American History Hit - NATO: 75 Years Deterring Armageddon

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

It comprises more than half of the world's defence spending, but what is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation? How has the United States influenced it from its inception to today? And how, during its 75 years, has it impacted the United States in return?Don is joined by Peter Apps, journalist and Reuters global defence commentator. From the signing of the treaty by the first 12 members on 4th April 1949, through tensions, failures and the addition of member states, how might NATO be 'the world's most successful military alliance'?Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Ella Blaxill. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/. You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. President Harry S. Truman stands at a wooden podium in the Departmental Auditorium of Washington, D.C., speaking to an official gathering. At the conclusion of his remarks, the President is roundly applauded as he assumes his seat within the semicircle of representatives of the brand-new North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or, as it will come to be known, NATO.

The 12 flags of the founding member states stand behind them. On this day, April 4, 1949, his name. history is made. A treaty is signed aimed at protecting and ensuring peace in the world. It is the first multinational alliance the United States of America has ever joined during peacetime, an alliance that will endure 75 years and still counting. A note from your host, this podcast was recorded before the death of Russian opposition leader, anti-corruption activist, and political prisoner, Alexei Navalny. Greetings you're listening to American History Hit with your host, Don Wildman.

Excellent choice. We're here with new episodes every Monday and Thursday rain or shine. Thanks for showing up. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, more commonly known as NATO, is 75 years old in 2024, signed into existence by its 12 founding members, United States primary among them, on April 4th, 1949 in Washington, D.C. The North Atlantic Treaty was negotiated to create a sturdy, alliance protecting most immediately then against communist aggression just after World War II

had ended and the Cold War with USSR was underway. 75 years later, NATO has proven remarkably resilient. This year, 2004, it became the longest international alliance in history, one year older than the ancient Deleon League, when Greek city states joined forces against the Persians in 478BZ. Today, with Ukraine in the second year of fending off a brutal, russian, you know, a brutal, Russian invasion and other Eastern European nations on high alert, NATO is very much in the discussion of current European geopolitical strategy. As General James Mattis, U.S. Secretary of Defense told his president in 2017 it would be necessary to invent NATO if it didn't already exist.

The history of NATO. Let's talk about it with journalist Peter App's author of deterring Armageddon, the biography of NATO, newly published this year. Wow, Peter, nice to have you here, very honored. It's a pleasure to be here. I have to ask you, obviously, in 75 years, this is a big anniversary. But was the prompt on this to write the invasion of Ukraine and all the NATO discussion that's been going on? The initial sort of brief and idea was to look at the past and future of NATO. And I think we probably wouldn't have done that if it hadn't been for the invasion

of Ukraine. And it was a really interesting way of cutting it because it's both proper history. It's what people like Eisenhower and Churchill and that generation that one World War II did next. But it's also incredibly current. And there's a lot of resonance from that era. 1940s, then in 1950s when it was founded to where we are today. So it was a really exciting idea that would get us behind the Ukraine war without getting into the weeds of what's going on

Ukraine. There's lots of journalists who've already done that very well. And to give that both background and the story of how we got to where we are and then a sort of primer for what could be potentially the most volatile 25 years in NATO history, which is the 25 years from here as we roll in towards the centenary of NATO, if it makes it that long in 2049. Yeah. For most people alive today, NATO has been there all the way along. I mean, it's a remarkable story of, I guess, a brilliant idea of how to create something that really sticks around. Founded 1949 around the same time as the United Nations, what was necessary about a sweeping transatlantic military alliance of the sort when we had already created the United Nations? The first sort of impetus for creating NATO comes from the very end of World War II. May 1945, Churchill writes to Truman, who's only just become U.S. president after the death of Roosevelt, and he's extremely worried, and there's a lot of modern residents of this, because the U.S. army is leaving Europe and it's going to the Pacific.

