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11 books match the query 'North Atlantic Treaty Organization'

cover of After Bipolarity: The Vanishing Threat, Theories of Cooperation and the Future of the Atlantic Alliance

After Bipolarity

The Vanishing Threat, Theories of Cooperation and the Future of the Atlantic Alliance

Fred Chernoff, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1995

The demise of the Soviet threat has compelled the United States and Europe to reassess how they deal with each other and with the rest of the world. For the past forty-five years, NATO has been the centerpiece of U.S.-European security relations, but some analysts now argue that the alliance can no longer survive. Should NATO states continue to rely on the NATO alliance for security? Several theories have been advanced to help answer this question. Nevertheless, After Bipolarity defends the argument that none of them---neorealism, neoliberal institutionalism, or cybernetic theory---is an entirely convincing account of past relations among NATO states and proposes a new theory based on disparate elements of these earlier theories. The author builds his case on twenty-one instances where alliance cooperation was sought, from the Suez crisis to Operation Desert Storm, representing a variety of issue areas: arms deployments, arms control, out-of-area operations, and alliance doctrine. Much of the data for the case studies comes from interviews with government and alliance officials and sheds considerable new light on certain key alliance decisions. After Bipolarity makes use of a variety of methods to test the key variables. Boolean algebra in particular is used to illuminate the author's theory, which contends that there is no unique set of necessary and sufficient conditions for cooperation but that there are alternate sets of conditions that may produce cooperative behavior. It is noteworthy that threat perception, a variable emphasized in widely accepted realist and neorealist theories, does not perform as well as other, less popular variables in explaining cooperation. Chernoff concludes that without a commonly perceived threat, continued trans-Atlantic cooperation will be possible but will require a more diligent management of intra-alliance relations. Fred Chernoff is Associate Professor of Political Science, Colgate University.
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cover of Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport's Cold War Battle with NATO

Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games

International Sport's Cold War Battle with NATO

Heather L. Dichter

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

Winner of the 2022 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize from the British Society of Sports History

During the Cold War, political tensions associated with the division of Germany came to influence the world of competitive sport. In the 1950s, West Germany and its NATO allies refused to recognize the communist East German state and barred its national teams from sporting competitions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 further exacerbated these pressures, with East German teams denied travel to several world championships. These tensions would only intensify in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics.

In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other.
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cover of Carter's Conversion: The Hardening of American Defense Policy

Carter's Conversion

The Hardening of American Defense Policy

Brian J. Auten

University of Missouri Press, 2008

When presidential candidate Jimmy Carter advocated defense budget cuts, he did so not only to save money but also with the hope of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons. Three yearslater, when President Carter announced his support of full-scale development of the MX missile and modernization of NATO’s Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force, it marked a dramatic policy shift for his administration.
In light of Carter’s cost-cutting in the first year of his administration, previous observers have attributed Carter’s subsequent shift either to the “shocks of 1979”—the Soviet Union’s move into Afghanistan and the seizure of power by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran—or to domestic political pressure, such as interest group activity, executive-legislative bargaining, or interbureaucratic conflict. Brian Auten now argues that these explanations only partially explain this midterm policy change.
In Carter’s Conversion, Auten reveals how strategic ideas and studies, allied relations, and arms control negotiations each worked to deflect Carter’s initial defense stance away from the policy path suggested by the prevailing international military environment. He also shows how the administration’s MX and Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force decisions subsequently hardened following significant adjustments to these three variables.
Employing the approach to international relations known as neoclassical realism, Auten demonstrates that Carter reassessed his strategic thinking and revised his policy stance accordingly. Integrating declassified documents, interviews, and private archives with a mountain of secondary sources, he provides a historical analysis of defense policy transformation over the first three years of the Carter administration and a detailed examination of how Carter and his national security team addressed challenges posed by the expansion of Soviet military power.
Full of rich history and cogent analysis, Carter’s Conversion presents a wealth of detailed arguments about how Carter adjusted his policy outlook, couched in a thorough understanding of weapons, arms control dynamics, and defense policy-making. As a revision ofcommon interpretations, it provides both an example of self-correcting policy change and a realist argument about the end of superpower détente and the start of the “Second Cold War.”
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cover of Diplomacy and War at NATO: The Secretary General and Military Action After the Cold War

