Enduring alliances are born, not made. The seed of national interest is planted in the soil of mutual advantage, and growth is almost always forced in the hothouse of external pressure. As long as the soil and seed remain fertile the plant prospers and puts out new roots and branches to hold fast against danger and to fend off peril. An alliance must be clearly defined as to its objectives and, as Bismarck said, “be reinforced by the interests” of the states concerned. Thus there are the lasting alliances, those born of necessity and enduring through adversity, such as the valiant league of the Grecian city-states against the sea power of Persia; the most ancient existing alliance, that between Britain and Portugal; and that most recent of the “natural alliances,” the Organization of the American States.
Other temporary arrangements of suspicious self-interests have taken the name of “alliance.” There were three Triple Alliances, to say nothing of the one Quadruple Alliance born of the mysticism of the Tsar and the craft of Metternich. Even so, the Holy Alliance was a greater factor for peace than the triple Triple Alliances—two, formed in 1688 and again in 1795, against the power of France, and the third, between Germany, Austria and Italy in 1882, against France and Russia. This latter treaty did not have sufficient pull of mutual interest to keep the Italian satellite within its gravitational field. And the pacts between Ribbentrop and Molotov, between Molotov and Matsuoka, in 1939 and 1941, were less than alliances; they were contracts in duplicity, purchasing time at the price of honor.
Other common arrangements for joint action by groups of states have been called alliances and indeed were, so long as the military emergency lasted. Such was the grouping of disparate powers in the coalition which finally wore out France and beat Napoleon. Such was the even more disparate group of powers which formed the coalition which wore out Germany and beat Hitler. But for all the ringing periods in the Declaration of the United Nations, signed on January 1, 1942 at the White House, and for all the idealism enphrased in cadenced sentences in the Atlantic Charter, these instruments did not have within them the seed of self-interest planted in the soil of mutual advantage which could last beyond the immediate interest and the instant advantage.
Nevertheless the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration of the United Nations set forth principles which, if lived up to, would have made the Millennium follow upon the Armageddon in which the world then bloodily struggled. It was felt in many lands, though not in all, that the conflict could have no meaning unless it give rise to a more rational order of international conduct. President Roosevelt, with deeper insight, called it a war for survival. Even so, men with good hearts and brains in all the lands hoped, in various ways, that this was the last great outpouring of blood and iron, and that man would now so arrange his affairs that the intercourse of national states would be as peaceful and well ordered as the life within the metropolitan domain. So it was that, following the identical pattern set by the first World War, and avoiding (it was thought) the mistakes of Versailles, the victorious United Nations met at San Francisco four years ago and established a world organization to keep the peace they had so recently won.
A reading of merely the Preamble, to say nothing of the entire United Nations Charter, suffices to show how the high hopes of San Francisco have thus far been frustrated. “We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind” [and who in three years have witnessed armed conflict in Indonesia, Greece, Palestine and China], “and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human fights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small” [as “reaffirmed” by the secret police of Russia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Albania and Yugoslavia, to say nothing of Poland and Czechoslovakia, and by the “respect” for small nations shown by the U.S.S.R.] “ ... to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors” [as for example, the neighborly conduct toward Greece of the three states on its northern frontier], “and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security” [by not agreeing to provide the Security Council with its intended striking force]—a reading of this Preamble, phrased in the superb language of Marshal Smuts, is a saddening experience for the man of goodwill today.
This is not an indictment of the United Nations. The Charter is as good a constitution for a world peace-preserving organization as is possible today. So was the Covenant of the League of Nations. What is required is not a better constitution, but better performance in living up to the Charter we have. This leads us to the fundamental fact that the United Nations Charter was adopted on the assumption that the signatures on the parchment were binding, that it was a treaty which meant what it said, that the principles and purposes it so nobly phrased would be put into practice. This largely boils down to saying that the Charter was adopted on the assumption that the U.S.S.R. would develop a new dialectic which would modify the Marxian one, and that it would treat with its allies in peace at least as equitably as with its allies in war.
One cannot know with what measure of hope or cynicism the masters of Soviet power signed the Declaration of Yalta and its sequence, the Charter of the United Nations. All one can do is to judge the word by the deed. Molotov, who has signed so many “binding” promises with so many people, from Ribbentrop and Matsuoka to Roosevelt and Churchill, signed the Five Power Statement in San Francisco by which the five Permanent Members of the Security Council promised to use their veto power only in the most exceptional and solemn circumstances. Yet by the end of 1948 the Soviet representative on the Security Council had exercised the veto power 27 times, as compared with a total of only two vetoes cast in the same time by all the other Permanent Members together.