It's going to defeat Japan. And he's really worried from the very start that the Soviet Union, which has this massive army that's just swallowed most of Eastern Europe and is not going to demobilize, will have the ability to eat the rest of Western Europe, while all the Western European countries, and indeed the United States want to demobilize and get back to ordinary civilian life after World War II. And these worries, if anything, grow during the second half of the 1940s, where it becomes clear that Europe is very poor. It needs American aid. From the 948, we get the Marshall Plan, putting Europe back on its feet economically.

But there is this real worry that actually there is a huge conventional military imbalance in favor of the Soviets. It's initially in the 1940s, the Americans are the only people to have the atomic bomb. And some people think that will last for a long time. Truman thinks that will last for a long time. Other people are much less confident. But there's this real worry that unless you can bind together the US and Europe in a way that we didn't do after the first world. Or you remember the US didn't join the League of Nations in 1990, that actually the Russians will start picking countries off one by one, or indeed just take the whole lot in a very quick offensive.

And only by tying everyone together to the people who found NATO, both Europe, European leaders and a sort of growing clique of individuals in Washington, particularly at the State Department, feel they can actually tie everything together. It starts with 12 member states, eventually 19, join over the years. It's 31 today. It really is about, and it's still a major factor. American isolationism, isn't it? It's to fight that urge that Americans naturally have to stay within their own shores. Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that a lot of the initial energy for founding what becomes NATO comes from Britain. Ernest Bevan, British Foreign Secretary, extremely keen to tie together. Firstly, European states. So he creates the Treaty of Dunkirk between Britain and France.

And then becomes the Brussels Treaty, which also wraps in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Then the next stage of that is building NATO. But at that stage, Britain was declared foreign policy aim, number one priority, is to end US isolationism permanently and tie it into Europe. It really could go either way. I mean, I haven't realised until I started researching this, that when Churchill gives his famous Iron Curtain speech in Filton, Missouri in 1946, Truman has read that speech in advance, but the backlash in the US against that was huge.

Truman was hugely criticised for encouraging Churchill to make that speech and ended up denying that he'd read it. He also ends up inviting Stalin to Missouri to give a similar speech, which Stalin never takes him up on. There's a real moment, particularly in 1946, where it looks like the US really could go either way. There's another moment in 1952, where if Eisenhower didn't take the Republican nomination, it would probably have gone to Senator Taft, who was again an isolationist. And again, this idea of there being quite a strong contingent in US politics. There are various senators who put forward various proposals throughout the late 20th century to withdraw US troops from Europe if Europe doesn't pay its way on defence. The same arguments we're hearing today from Donald Trump. It's a real

undercurrent through the relationship. And the point of creating NATO, so Jack Hickerson and Theodore Achilles, who are two US State Department officials, Jack Hickson is the head of European Affairs in 1948. They decide that they actually want to make this happen. And they essentially carry the US structure with it. They went over Truman. They went over Marshall, who's the central state at the time. They went over people on the hill for Senator Vandenberg. And they carry this growing momentum to build this thing. And Jack Higginson says, I don't care if entangling alliances have been the worst sin since George Washington's time, we're going to build one. And certainly the Brits who saw that treaty being signed in 1949 and the Europeans were really struck. This was

America turning its back on isolationism, committing itself to Europe. And that was seen by them as being a really important step in avoiding war in the second half of the 20th century. I wonder how much of this was born in the struggle over Germany and how to divide Germany up. Were the lessons learned there, the beginnings of this idea of an alliance from the American perspective? Yeah, I mean, I think there are some people who are thinking about this going back to the end of the First World War. Woodrow Wilson has the League of Nations, this idea of criminalizing wars of aggression, the ideas that come to fruition with the United Nations and with NATO are born out of the end of the First World War. Churchill finishes his great history of the

