The US Role in NATO’s Survival After the Cold War


Book Description

This book takes a new approach to answering the question of how NATO survived after the Cold War by examining its complex relationship with the United States. A closer look at major NATO engagements in the post-Cold War era, including in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, reveals how the US helped comprehensively reshape the alliance. In every conflict, there was tension between the United States and its allies over mission leadership, political support, legal precedents, military capabilities, and financial contributions. The author explores why allied actions resulted in both praise and criticism of NATO’s contributions from American policymakers, and why despite all of this and the growing concern over the alliance’s perceived shortcomings the United States continued to support the alliance. In addition to demonstrating the American influence on the alliance, this works demonstrates why NATO’s survival is beneficial to US interests.




Not Whether But When


Book Description

How did Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic become the newest members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Based on interviews conducted with more than 75 individuals—from Cabinet officials to desk officers—James M. Goldgeier tells the inside story of this controversial Clinton administration initiative. Analyzing the earliest internal deliberations, as well as administration discussions with allies, the Russians, and the United States Senate, Goldgeier demonstrates how a handful of committed policymakers outmaneuvered overwhelming bureaucratic opposition. He shows the role of domestic politics in shaping the evolution of this policy and dissects the national campaign waged by the administration's specially created NATO enlargement ratification office and its outside supporters. Weaving together insights about bureaucratic politics, policy entrepreneurship, and domestic politics, this book provides fresh insights into the American foreign policymaking process.




Opening NATO's Door


Book Description

How and why did NATO, a Cold War military alliance created in 1949 to counter Stalin's USSR, become the cornerstone of new security order for post-Cold War Europe? Why, instead of retreating from Europe after communism's collapse, did the U.S. launch the greatest expansion of the American commitment to the old continent in decades? Written by a high-level insider, Opening NATO's Door provides a definitive account of the ideas, politics, and diplomacy that went into the historic decision to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the still-classified archives of the U.S. Department of State, Ronald D. Asmus recounts how and why American policy makers, against formidable odds at home and abroad, expanded NATO as part of a broader strategy to overcome Europe's Cold War divide and to modernize the Alliance for a new era. Asmus was one of the earliest advocates and intellectual architects of NATO enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s and subsequently served as a top aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott, responsible for European security issues. He was involved in the key negotiations that led to NATO's decision to extend invitations to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and finally, the U.S. Senate's ratification of enlargement. Asmus documents how the Clinton Administration sought to develop a rationale for a new NATO that would bind the U.S. and Europe together as closely in the post-Cold War era as they had been during the fight against communism. For the Clinton Administration, NATO enlargement became the centerpiece of a broader agenda to modernize the U.S.-European strategic partnership for the future. That strategy reflected an American commitment to the spread of democracy and Western values, the importance attached to modernizing Washington's key alliances for an increasingly globalized world, and the fact that the Clinton Administration looked to Europe as America's natural partner in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century. As the Alliance weighs its the future following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and prepares for a second round of enlargement, this book is required reading about the first post-Cold War effort to modernize NATO for a new era.




The US Commitment to NATO in the Post-Cold War Period


Book Description

This book examines the continuing US commitments to NATO in the post-Cold War era. The initial focus is on the recommitment decisions of the Clinton administration. It also extensively explores the US operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan and, in particular, Libya. The case study on Libya is especially important in exploring the Obama administration’s understanding of the purpose of NATO in the context of current economic pressures, domestic US debates about post-War on Terror interventions, and of increasing American preoccupation with Pacific rather than European security. The author utilises substantial archival research and interviews with policymakers and academics, including Ambassador Kethleen Stephens, former Special Assistant to the President Stephen J. Flanagan, and former Director for Non-proliferation at National Security Council Robert S. Litwak. This book is ideal for postgraduate researchers and academics in US foreign policy, foreign policy decision-making, transatlantic relations and NATO, as well as a great use to undergraduate students.




Beyond NATO


Book Description

In this new Brookings Marshall Paper, Michael O'Hanlon argues that now is the time for Western nations to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in eastern Europe to stabilize the region and reduce the risks of war with Russia. He believes NATO expansion has gone far enough. The core concept of this new security architecture would be one of permanent neutrality. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc, from Europe's far north to its south: Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; and finally Cyprus plus Serbia, as well as possibly several other Balkan states. Discussion on the new framework should begin within NATO, followed by deliberation with the neutral countries themselves, and then formal negotiations with Russia. The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to help uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner; after that, corresponding sanctions on Russia would be lifted. The neutral countries would retain their rights to participate in multilateral security operations on a scale comparable to what has been the case in the past, including even those operations that might be led by NATO. They could think of and describe themselves as Western states (or anything else, for that matter). If the European Union and they so wished in the future, they could join the EU. They would have complete sovereignty and self-determination in every sense of the word. But NATO would decide not to invite them into the alliance as members. Ideally, these nations would endorse and promote this concept themselves as a more practical way to ensure their security than the current situation or any other plausible alternative.




The Debate on NATO Enlargement


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Enduring Alliance


Book Description

Sayle's book is a remarkably well-documented history of the NATO alliance. This is a worthwhile addition to the growing literature on NATO and a foundation for understanding its current challenges and prospects.― Choice Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some seventy years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era. In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO. As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.




The NATO-Russia Relationship


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