enough, though, to replace despair with hope and to give reason for believing that at least the major nuclear powers have acquired some experience and some confidence which will make the job easier during the second 20.

We have learned that the Communist world of the twentieth century is no more immune than a “capitalist world” (or a “royalist world”) to schism, invective, territorial disputes, ideological hostility, rivalry, resentment, and even the acknowledged possibility of military engagement. We were slow in the United States, terribly slow, to recognize the Sino-Soviet split for what it was, probably because we wrongly believed it couldn’t happen, partly because we may have let our own propaganda talk us into believing in a monolithic image of the Soviet bloc as constitutionally insusceptible to internal division. Even yet we may not have shaken off altogether an evaluation of China that credits it with the full potential support of Soviet nuclear strength.

We have learned, too, that the underdeveloped world is extraordinarily difficult to influence, to manipulate, or to control—by Americans with all their money and armaments or by Russians with all their money and armaments. It is nearly a decade since the entire Middle East seemed almost in the clutches of the Soviet Union, but the Russians find a Nasser as hard to clutch as we do. The stunning change in the politics of Indonesia during the past two years contradicted the forecasts of the most knowledgeable American experts and proved that Communist political manipulation is capable of failing even on the very brink of success. And we have only recently recovered from a brief panic at the thought that a few hundred Chinese or Cubans with a few truckloads of machine guns and radio transmitters would, with cheap and subtle violence, subvert and then control central Africa and Central America.

Most extraordinary of all is the discovery—a discovery important to social science as well as to foreign policy—that the countries that had Communist regimes imposed on them by Soviet force and subversion could become less, not more, ideologically Communist with the passage of time. They can become less, not more, tightly integrated into the Soviet bloc with the passage of time. And they can raise a generation under Communist rule that attests the durability of national identity and cultural continuity in a way that ought to enrage an old Bolshevik as much as it puzzles the Western scholar. The crushing of Budapest in 1956 was more like the beginning than like the end of an evolutionary process, a process that shows that even in a Communist world both internal politics and foreign relations have a dynamic character that neither a Communist nor a non-Communist social theorist can fully understand, predict, or control.

What has been happening in Eastern Europe is documented by so many scholars, journalists, and travelers, whose interests range from business management to scientific meetings, from poetry and editorials to the way people talk privately and in public, from the role of the party or the police to the role of the professional bureaucrat, that one has to accept their testimony as significant. What appears to be happening in Eastern Europe contradicts the expectations of some of the best social scientists in the West, who did not believe ten years ago that the process of “liberalization” or “modernization” could go so far, or that the vitality of national and regional cultures could flourish so.

Communism in its doctrinaire form has been something short of an economic success, and it is becoming harder and harder to sweep the evidence under the rug. I was recently behind the Iron Curtain talking to economists—well-educated, sophisticated professionals familiar with Western economics—and the conversation sounded like conversations with Western European economists in 1948, ‘49, ‘50. There are all the usual problems of overcontrolled economies, bureaucratic rent controls, exchange rates out of line, excessive attempts at wage uniformity, great inefficiency and some bureaucratic demoralization resulting from a 20-year or 15-year experiment in doing by ideology what the market does better. And, just as many developing countries learned a decade ago after flirting with socialism, some of the Eastern European countries are discovering that, whatever else there is to say about Marxism-Leninism, it does not have the key to the running of a country’s economy.

They are facing a new problem, too, in Eastern Europe: reconciling the Communist Party with the government bureaucracy. This could happen only in a one-party country; in a multiparty system the parties compete and have no authority. In a country in which the party is the ultimate authority, something eventually occurs that we called, in this country thirty years ago, the “managerial revolution”—the development of a professional class, a bureaucratic class, composed of people more identified with the job they do from day to day than with the ideology and philosophy that goes with it. There is a tendency for party leadership to become older in years and less in touch with what is going on. One of the questions that has surfaced in Yugoslavia, and is widely discussed and about to surface in other countries, is what the role of the party is going to be if it is not to become a collection of superannuated revolutionaries. Foreign relations tend to be handled more by party than by diplomatic establishments; but for the internal running of the countries, there is emerging what is almost a “two-party system,” the party and the government functionaries.

We have learned some things, too, about our side of the Iron Curtain. One is that the “nation,” as a political and geographical unit, is not too small or too politically obsolete to command the loyalty and interest of its citizens. Larger “communities” may be desirable, but not to fill some vacuum of national disillusionment. In the early 1950s there were many who feared (and some theorists who hoped) that the traditionally defined sovereign nation was unsuited to the modem world and would have to be submerged in some drastically different federal or supranational system. Today the traditionally defined “nation” looks pretty viable. Militarily, of course, many proud countries are too weak to stand alone against a major adversary, or a bloc of major adversaries; but the twentieth century is no different from the nineteenth in that respect. Economically there is much to gain through the merging of markets and the elimination of barriers to trade, capital flow, and the movement of people; but doing so now seems compatible with a modest diminution of “sovereignty.”