First World War, which he writes in the early 1920s, essentially speculating on whether they will be peace or whether the forces of what he calls Teuton and Gaul, because he likes to be doing classical terms, will clash again. Someone like Montgomery, first deputy supreme commander of NATO, who's a Western Front soldier, they really are thinking at the end of the second war, how do we stop this happening again? And of course, this is given much greater impetus by the development of atomic weapons. We cannot afford a third world war because it will destroy the world. Then there is this parallel thing, as you say for Germany, which is how do we take Germany, now divided Germany, can't completely look up by the Russians, and bring it back into the system

of nations. There's a parallel project about denatifying Germany and create this structure whereby you've lost half of Europe or closed on half of Europe to what becomes the Warsaw Pact. how do we deliver both strength but also democratic strength, avoid the mistakes of the past, and create a Western alliance of democracies that will last? And the last thing which I think is quite interesting is that some of those who found NATO, people like Ted Achilles and Dean Ackerson and others, they're genuinely thinking in terms of this might be giving of a federal union of democracies across the Atlantic, which is again an idea that comes out of the First World War,

is discussed before the second. So, you know, there's a real sort of moment of averting disaster, a bit of utopian idealism, building something new that will last. And I think a real awareness, certainly Eisenhower, who becomes the first Supreme Court commander just after the Korean War starts. He tells his chief archivist, we need to keep a history of this, because either it will work and people want to know why, or it won't and people want to know why it went wrong.

So there is a real feeling that they're doing something important here. What was the relationship in terms of NATO and the creation of NATO? Was there a friction between Truman and Eisenhower or cooperation? Well, I think there's a mutual fascination, particularly of Truman to Eisenhower. So Truman offers Eisenhower in 1945 with his support for getting the Democratic nomination for the next presidential election, which, of course, is in 1948. So Truman offers not to run for a second term if Eisenhower will take the Democrat ticket. Now, how serious he was about that proposal is anyone's guess. Now, Eisenhower, for his side, begins to conclude he's not a Democrat. He's not a fan of the New Deal. He's so not a fan of extended New Deal spending. He thinks that extended New Deal spending will bankrupt. The U.S. also very worried that the Republicans will become unelectable and the U.S. will become a one-party state. So he starts to develop his worries in his time in civilian life. He leaves the military in about 947, home in head of the U.S.

Army, and goes off around Columbia University, where he's pretty much a fish out of water, as you can probably imagine. He grew up in Midwest, suddenly he's in New York, running a idiosyncratic liberal university. And he's a bit out of his depth there, but he's beginning to think about becoming president. And then NATO gets signed into existence but has no military structures. Montgomery is running a European defence organisation called Western Union at this point and complaining that he hasn't got a hope of protecting Europe against a Russian invasion. He says, my orders are to hold the rind. My troops can only help the tip of the Breton Peninsula for 48 hours. And then the Korean war starts, everyone gets really worried about an invasion of Europe, very likely the 22 invasion of Ukraine moment.

And Eisenhower gets recalled to the US Army to come back and lead NATO. And then obviously, Truman again, is trying to keep him on side, partly because he really doesn't want him to run as a Republican. But as it becomes more and more clear, that's going to happen. The relationship with Truman gradually sort of breaks down. And by the time you get to Eisenhower running president in 1952, they're not really talking anymore. So it's quite a complicated relationship on both sides. They're both quite complicated. They're not even really expected to be with the word.

Truman never accepted president. Eisenhower was a colonel in 1939, never expected to be the military supremo of the Western world. They have a very complicated relationship, which never really. becomes uncomplicated. Article 5 in the treaty, central idea of the NATO alliance, an armed attack against one or more of them shall be considered an attack against them all. Bold stuff. Big language. It seems still amazing that such a sweeping global affair could be done militarily. No turning back from globalism at this point. It really represents a brand new age, doesn't it? It does, although it's worth pointing out. There's all kinds of wording that that