Diplomacy and War at NATO

The Secretary General and Military Action After the Cold War

Ryan C. Hendrickson

University of Missouri Press, 2006

NATO is an alliance transformed. Originally created to confront Soviet aggression, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization evolved in the 1990s as a military alliance with a broader agenda. Whether conducting combat operations in the Balkans or defending Turkey from an Iraqi threat in 2003, NATO continues to face new security challenges on several fronts.
Although a number of studies have addressed NATO’s historic evolution, conceptual changes, and military activities, none has considered the role in this transformation of the secretary general, who is most often seen as a minor player operating under severe political constraints. In Diplomacy and War at NATO, Ryan C. Hendrickson examines the first four post–Cold War secretaries general and establishes their roles in moving the alliance toward military action. Drawing on interviews with former NATO ambassadors, alliance military leaders, and senior NATO officials, Hendrickson shows that these leaders played critical roles when military force was used and were often instrumental in promoting transatlantic consensus.
Hendrickson offers a focus on actual diplomacy within NATO unmatched by any other study, providing previously unreported accounts of closed sessions of the North Atlantic Council to show how these four leaders differed in their impacts on the alliance but were all critical players in explaining how and when NATO used force. He examines Manfred Wörner’s role in moving the alliance toward military action in the Balkans; Willy Claes’s influence in shaping alliance policies regarding NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign on the Bosnian Serbs; Javier Solana’s part in shaping political and military agendas in the Yugoslavian war; and George Robertson’s efforts to promote consensus on the Iraqi issue, which culminated in NATO’s decision to provide Turkey with military defensive measures. Through each case, Hendrickson demonstrates that the secretary general is often the central diplomat in generating cooperation within NATO.
As the alliance has expanded its membership and undertaken new peacekeeping missions, it now confronts new threats in international security. Diplomacy and War at NATO offers readers a more complete understanding of the alliance’s post–Cold War transformation as well as policy recommendations for the improvement of transatlantic tensions.
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cover of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions

Fools' Crusade

Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions

Diana Johnstone

Pluto Press, 2002

In the endless series of United States military interventions, the 'humanitarian' bombing of Yugoslavia played a key role in gaining support of the centre left for war as an instrument of policy.

Thanks to massive deception and self-deception by media and politicians, even the anti-globalisation movement failed to grasp the implications of the aggressive military globalisation pursued by the United States, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond.

In this study, Diana Johnstone identifies the common geopolitical interests running through all these past, present and future military interventions. She argues persuasively that outside intervention creates rather than solves problems and cannot be justified.

Johnstone shows that the 'War in Kosovo' was in reality the model for future destruction of countries seen as potential threats to the hegemony of the 'International Community', led by the United States.
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cover of Greening the Alliance: The Diplomacy of NATO's Science and Environmental Initiatives

Greening the Alliance

The Diplomacy of NATO's Science and Environmental Initiatives

Simone Turchetti

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Following the launch of Sputnik, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization became a prominent sponsor of scientific research in its member countries, a role it retained until the end of the Cold War. As NATO marks sixty years since the establishment of its Science Committee, the main organizational force promoting its science programs, Greening the Alliance is the first book to chart NATO’s scientific patronage—and the motivations behind it—from the organization’s early days to the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Drawing on previously unseen documents from NATO’s own archives, Simone Turchetti reveals how its investments were rooted in the alliance’s defense and surveillance needs, needs that led it to establish a program prioritizing environmental studies. A long-overlooked and effective diplomacy exercise, NATO’s “greening” at one point constituted the organization’s chief conduit for negotiating problematic relations between allies. But while Greening the Alliance explores this surprising coevolution of environmental monitoring and surveillance, tales of science advisers issuing instructions to bomb oil spills with napalm or Dr. Strangelove–like experts eager to divert the path of hurricanes with atomic weapons make it clear: the coexistence of these forces has not always been harmonious. Reflecting on this rich, complicated legacy in light of contemporary global challenges like climate change, Turchetti offers both an eye-opening history of international politics and environmental studies and a thoughtful assessment of NATO’s future.
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cover of Is There Still a West?: The Future of the Atlantic Alliance

Is There Still a West?

The Future of the Atlantic Alliance

Edited & Intro by William Anthony Hay & Harvey Sicherman

University of Missouri Press, 2007

The international response to the attacks of 9/11 promised a new sense of unity between the United States and its European allies, but subsequent disagreements over Iraq have made the Western alliance seem tentative at best. Is There Still a West? looks beyond recent events to put disagreements within NATO into historical perspective, exploring how cultural, demographic, economic, and military factors since the 1940s have affected future prospects for security cooperation.
As questions underlying the current rift persist, distinguished scholars—Stephen A. Schuker, Michael Radu, Jeremy Black, and others—consider whether that gathering of nations long known as “the West” remains a valid construct. Claiming that differences over Iraq are no greater than past conflicts over Suez, China, or other issues, they adopt a “realist” stance in international relations to offer an alternative to neoconservative and liberal viewpoints. They show what the major issues—and nonissues—really are, and which among them are the true time bombs.
These essays consider a range of relevant topics, from the impact of globalization to emerging differences in the political cultures of North Americans and Europeans to an analysis of headscarf issues among Muslim immigrants. They particularly address the consequences of demographic shifts as Western countries try to deal with growing Muslim communities that present a security and cultural challenge. In proposing possible counterterrorism strategies to define a shared Western security policy, this book considers whether a distinctive Western way of war in fact exists and what it might mean for the alliance.
These insightful essays look beyond transatlantic complaints to probe underlying difficulties, explore sources of conflict, assess prospects for economic divergence, and advocate a workable security policy. Together, they ask readers to consider whether “the West” is still a major force in international affairs or whether we face a new world of competing states and shifting alliances. By addressing these challenges, Is There Still a West? points toward the development of effective policies to ensure the ongoing unity of the West.
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cover of NATO and Germany: A Study in the Sociology of Supranational Relations

