ABSTRACT
NATO has always been in crisis – and NATO has always endured. Indeed, it is the nature of the transatlantic security relationship to struggle and yet overcome. That is the lesson of the early years of the Cold War as the Alliance steeled itself for confrontation with Stalin’s Soviet Union, and dealt with a range of internally and externally generated crises – the first Berlin crisis, the Korean War, German rearmament, the missile gap, the second Berlin crisis, the Cuban Missile
Crisis and the withdrawal of France from military NATO pushed the Alliance to the limit. However, NATO endured because no internal controversy was greater than the challenge posed by the security environment NATO had to confront.
