The Rise and Decline of NATO

Worldview ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
William Pfaff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union

NATO was born of a crisis, and its trouble today results from the fact that the crisis is gone. The ruins of war have been cleared away. The drama of 1949—of a clash between Germany's conquerorshas faded. The ambition of the Soviet Union to dominate Western Europe undoubtedly still exists, but it is a passive threat, a latent threat which no longer has in it an immediacy and power sufficient to compel great measures of defense, The states of Western Europe are no longer the unconfldent nations they were in the last years of the 1940's; they no longer need rely upon the United States to defend them from the Soviet Union; and the Soviet Union is no longer quite the bizarre society it was in those years of menace.

scholarly journals Introduction to Special Issue: Japan as Studied in Japan's Neighbors and Japan Itself

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-273
Author(s):  
TAKASHI INOGUCHI
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
East Asian ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Total Trade ◽  
The Soviet Union

This special issue highlights one of the important subjects of this journal, Japanese politics and international relations, as studied in Japan's neighbors, Korea and China, and Japan itself. The aim is to elucidate the angles taken by these three countries when examining Japan. Before going into the similar and different angles taken, it may be helpful to note two noteworthy features of their interactions and transactions. They are, first, the steady integration of these economies and societies; second, the tenacity of ill-feelings held toward Japan. First, if the lifting in 1991 of the embargo imposed on China for its Tiananmen massacre of 1989 is a key benchmark for the steady and swift regional integration in East Asia since, it did not take a dozen years before the intra-regional trade ratio over total trade went beyond 50%. As compared to parallell figures for Europe at various time points, say 1962 when the Rome Treaty was signed and 1990 when the Maastricht Treaty was signed, the number of years necessary for intraregional trade over total trade to exceed 50% are a dozen years for East Asia versus thirty odd years for Western Europe. It has a lot to do with the pattern of inclusion in East Asian regional integration. It includes China and the United States. In Europe regional integration was meant to enable Western Europe to stand alone. Bothvis-à-visthe United States andvis-à-visthe Soviet Union, Western Europe wanted to band together and bind together those with shared values. East Asian regional integration differs from this European model. The East Asian model is first to strengthen themselves, while seeking opportunities regionally and globally to attain, as a result of their self-strengthening strategy, high regional strength and high regional integration.

Conflict and Cooperation in Intra-Alliance Nuclear Politics: Western Europe, the United States, and the Genesis of NATO's Dual-Track Decision, 1977–1979

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Spohr Readman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conflict And Cooperation ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
East West

On the basis of recently released archival sources from several member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), this article revisits the making of NATO's landmark 1979 dual-track decision. The article examines the intersecting processes of personal, bureaucratic, national, and alliance high politics in the broader Cold War context of increasingly adversarial East-West relations. The discussion sheds new light on how NATO tried to augment its deterrent capability via the deployment of long-range theater nuclear missiles and why ultimately an arms control proposal to the Soviet Union was included as an equal strand. The 1979 decision owed most to West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's political thought and initiative. Intra-alliance decision-making, marked by transatlantic conflict and cooperation, benefitted from the creativity and agency of West German, British, and Norwegian officials. Contrary to popular impressions, the United States did not truly lead the process.

Western Europe

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Etges
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German Question ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter explores the role and experience of Western Europe in the Cold War. It explains that Western Europe is not a precise political or geographical entity, and that its role in the Cold War can only be understood in the context of its changing internal dynamics and changing relationship with the United States, the Soviet Union, and countries of Eastern Europe. The chapter argues that Western Europe both shaped and was shaped by Cold War in a political, economic, military, cultural, and ideological sense, and also considers the German question, Franco-German rapprochement and European integration, and military aspects of the Western alliance.

Globalizing Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 408-430
Author(s):  
Tobias Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Short Period ◽  
European Jewish

Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from small towns in Eastern Europe to the United States. Smaller groups went to other destinations in the Americas, Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. This chapter discusses the background and impact of that mass migration around the world. The global diffusion of Jews from Eastern Europe concentrated in three new Jewish centers: the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. The Eastern European Jewish mass migration, however, did not ultimately lead to the formation of a distinct diaspora of Yiddish-speaking Jews, but rather became the driving force behind a dramatic transformation of the Jewish diaspora as a whole. The reasons for this can be explained by several factors: accelerated Jewish assimilation in these centers, the short period of the mass migration, the great diversity of the migrants, and the almost complete destruction of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.