A consequence is that “regionalism” may be losing its appeal, and properly losing it, as a basic mode of organization. Regionalism was expressly allowed for in the United Nations Charter, and for a decade it was a great hope for European unity. The idea has been applied, somewhat sporadically, to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The idea was that geographical propinquity gives countries a great deal in common, that neighborliness is the stuff of which federation is forged, and that a country’s geographical location determines its interests and responsibilities towards other countries. For land warfare that undoubtedly still is true; but in the age of jet travel, supertankers, satellite-relayed communications, and the increasing similarity of consumption patterns among the developing countries, the idea that Germany and the Netherlands, France and Italy, or Japan and Korea should form a “community” because they are close together on a conventional map may be becoming an obsolete idea. When it is suggested that Britain should join “the continent,” in the present age one should ask, “Which continent?”

The same question is at least as pertinent to Japan, which so often has to be considered, geography notwithstanding, as part of the European continent or “Atlantic Community.” This is not to deny that history, tradition, and culture provide some regional basis for collaboration in common institutions or that geography does determine some joint economic interests. It does suggest, though, that we should be careful in applying nineteenth-century economic geography to political groupings in the late twentieth century.

There is another development—one that used to be wished for without much hope but is now looked at askance by our European friends. That is rapport between the United States and the Soviet Union. We had the nuclear test ban in 1963, but that was not a convincing display of Soviet-American common interest: the two countries got into the test ban by a process of worldwide pressure and propaganda debate, rather than recognition of a common security interest. Eight or ten years ago, if you had gone to a conference almost anywhere around the world, delegates from various countries would have asked, “Why cannot the United States and the Soviet Union get together and keep nuclear weapons from spreading?” Now if you go to a conference almost anywhere around the world, but particularly in Western Europe, the question is, “Why must the United States and the Soviet Union get together to deny the spread of nuclear technology?”

Several things have happened. One is that most European countries no longer see a clear and present danger of Soviet military aggression. They can afford the luxury of being concerned with things that were suppressed by higher-priority problems ten years ago. Most of what has exercised NATO for the past four or five years has not been how to meet the menace of Soviet military aggression; it has been internal to NATO—each country thinking about its role within the alliance, its future, and its diplomatic status. Those who think that America and the Soviet Union may be getting together undoubtedly have some pretty good evidence. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—the draft treaty as it now stands—is not something that the two countries were pushed into by the pressure of world opinion. It is something that these two countries finally arrived at in spite of accumulating world opinion against it. Preserving what is left of the nuclear monopoly may not look good to many countries of the world, but it is a dramatic reminder that we and the Russians do have at least some interests in common.

I think it has been noticed, too, that in spite of the war in Vietnam Soviet-American relations are remarkably cordial. The kind of vituperation that was customary before, say, the Cuban missile crisis just does not go on between the two countries now. The treatment of American visitors to scientific and other conferences in the Soviet Union is more friendly and relaxed than it ever was. The Russians like to say that there can be no progress on disarmament and arms control as long as the war in Vietnam lasts; but they seem almost to be saying that this is a temporary disruption of the normal business of getting on in a cooperative way. This is noticed by our European partners, who are becoming strangely jealous at the breakdown in the polarization of East-West rivalry.

There is a special sign of this jealousy. Much is said these days about a technological gap between the United States and Europe. It is hard to know what is meant by a technological gap, but the idea seems to be that we have more and better technology than they have. There are some who go further and say that the United States, through a conscious and deliberate policy, sometimes in collusion with the Soviet Union, is trying to deny modem technology to our European partners to keep them in a subservient position economically and technologically. This is a bitter situation to have come up between us and the Europeans.

I do not think the problem is one of technological “gap.” There surely is a wealth gap–we are richer than they are. Twenty years ago there was the notion of a “dollar gap”; it did not materialize as a persistent trend in world economics, but as a possibility it was a logically sound notion. Now what seems to be the gap is essentially the higher per capita gross national product of the United States compared with the European GNP. Whatever role one imputes to education, technology, native skills, special resources, etc., it turns out that countries that have saved and invested in capital equipment over the past fifty years more than other countries are bound to be richer. It is probably simpler to call it a wealth gap than a technology gap.

If anyone insists on putting it in terms of technology, the gap in technology between, say, Sweden and Portugal is greater than the gap between the average European country and the average state in this country. We have technological gaps within this country, too; Congress is exercised about the technology gap between the Harvard-MIT area in Massachusetts and Middle Western states that are not becoming computer centers.

