‘An Unfortunate Lack of Ideas’: NATO’s ‘Out-of-Area’ Debate and the Syrian Crisis of 1957

Abstract

In the late 1950s, following the Suez Crisis, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) debated what role it might play in the Middle East. NATO’s Secretary General Paul-Henri Spaak lobbied for NATO to be adapted to the new realities of a global Cold War and play a more active role in the Middle East. With the Syrian Crisis of 1957, Spaak saw an opportunity for NATO to take on a larger role and, in so doing, dispel anxieties about the alliance’s future post-Suez. Ultimately, these efforts were quashed by two NATO members—the United States and the United Kingdom—who had active interests in the region. Spaak lost the struggle for a larger ‘out-of-area’ role for NATO, an outcome that helped set the limits of NATO, both in terms of geography and the power and role of the NATO Secretariat. These debates also reflected simmering anxieties about the purpose and structure of NATO, not unlike those arguments later advanced by Charles de Gaulle in his bid to remake the alliance.