doesn't say attack against one is attack against all. That's not a promise to declare war because only Congress can declare war. So that language is watered down from earlier versions because they don't think they'll go through Congress. The Brits aren't actually that happy with the Article 5 in its format, but eventually they just kind of accept it. It's a brilliant piece of writing because it commits people to things without treading on a bunch of red lines that have always been quite a big deal, particularly in the US politics. And one of the reasons it's never been significantly amended is that it can still interpret it in quite a wide number of ways. Ten Achilles actually writes a chunk of it talks about that flexibility from the get-go. But actually, if you talk to people

who sit on the North Atlantic Council today in Brussels, they'll still talk about that level of flexibility and the value of that. One of the senior British diplomats who watched it, the US has completely changed its view on the world in my lifetime. It really was, particularly for those European states, you've got to remember pretty much all of the European statesmen of the 1940s, they'd watch their countries get run over by the Nazis. Paul Omri Spark, the Prime Minister of Brussels, of Belgium at this point, but the former minister at that time, then becomes Prime Minister and then becomes Secretary General, you have fled Belgium in a lot when the Nazis invaded. These people,

than very recent history of watch their countries be wiped off the map. There's a whole bunch of governments in exile sitting in Washington, New York and elsewhere, who've also seen their countries right. The Estonians are having their embassies in exile at this point. The Estonian is actually right to Dean Rusk, who's the assistant secretary of state, saying, we would join NATO if we could, but we've been occupied by the Russians, by the Soviets. There's a commitment of the West, but there's also no obligation there to liberate Eastern Europe. There's all kinds of things it doesn't say. It's both a commitment to defend the democracies that exist at that point and indeed a couple of dictatorships, Portugal obviously joins. But it's also quite striking that it

doesn't contain commitments to push democracy any further. It's not a neo-conservative agenda in the same way as some people might have liked. How does Russia under Stalin react to this whole idea? I mean, they don't like it and they try and intimidate people out of it. So before you get NATO, you get the Marshall Plan, which is the massive US economic bailout for Europe. and the Czechs attempt to sign up for the Marshall Plan, and the Russians don't like that one bit, and they mount a coup in Czechoslovakia and essentially take over the country. And that really sort of wakes up the Western democracies at that point,

particularly places like Belgium and the Netherlands, and makes them realize that unless they get into some kind of alliance pretty fast with the big boys, particularly the United States, they may well go the same way. So there's clearly this sort of Russian strategy of subversion and threat. The Russians write various letters to try and threaten people. They accuse the US of tearing up the UN treaty. So there's quite a lot of rhetoric.

I mean, not a million miles away from the sort of information morph we see from Putin's Russia today. The biggest thing they do is imitation and flattery. Within five years of NATO's creation, they created the Warsaw Pact, which is essentially a parallel organization in eastern and central Europe, tying together the communist nations. They then spend 40 years trying to subvert NATO in different ways. You know, they've spireings into various European countries, obviously the UK is one of them. French get very heavily penetrated on the KGB, as does NATO, almost certainly in the 50s and 60s. There's a whole bunch of things that go on.

They put pressure on Berlin. One of the things they do as the North Atlantic treaties being written is that they try and squeeze Berlin, the Berlin blockade and the airlift. One of the reasons why the Northland Treaty gets written is being written at the same time as the Berlin airlift is going on. And they then try and squeeze Berlin again through the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. So there's lots of stuff they try and do, but what they never actually dare to do is try and humiliate NATO by taking a chunk of ground.

And to bring us back to the present day, the fear if you're Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania, is that a Putin who maybe hasn't won the war in Ukraine, who's maybe got quite a large army that is built up Ukraine, not a lot to do with it, decides that actually they're going to try and inflict that humiliation on NATO by seizing anything from a town to an entire country on the eastern flank and demonstrate that NATO isn't going to put its money where its mouth is, by humiliating them into doing something. And that's why this period is arguably the most dangerous since the 50s, early 1960s,

because we're back in the game where that becomes imaginable. And the other thing that's really different now to then is this assumption in the 50s and 60s that any war will become massive and nuclear pretty much immediately. What we've shown in Ukraine is going to have a very long-running conventional war in Europe. And that's a prospect that we've not really looked at since the 50s. How has the command structure evolved? Have there been some fundamental changes in the way that was originally set up till today? Yeah, I mean, so the initial NATO command structure puts Eisenhower at the top,