Why is it that the technology gap gets so much attention? I think it is because the Europeans resent American wealth as well as leadership and particularly resent this effort by us and the Soviet Union to deny them nuclear technology. This relates closely to the nuclear weapon issue in Europe, which is the hammer that was hitting us on the head for several years. In the nuclear debate we allowed nuclear weapons to acquire almost the status of a “sixth freedom,” the birthright of a nation—the thing possession of which meant it had reached national manhood or advanced technological status. I think that’s over now. We tried for several years to reconcile two notions: that Germany should have at least some capability to fire nuclear weapons, in spite of the wishes of other NATO countries, and that Germany should not have precisely that capability. And it turned out that as long as the debate remained legalistic, these were wholly unreconcilable notions. For some reason, and I suspect it was fatigue as much as anything else, this argument has died out.

My own feeling is that Germany would be wise to recognize that while nuclear weapons might give prestige to Germany, Germany would also give prestige to nuclear weapons, Germany is one country in the world that without nuclear weapons can claim to be technologically advanced, industrially dynamic, important, and in no need of nuclear weapons just to prove that it is a real country, I tried to argue a year ago, in speaking with Germans, that the real prestige item among the smaller countries of the world was not going to be nuclear weapons but troops that would actually fight, with officers and noncoms that could lead them. Since the brief war in June of this year in the Middle East, I have the impression that this has been borne out. I cannot imagine that possession of nuclear weapons would have obtained for Israel the prestige that an army of disciplined, highly motivated human beings can provide; and I suspect that the Germans would be wise to rest their prestige upon having the best army in Europe rather than worrying about nuclear weapons.

Let me sum up. The original clear and present danger isn’t there, and it is futile to suppose that European countries will be as exercised about NATO military force in the years to come as they were in the 1950s. They are evidently going to go on worrying much more about their own internal problems than about external danger. I believe, too, it is futile for NATO to try to enhance its position by going into cultural and economic fields; defense organizations are conservative organizations and amply preoccupied with the business of defense without becoming economic and social councils.

We have now almost twenty years of U.S. investment in NATO, represented by men and equipment in Europe, testifying to the importance of Europe. In spite of our preoccupation with Southeast Asia, I do not see how there can be any question but that Europe is the part of the world that most matters to us, as well as to the Soviet Union.

It is only five years since the missile crisis in Cuba, six since the Berlin wall went up. The Russians now seem reasonably well behaved, but we cannot guarantee that they will be six years from now. It would be enormously difficult, maybe impossible, to recreate NATO if we suddenly needed it; and even those who think that for the moment we hardly need it ought to realize that as insurance against sudden need in the future we should take NATO seriously.

In my evaluation, the essential element goes back to what NATO was in 1949 and 1950: the U.S. commitment to the worth and importance of Western Europe as expressed in a physical capability to help—even in a physical inability to avoid being engaged—in the defense of Europe if Europe has to be defended.

 If all goes well, NATO is not going to have the vitality we would like. NATO gets its vitality from a clear and present danger from the East or from bitter division within the alliance. So if all goes well, NATO will languish. The important thing, and it is hard, is to maintain some kind of steadfast commitment, of military presence, over there, not because the asymmetry between us and Europe requires us to protect them and not them us but because that is where the frontier is and we are all part of the Western world. We must not become so bemused with modern transport that we think we can pull the troops back easily and get them there in a hurry in a crisis. It takes more than transport to get them there in a crisis; it takes resolve and new decisions.

We would be wise not to allow uncertainty or misinterpretation by the U.S.S.R. of what the United States would do if the Russians should attempt to take military advantage of some European military weakness. We would be wise to keep in mind that not long before North Korea attacked South Korea the United States withdrew troops from South Korea and very likely inadvertently signaled something about its intentions in a way that proved costly, not only for us but for our enemies.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Contributor

Dr. Thomas C. Schelling (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Professor of Economics and a faculty member of the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. From 1948 to 1953 he was with the ECA Mission to Denmark, the Office of the ECA Special Representative in Paris, the Special Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs, the Office of the Director for Mutual Security, and the Foreign Operations Administration. From 1953 to 1958 he was in the Department of Economics, Yale University. During 1958-59 he was with the RAND Corporation. During 1965-66 he was Acting Director of the Center for International Affairs. He has been a regular lecturer on national security policy at several war colleges and the Foreign Service Institute and a consultant to the Departments of State and Defense, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the RAND Corporation, the Institute for Defense Analyses, etc. He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board, USAF, 1960-63, and of the Research Advisory Board, Committee for Economic Development, 1961-64. Dr. Schelling is the author of Arms and Influence (1966), Strategy and Arms Control (with Morton H. Halperin, 1961), The Strategy of Conflict (1960). International Economics (1958), and National Income Behavior (1951).

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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