NATO and Germany

A Study in the Sociology of Supranational Relations

Stanford Lyman

University of Arkansas Press, 1995

Focusing on the Cold War years, thismonograph examines the processes, problems, and policies through which the Federal Republic of Germany was formed and admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The author compares the situation of Weimar Germany during its short-lived postwar decade with that of the Federal Republic by applying geopolitical concepts and theory, illustrating Germany’s territorial uniqueness and how that special aspect of its place on the European continent in?uenced the nation’s diplomacy in both eras.

During the late 1940s and the 1950s, the problem presented by Germany to the other NATO allies was how to secure and maintain the Federal Republic’s allegiance to the anticommunist alliance without eliminating the country’s desire to be reunited with its Soviet-dominated eastern section. How both NATO and Germany managed to maintain themselves in a state of dynamic equilibrium throughout the era of the Cold War illustrates the concept of international organization called “cooptation,” which Lyman helped to de?ne and expand.

The epilogue explores the larger issues that the case study illuminates: global space, national territorialization, collective identity, and ethnocentrism. Considering the current con?ict in the Balkans as it relates to the new Germany and the role of NATO, this far-reaching book is especially rel­evant with its suggestions for a basic supranational sociology.

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cover of NATO and the UN: A Peculiar Relationship

NATO and the UN

A Peculiar Relationship

Lawrence S. Kaplan

University of Missouri Press, 2010

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed just four years after the United Nations, it provided its members with a measure of security in the face of the Soviet Union’s veto power in the senior organization’s Security Council, as well as a means of coping with Communist expansion. Ever since then, the two institutions have been competitors in maintaining peace in the postwar world. Occasionally they have cooperated; more often they have not.

In NATO and the UN, Lawrence Kaplan, one of the leading experts on NATO, examines the intimate and often contentious relations between the two and describes how this relationship has changed over the course of two generations. Kaplan documents the many interactions between them throughout their interconnected history, focusing on the major flashpoints where either NATO clashed with UN leadership, the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other directly, or fissures within the Atlantic alliance were dramatized in UN sessions. He draws on the organizations’ records as well as unpublished files from the National Archives and its counterparts in Britain, France, and Germany to provide the best account yet of working relations between the two organizations. By examining their complex connection with regard to such conflicts as the Balkan wars, Kaplan enhances our understanding of both institutions.

Crisis management has been a source of conflict between the two in the past but has also served as an incentive for collaboration, and Kaplan shows how this peculiar but persistent relationship has functioned. Although the Cold War years are gone, the UN remains the setting where NATO problems have played out, as they have in Iraq during recent decades. And it is to NATO that the UN has turned for military power to face crises in the Balkans, Middle East, and South Asia.

Kaplan stresses the importance of both organizations in the twenty-first century, recognizing their potential to advance global peace and security while showing how their tangled history explains the obstacles that stand in the way. His work offers significant findings that will especially impact our understanding of NATO while filling a sizable gap in our understanding of post-World War II diplomacy.
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cover of The Future of NATO: Regional Defense and Global Security

The Future of NATO

Regional Defense and Global Security

Andrew A. Michta and Paal Sigurd Hilde, editors

University of Michigan Press, 2014

 The conclusion of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operations in Afghanistan in 2014 closes an important chapter in the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In this volume, European and US experts examine a range of perennial issues facing the Alliance, including relations with Russia, NATO’s institutional organization and command structure, and the role of the United States in the Alliance, in order to show how these issues shape today’s most pressing debate—the debate over the balance between NATO’s engagement in security operations globally and traditional defense within the North-Atlantic region. The volume’s contributors propose that NATO can indeed find a viable balance between competing, but not inherently incompatible, strategic visions.

A theoretically informed, empirical account and analysis of NATO’s recent evolution, this volume will appeal to both security scholars and practitioners from the policy community.
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cover of The Missing Link: West European Neutrals and Regional Security

The Missing Link

West European Neutrals and Regional Security

Richard E. Bissell and Curt Gasteyger, eds.

Duke University Press, 1990

The Missing Link brings together the views on the defense of the continent of the five principal neutral nations in Europe—Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Yugoslavia, and Austria—and examines the evolution and current status of the security threats faced by them. The analyses presented here were commissioned by the Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
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