Montgomery as his deputy and then a bunch of regional commands. It doesn't really change that much throughout the Cold War. It's still very recognisable through to 1989. It then gets completely rebuilt in the 1990s, because suddenly the Cold War's gone and you rebuild a much more deployable NATO. So what used to be one British Corps, for example, the British Army in the Rhine, becomes a thing called the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, HQ still base comes back from West Germany to Britain. and that commands NATO deployments in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and then in Afghanistan, in the 90s and 2000s. So you get this whole sort of rebuilding NATO around the fact that it will probably be doing limited missions in maybe a country like Kosovo or Bosnia. Now, all of that then starts to change after 2014 and the invasion of Crimea, where you start to create these enhanced forward presence battle groups in Eastern Europe.

They go in in 2017. And then you have a proper Eisenhower moment after February of 2022 when you start to rebuild an entire plan. for commanding NATO in the field along the entire eastern flank from, as you now say, Finland, all the way down through the Baltic states, around Poland, to the border with Belarus, down through Romania, down to the Black Sea. The moment the initial plans were signed up in Vilnius last year, the next iteration will be signed off in Washington, July. They're being put into action at the moment through steadfast defender as we speak,

which is the biggest exercise at the end of the Cold War, 90,000 troops. And the other, the big shift, you know, from during the Cold War, the strategy, and indeed up to that 2020, 2022. We're talking about the US sending over large numbers of troops to Europe in the event of war. And what we're now seeing as we get into the 2020s is the US saying, actually, our main priority is going to be Asia and a potential of Chinese invasion of Taiwan. So the larger degree of combat force, therefore, has to be generated from Europe. We're now talking about would Germany reintroduce conscription in the event of a long-running war? We're having a whole bunch of discussions that we haven't really had for quite a long time. And there's a lot of rethinking of

how Europe would do a conflict taking place pretty much as we speak. I guess Korea really set this precedent. But when a member state gets involved in a large military adventure such as Korea or Vietnam, does that play into NATO at all? I mean, that's not an attack upon us, right? So there are two very different things. I mean, don't forget, the U.S. doesn't go into Korea by choice. North Korea invades South Korea with a massive conventional invasion of the sort that Montgomery had feared in Europe. So that suddenly puts war back on the map. It makes a war in Europe feel much more plausible. It happens only sort of barely a year after the first Russian nuclear test. So the Korean war is what forces the creation of NATO's military structure. Now, Vietnam is very different because

that's saying that firstly is a French war, which the US is desperate to keep out of with a huge chunk of discussion in the right of 2049 about writing the NATO treaty in a way that'd be a different. doesn't obligate the US to get involved in colonial wars like Indochina, what becomes Vietnam. However, obviously, you know, under Kennedy and then under Johnson, the US does get drawn into Vietnam, and it gets very upset that European countries won't play ball. Johnson and Nixon, there's a real sense of irritation in Washington that European states aren't joining them in Vietnam. And that has a sort of subtext to the whole sort of NATO existence throughout that period.

Up until the 1980s, where Reagan wants to win the Cold War, you get the new sort of resumption nuclear tensions and things get hot again. Iraq wasn't anything to do with NATO, but divisions over Iraq really made NATO quite an uncomfortable place to be European countries. Jack Shir, Iraq and civil, very much opposed to that war. But then actually over Afghanistan, NATO nations agreed to support that, and that was a NATO mission. And again, Libya is also a quite complicated NATO mission. So they're all quite different. I think one of the things that happens, again, in the 2020s, is this realization that the days of that kind of mission are probably over. Yes, we're bombing the Houthi, but it's very hard to imagine a major Western military intervention.

