The Berlin crisis had three significant outcomes. In the first place, it led directly to the creation of two German states, an outcome none of the Allies had sought four years earlier. For the Western powers this had become an attractive and attainable objective; indeed, for all the lip service thenceforth paid to the desirability of German unification, no-one would be in any hurry to see it happen. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan replied to President Charles De Gaulle nine years later, when De Gaulle asked how he felt about a united Germany: ‘In theory. In theory we must always support reunification. There is no danger in that.’ For Stalin, once he appreciated that he could neither compete with the Allies for the allegiance of the Germans nor force them to abandon their plans, a separate East German Communist state was the least bad outcome.
Secondly, the Berlin crisis committed the United States for the first time to a significant military presence in Europe for the indefinite future. This was the achievement of Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Minister—it was Bevin who successfully urged the Americans to lead the airlift to Berlin, once Truman had been assured by Marshall and General Clay (the US commander in Berlin) that the risk was worth taking. The French were all the less involved in the Berlin crisis because from July 18th to September 10th 1948 the country was in the midst of a political crisis with no clear governing majority in the Assemblee Nationale.
But thirdly, and this followed from the first two, the Berlin crisis led directly to a reappraisal of Western military calculations. If the West was going to protect its German clients from Soviet aggression then it would need to give itself the means to do so. The Americans had stationed strategic bombers in Britain at the start of the Berlin crisis and these were equipped to carry atomic bombs, of which the US had 56 at the time. But Washington had no established policy on the use of atomic bombs (Truman himself was especially reluctant to consider using them) and in the event of a Soviet advance US strategy in Europe still presumed a retreat from the continent.
The military rethinking began with the Czech coup. In its aftermath Europe entered a period of heightened insecurity, with much talk of war. Even General Clay, not typically given to hyperbole, shared the prevailing fear: ‘For many months, based on logical analysis, I have felt and held that war was unlikely for at least ten years. Within the last few weeks I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define, but which now gives me a feeling it may come with dramatic suddenness.’ It was in this atmosphere that the US Congress passed the Marshall Plan legislation and the European allies signed the Brussels Pact, on March 17th 1948. The Brussels Pact, however, was a conventional 50-Year Treaty binding Britain, France and the Benelux countries to ‘collaborate in measures of mutual assistance in the event of a renewal of German aggression’, whereas European politicians were becoming markedly more aware of their helpless exposure to
It was the British who initiated a new approach to Washington. In a speech to Parliament on January 22nd 1948, Bevin had committed Britain to engagement with her continental neighbours in a common defense strategy, a ‘Western European Union’, on the grounds that British security needs were no longer separable from those of the continent—a significant break with past British thinking. This western European Union was officially inaugurated with the Brussels Pact, but as Bevin explained to Marshall in a message of March 11th, such an arrangement would be incomplete unless extended to the concept of North Atlantic security as a whole—a point to which Marshall was all the more sympathetic because Stalin was just then applying considerable pressure on Norway to get it to sign a ‘nonaggression’ pact with the Soviet Union.
At Bevin’s urging, then, secret discussions took place in Washington between British, US and Canadian representatives to draft a treaty for Atlantic defense. On July 6th 1948, ten days after the start of the Berlin airlift and immediately following Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform, these talks were opened to other members of the Brussels Pact, among whom the French were not well pleased to discover that once again the ‘Anglo- Americans’ had been arranging the world behind their back. By April of the following year the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) had been agreed and signed by the US, Canada, and ten European states.
NATO was a remarkable development. As late as 1947 few would have predicted that the United States would commit itself to a European military alliance. Indeed, there were many in the US Congress who were notably reluctant to approve Article V of the Treaty (which bound NATO members to come to one another’s aid if attacked), and the Treaty only secured Congressional approval, after three months of discussion, because it was represented as an
And this was indeed the American intention. If the United States was committing itself to an entangling European alliance for the first time, it was because many people in Washington saw NATO much as they saw the Marshall Plan: as a device to help Europeans feel better about themselves and manage their own affairs—in this case, their own defense. In itself, NATO changed nothing in the European military balance: of the fourteen divisions stationed in Western Europe, only two were American. The Western allies were still outnumbered on the ground 12:1. The US Chiefs of Staff in 1949 calculated that it would be 1957 at the earliest before an effective defense on the Rhine could be mounted. It was by no means inappropriate that at the NATO Treaty-signing ceremony in Constitutional Hall, Washington, on April 9th 1949, the band played ‘I’ve Got Plenty of Nothing…’.
Nevertheless, things looked rather different from the European side. The Americans did not ascribe much significance to military alliances; but Europeans, as Walter Bedell Smith advised his colleagues on the State Department Policy Planning Staff, ‘do attach far more importance to the scrap of paper pledging support than we ever have.’ This was not perhaps altogether surprising—they had nothing else. The British, at least, were still an island. But the French, like everyone else, were as vulnerable as ever: to the Germans
NATO thus had a double attraction for Paris especially: it would place the line of defense against Soviet forces further east than hitherto—as Charles Bohlen had observed, some months before the Treaty was signed, ‘the one faint element of confidence which [the French] cling to is the fact that American troops, however strong in number, stand between them and the Red Army.’ And perhaps more important, it would serve as a reinsurance policy against German revanchism. Indeed it was only because of the promise of NATO protection that the French government, with the outcome of World War One still firmly in mind, conceded its approval for a West German state.
The French thus welcomed NATO as the guarantee against a revived Germany that they had been unable to obtain by diplomatic means in the previous three years. The Dutch and Belgians also saw in NATO an impediment to future German revanchism. The Italians were included to help shore up Alcide De Gasperi’s domestic support against Communist critics. The British regarded the NATO Treaty as a signal achievement in their struggle to keep the US engaged in Europe’s defense. And the Truman Administration sold the agreement to Congress and the American people as a barrier to Soviet aggression in the North Atlantic. Hence the famous
NATO was a bluff. As Denis Healey, a future British defense minister, observed in his memoirs, ‘for most of the Europeans, NATO was worthless unless it could prevent another war; they were not interested in fighting one’. The originality of the Treaty lay not so much in what it could achieve but in what it represented: like the Marshall Plan—and the Brussels Treaty from which it sprang—NATO illustrated the most significant change that had come over Europe (and the US) as a result of the war—a willingness to share information and cooperate in defense, security, trade, currency regulations and much else. An integrated Allied command in peacetime, after all, was an unheard of departure from practice.
But NATO did not leap fully formed from the agreements of 1949. In the spring of 1950 Washington was still worrying about how to explain to the French and other Europeans that the only realistic hope for West European defense was to rearm Germany, a subject that made everyone uneasy and was thought likely to provoke an unpredictable response from Stalin. In any case, no-one wanted to spend precious resources on rearmament. The appeal of neutrality—as an alternative to defenseless confrontation—was growing, in Germany and France alike. If the Korean War had not broken out just at this moment (a reasonable counter-factual, since it nearly didn’t) the contours of recent European history might look very different indeed.
Stalin’s support for Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea on June 25th 1950 was his most serious
