Breaking the Vicious Circle: Britain, the United States, and the Genesis of the North Atlantic Treaty

Abstract

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, DC, on 4 April 1949, six months after the United States had issued invitations to the negotiations. At the time the entire process appeared to be the result of American initiatives. The earliest historians of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reinforced this perception, asserting that the United States had created the pact in response to a Soviet threat to American security. In their view, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in February 1948 and the Berlin blockade later that June forced the United States to take action to prevent the democracies of Western Europe from succumbing to the advance of Soviet communism.1 This focus on American initiative gained currency as the revisionist school of historiography grew in the United States in the 1960s. Revisionists minimized the influence of Soviet actions upon the United States and represented the Cold War as a bipolar conflict in which other powers played a peripheral role. The creation of NATO was interpreted as an example of the new American imperialism.2