The Estonian is very blunt about this. Invading countries is a bad thing to do, is the feeling of the age. We are going to respond if the Russians invade Eastern Europe or if China invades Taiwan. We're probably not going to get involved in unilateral regime change in the way that we did in Iraq or as well. You've mentioned this before. How does the nuclear force figure into NATO? Is that part of its response or is that separate?

It's baked into NATO from the beginning. So the very first discussions over how you're going to defend the United States. alliance. Instead of 19449, 1950, America is the only nuclear power at this point in the world and then in the alliance after the Russians get it. The Brits and the French don't get nuclear weapons until the 50s and 60s, respectively. So, you know, NATO's nuclear pounds say that the US will provide nuclear weapons and early commanders of NATO are talking about having 20, 40, 60 US atomic bombs or sort of Hiroshima size to fight largely conventional war. Now that changes in the 50s where you get hydrogen bombs, many more rockets, get this doctrine of massive retaliation. By the late

50s, there's this assumption that any war is going to go very nuclear very quickly. And that's one of the reasons why both the bullying of the Berlin Wall and the face up over that and Cuba are so dangerous. Throughout the 60s, you get to talk about, you know, the US nuclear sharing. The US agrees to have nuclear bombs based in Europe to transfer to European air forces in time of war. So various European air forces and the Turks, the Italians, the Germans, the Dutch, the Belgians will receive if once the nuclear threshold is breached, there are any US nuclear bombs in Europe to be transferred to Air Forces. It really is a key part of NATO is this idea that it's a nuclear alliance. And right now you see a resumption of that. The NATO Nuclear Planning Committee has met more times in the last two years

than it had quite a long time before. The US still has its nuclear bombs in Europe to be delivered to European air forces in the time of war. NATO has made a bit more noise about its steadfast noon nuclear exercises that take place every September. But now, of course, you know, we've got talk of Trump and the US potentially quitting NATO. That again would take us into uncharted territory because the Brits share their nuclear weapons with the alliance in time of war, the French do not. There's a whole bunch of assumptions about America being there that are now being thrown at least slightly into question. Good trivia fact.

NATO expenditures account for more than half of the military spending in the entire world. And the U.S. carries the lion's share of this budget, doesn't it? How does that affect the organization in general? Is the U.S. in effect in charge simply because of expenditure or not? Yeah, I mean, the first thing to say is that those numbers depend on these days heavily on what you genuinely think the Chinese military budget is. So you can start to knock that into sort of less than half, if the upper estimates of what China might be spending are coming in. The second point is that we also don't really have good estimates about what the Russians are spending anymore,

but there's now talk about them putting maybe a quarter to a third of their GDP into defense this year from maybe sort of four or five percent a few years ago. So we really are seeing a shift. Another sort of really alarming statistic from UK defense intelligence, the Russians are building 100 main battle tanks a month. That's more than they're losing in Ukraine. And it's one and a half times what the Brits intend to have in the next eight years. So, you know, we are in a different point. But yes, I mean, the US is by far the biggest spender in NATO. It has all kinds of capabilities, intelligence, airlift, 10 aircraft carriers,

all kinds of stuff that the Europeans can only dream of. And also that large nuclear arsenal. So the assumption has always been the reason Eisenhower gets dragged in as Supreme Alic commander is that the commander has to be American because the commander has to have access to U.S. intelligence and has to access to U.S. nuclear weapons. So that's been the assumption. Obviously, if the U.S. was to quit, then you end up in a very different world. Yeah, we've been mentioning throughout this Ukraine and how that indicates the relevancy, really, of NATO.