The Scientific Ethos of Reagan's America

1987 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Williams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Technical Change ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Efficiency And Effectiveness ◽  
Military Security ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
Scientific Ethos

WHILE STATES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN COMPETITION, modern states are in competition in an historically unique way. Only since the Second world War has it become generally appreciated that the mastery of technical change is vital to economic success, to such military security as is available, and, in short, to political achievement in a world in which expectations are unprecedentedly high. Since the political system of a state is inescapably a major factor in that state's overall performance, it follows that the efficiency and effectiveness of the world's various political systems are now, in an important sense, under long-term test. Whether over time most systems will tend to an asymptotic common performance, or whether some will reveal themselves as objectively ‘better’ than others is thus, really for the first time, a meaningful issue, and one which each succeeding generation can be expected to do a little more to resolve. In this context particular interest attaches in the immediate future to the relative performances of the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Western Europe, the latter considered both as separate states and collectively. This article is concerned only with the United States, but a reference frame of permanent international competition, in accommodating to and capitalizing upon technical change, needs to be borne in mind throughout.

Ends and means in the settlement of international disputes over jurisdiction

1985 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
A. V. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Law ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Peace ◽  
Member States ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
General Relevance

This paper offers an analysis of some of the problems arising in those international disputes concerning issues of public international law which do not present any proximate threat to international peace or security. It does so in the context of an examination of procedures for settling disputes over jurisdiction in public international law, disputes of the kind which arose in 1982 when the United States’ right to control—that is, its jurisdiction over—exports from Western Europe to the Soviet Union was challenged by the EEC and its member states. The analysis is also intended to have general relevance to all international legal disputes in which individuals are directly involved as disputants with or alongside states.

Africa's Rising Status in American Defence Policy

1984 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-151
Author(s):  
Daniel Volman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Strategic Value ◽  
Vietnam Syndrome ◽  
The Third World

Since the last American troops withdrew from Vietnam during 1975, the strategic value of Africa to the United States has steadily risen. As a result of the renewal of cold-war hostilities between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and an escalating series of crises for American foreign policy in the Third World, the African continent is now a principal battlefield for competition involving the United States, Western Europe (particularly France), Cuba, and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Vietnam war, direct American military intervention in Africa was precluded for a short time by legislative restraints – notably the ‘Clark Amendment’ of December 1975 that blocked involvement in Angola – and by the public's reluctance to become entangled in another military commitment overseas, a phenomenon often referred to in Washington as the ‘Vietnam syndrome’. Furthermore, the United States lacked the military capacity to engage in such adventures, having suffered such heavy losses in Indochina and being preoccupied with the creation of a new all-volunteer army. Over the past five years, however, two Administrations in Washington have worked assiduously to ‘cure’ the so-called ‘Vietnam syndrome’ and restore America's military position abroad.

The Political Geometry of the Gulf War

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-209
Author(s):  
Theodore Caplow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union

In the course of World War II, the seven great powers of 1939 – Germany, the Soviet Union. Britain. France, Italy, Japan and the United States – were temporarily reduced to two. each commanding awesome strength, and each posing a realistic threat of world domination. The huge forces of the Soviet Union at the edge of western Europe were positioned to move all the way to the Atlantic, thus achieving the control of the Eurasian heartland that, according to geopolitical doctrine, would confer world domination. There were fifth columns prepared to assist them within most European and Asiatic nations.

American Security Guarantees during the Cold War, 1949–1980

2018 ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Alexander Lanoszka
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Strategic Posture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Security Guarantees ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter chronicles how the United States designed and adjusted its alliance commitments in Western Europe and East Asia during the first three decades of the Cold War (1949-1980). The purpose of this chapter is not only to introduce historical events to readers, but also to highlight key variation decision-makers implemented changes in American strategic posture and, by extension, the security guarantees provided to American allies. It covers how the United States expanded its commitments around the world early in the Cold War before contracting them by the late 1960s amid changes to the nuclear balance between it and the Soviet Union.

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