The most successful security arrangement of the modern era - NATO's division of responsibility between American military power and European economic integration - must not be discarded despite growing transatlantic tensions, a Cambridge geopolitics scholar has argued in Foreign Affairs, as "Hvylya" reports.
Hugo Bromley traced the origins of this arrangement to the Truman administration's belief that integration was the most effective way to rebuild the shattered continent and halt the spread of communism after World War II. Washington provided the security umbrella; European nations built institutions of economic cooperation, starting with the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948 and the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951.
The one serious attempt to integrate defense - the European Defense Community - was killed by the French National Assembly in 1954. No meaningful common defense policy has been developed since. Instead, NATO provided mutual defense through intergovernmental cooperation, while Washington accepted the burden of funding and deploying the military assets essential to deterring the Soviet Union.
The value of this division was well understood in Washington. U.S. Senator Richard Lugar warned in 1993 that NATO was necessary to prevent "healthy national pride" from becoming "destructive xenophobic nationalism." Were the alliance to fracture, Lugar said, there was "a danger that Europe could again come apart at the seams."
Bromley argued that policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic must stop projecting ambitions onto institutions that were never designed to fulfill them. The division of responsibility between economic and military matters has preserved peace across the Euro-Atlantic area for more than 70 years. To cast it aside, he concluded, is to risk calamity.
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