I am curious, though, how much of a discussion it is to change this alliance in any way. I mean, a sort of rethinking of it. Is it necessary going in towards the 100th year of all of this? Are they going to redesign this alliance in any way? One of the things I think it's quite easy to sort of miss is how much it's been redesigned in the last three years. And that hasn't really required agreement because it's been going back to its original model. Everyone knew that NATO was designed to defend its members against a Soviet attack. There hasn't needed to be a huge amount of discussion over the need to reshape it to do that post-2014

and particularly post-2020. And nor has anyone felt it needed sort of a massive social conversation to reapprove because obviously the treaty is already there. It is fundamentally a mutual defence pact. But amongst the people who actually do these things and put lines on, maps and so forth, there's been a very large sort of re-engineering over the last two years or so. And I think it's important to realize that. As we move towards 20, 2049, I think there are two or three areas which are going to be different. Firstly, it's preparing NATO to fight a long-running

Ukraine-time war. So that means you've got to have both Europe and the United States, but with Europe having to do more than it's had to in the past, the ability to build a bunch of weapons cheaply now and scale that up in time of war. The ability to deliver a number of troops now and scale that up in time of war. So those are quite big things and those are discussions that are currently ongoing and some of you will have seen discussions in Europe about subscription and so forth in the last two or three weeks. In the UK, it's a sort of live discussion for the first time, I would say, someone since the 50s. So there are discussions about that going on. Those will probably remain current. I think the one thing that probably won't

happen. If Putin was to fall tomorrow and be replaced with, say, someone like Alexei Navalny, I don't think you would dismantle NATO's eastern, the way we did in the early 90s. There's an awareness that even if Russia was to sort of play nice again, it might not play nice in future. There's a realization that Russia will never go away. It's a forever problem along Eastern European security to put it. And I think that's probably where we'll be for the next few decades. Your table of contents of the book alone is fascinating. It's a record of every military entanglement in the mid-20th century onward, as far as the United States is concerned. How much did NATO's existence play a role in controlling the scale of military endeavors in our lifetimes?

I mean, really, the idea was to keep peace, but it also changed warfare, didn't it? It localized it, and it makes it more of a – am I in the right realm of this question, Peter? Yeah, so I think there are unanswerable questions about how much is NATO and how much is the countries that are in NATO, right? Because we say NATO and we could be referring to the whole Western an alliance, all the countries together, they are half the world's GDP, or we could be talking about NATO, the institution, several thousand officials, a relatively small number of forces that are earmarked for at any particular time. NATO does not run the countries that are part of the alliance. I mean, even the EU barely does, but it doesn't have any of the ambitions of the EU

to be a supranational body. There's a whole bunch of stuff that is really interesting and happen in the 70s in the aftermath of Vietnam, the creation of modern network warfare, the weapon systems that are actually fighting properly for the first time, arguably, against a peer competitor in Ukraine. So M1A1 Abrams tanks, leopard through two tanks, Bradley armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, you know, all that kind of stuff. They come into existence in the 70s, primarily, I would say, due to the pushing of the Pentagon. But of course, NATO is part of that journey, and all of those European countries kind of drop into that process. NATO is a word, but what it refers to sort of bearings.

And one of the things I sort of decided not to waste too much time on the book is worrying. mean too much about that definition because what NATO is, at some point, NATO is basically the Secretary General, the Supreme Allied commander and not what else attempting to make things work. NATO, for example, is a real, almost completely blindsided by the Cuban missile crisis. The Kennedy administration doesn't tell NATO allies for the first week of what's going on. NATO ambassadors are briefed, I think about 12 minutes before Kennedy goes on television and briefs everybody else. And yet, the fact that NATO exists is hugely important to how the Cuban missile crisis runs and how any conflict that came out of it would be fought.

It's pretty central, but I think Vietnam for the psyche of the U.S. military is really important, and there are a bunch of other stuff that take place outside the edges. It is a complicated world we live in, and NATO has everything to do with sort of straightening it out, but also becoming ever complicating it at the same time. The story is told in the book by this author, Detering Armageddon, a biography of NATO by Peter Apps. You've been listening to a very facile mind, take us through a very complex history. Thank you so much for this view into it. It's really interesting to read your book. I encourage all listeners to get a hold of it. Thank you very much, Peter.

Absolutely pleasure. Thank you, Don't. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. From mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

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