ABSTRACT
True, at the moment the opinion polls show that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is quite popular among Americans. NATO was designed as if to avert World War II, the only difference being that it was the Soviet Union rather than Germany which was to be deterred from aggression against its European neighbors, and the United States was , from the beginning, a full partner in this coalition. The NATO troops will then, presumably, duly employ their tactical nuclear weapons, inflicting substantial casualties on the enemy. One might say, in retrospect, that NATO at birth was predestined to suffer such a dissolution. Some kind of armed confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Persian Gulf is far more probable than such a confrontation in Central Europe. It would be a wild exaggeration to say that Western Europe has shrunk to insignificance on the world scale where foreign policies are weighed and measured.
