ABSTRACT
This book about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the 1960s concentrates on the political dimension of the alliance. Most studies on NATO have centered on the alliance’s deterrence and defense functions, that is, on how changing perceptions of the Soviet threat and the military balance informed NATO’s debate on military strategy and force planning. Far less attention has been paid to how NATO evolved into a forum of political consultation and cooperation and how it reacted to the challenges beyond deterrence that culminated in a debate about the future political order in Europe. NATO’s political roles go back to the foundation of the alliance itself and are rooted in the unsettled nature of the postwar order in Central Europe. The alliance’s role in keeping the Anglo-Saxon powers engaged on the continent and in ensuring West German integration into an emerging Europe is well documented.1 By the mid1960s, however, the key political challenges had shifted from keeping “the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” (Lord Ismay) to designing political structures that would allow the multilateralization of détente and accommodate the demands of an economically revived and politically more assertive Europe.
