ABSTRACT
Mira Rapp-Hooper has taken up the cause at a moment when the value of alliances in US security strategy has come under withering attack from both the right and left. President Donald Trump has expressed contempt for the transatlantic Alliance, mocked it, accused it of theft and rejected the logic of collective security that underpins it in favour of a fee-for-service arrangement. The author argues counterfactually that the risks to the United States – and likelihood of war with the Soviet Union – would have been significantly greater in the absence of the Alliance, which she argues did not cost the US very much. She notes as well that NATO allies did not drag the US into wars, or even invoke Article V of the Washington Treaty. Segev’s biography of Ben-Gurion is the first in a long while and makes effective use of archival material that became available in the interim.
