NATO in Crisis: So They Keep Saying

Abstract

Why NATO Endures. By J. Wallace Thies, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 321 pp., $31.99 (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-74979-4). According to scores of scholars, policymakers, and journalists, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been in steady crisis since the late 1940s. In Why NATO Endures , Wallace J. Thies critically exams the “NATO-in-crisis” literature and argues that commentators, ranging from Henry Kissinger to Elizabeth Pond, have overstated NATO's internal conflicts and have stymied research into the processes that permitted NATO to survive and thrive as the most successful military and political alliance in history. By focusing primarily on how crises begin and publicizing the heated transatlantic exchanges, the author argues NATO's critics have shed little light on the Alliance's consistent “self-healing” processes. Thies opens his thoughtfully written and richly documented book by delineating the astounding number of books, essays, articles, and policy statements that have appeared over the decades pronouncing upon NATO's crisis du jour. Avoiding conflicts after 1995, Why NATO Endures is largely a Cold War history that centers on six case studies that preoccupied transatlantic relations and NATO: Suez, Sputnik, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet-European-American pipeline controversy, the INF deployments, and the early years of the Bosnia conflict. Wallace Thies has a bone to pick with scholars and commentators who have labeled NATO conflicts as “crises” without defining the word. While a considerable body of international relations literature exists on the study of crises, Thies …