In the Security Council, which was charged under Article 43 of the Charter with negotiating agreements with Members to make available to the Council armed forces, assistance, and facilities necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security, no progress whatever was made toward assembling a force with which to keep the peace. The Council's Military Staff Committee, made up of the representatives of the Chiefs of Staff of the five Permanent Members, met in a series of increasingly sterile discussions, mulling over the first principles which should govern the UN striking force, but without agreement on those principles. For almost two years the Soviet representative did not even produce a plan, and thereafter spent hours of argument in insisting that the other four powers adopt the' Soviet suggestion for absolute equality of force—plane for plane, ship for ship, and trooper for trooper—as the condition precedent to any further advance toward a security force in being and not in blueprint.
Meanwhile, although there was no increase in collective security while the Security Council lay stalemated on the question of its armed forces, the Soviet Union beat the drum for disarmament. The primary objective was to divest the idealistic Americans of their atomic bomb. The secondary objective was to pick up any windfalls in the way of increased relative military strength which might come from, say, a one-third reduction in the armed forces of Great Britain, China, France, the United States, and the manpower-rich U.S.S.R. A third by-product of the Soviet disarmament drive was its propaganda effect; and both the Soviet Union and the United States in the debates before the third regular session of the UN General Assembly in Paris seemed more attentive as to how their disarmament speeches sounded on a loud (very loud) speaker than to the grave substance of that grave problem.
Basically, however, it was becoming clear even through the distortion made by the heat waves of propaganda that, largely because of the attitude of Russia and its Communist satellites, the United Nations had thus far been stultified in much of its primary endeavor, and that collective security had not yet been achieved according to the great diagram of the Charter. In fact it seemed, three years after the birth of UN, that the old and terrible cycle was again beginning: the lack of collective security which leads to rearmament, which further lessens the prospect of collective security, which leads to more armament and eventually war.
Although these facts were emerging from the steam of disputation, at least in the American people there was a very deep- seated conviction that the United Nations was a good thing and that it ought to function as intended. There was also a firmly rooted illusion that the United Nations could “do” something about every problem that came up, even though the record made clear that in important aspects it lacked the tools with which to work. Psychologically it seems very probable that the choice of names for the new world organization was unwise, at least from the effect it had on the American mind. Most Americans thought of “United Nations” in terms of a type of “United States,” soundly organized, with due process of law, a police force (on paper), and a set of principles which were right as rain. The United States with its Constitution could “do something” when it had to, and the United Nations, with its fine new Charter, could “do something,” too.
The writer can testify to this attitude in the public mind from a score of instances in speaking tours about the country. The logic was: “We have the United Nations now, it was created for just the type of problem you are talking about, so let the United Nations do it.” There was little concept that the United Nations is a loosely banded organization of very self-consciously sovereign states, (except the Soviet satellites, which are selfconsciously un-sovereign), grouped under the meaningless and self-contradictory Charter rubric of “sovereign equality”; and that the seed of self-interest was implanted in what was yet the very loose soil of mutual advantage.
To make matters more confusing, more impetuous Americans, including a very sincere core of young veterans who were impatient to see their sacrifice repaid in the form of a better world, came out in full cry against the United Nations, damning its weakness and insisting on World Government. How they expected States which were not even then conforming in their international conduct to the simple rules of decency laid down in the Charter, to submit to the greater discipline of world government was never explained.
What was needed was either a prompt improvement in international morality, a willingness to play the game according to the rules established by the UN Charter, or else a more practical method, within the framework of the Charter, to ensure that its rules were respected.
As on so many other occasions, it was Arthur Vandenberg and the United States Senate which intervened at the optimum moment to show the way. It is also an impressive fact that the way they showed was one which had been worked out by the hard hewing of history; by the gradual evolution within the Western Hemisphere toward a regional organization which lived by the code d’Artagnan—“one for all and all for one.”
The origin of this development goes a long way back in American history. It goes back to the days of Canning and Richard Rush, of John Quincy Adams and James Monroe; to the Monroe Doctrine, in fact, which was, by odd historical coincidence, floated on the stream of popular consciousness in the United States by fear of Russian encroachment—this time like a glacier grinding from Alaska to the California coast. At all events the old, unilateral Monroe Doctrine, which had termed the Western Hemisphere “out of bounds” to further encroachment from the Old World, had metamorphosed during a century to the point where it became, under pressure of the last war, a multilateral doctrine. At Habana, first, in 1941, and more formally in 1945 at Chapultepec, the American Republics declared that a threat of aggression from outside the hemisphere against one American State was a threat against all, and vice versa. This principle was elaborated and made a legal, contractual obligation at Petropolis in 1947, when the Treaty of Rio was signed which came into effect on December 3, 1948. It embodied the basic principle described at the outset of this essay—the seed of self-interest implanted firmly in the soil of mutual advantage.
The Treaty of Rio was a “regional arrangement” within the scope of Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter. The basic concept is set forth in Article 52:
(1) Nothing in the present Charter precludes the existence of regional arrangements or agencies for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security as are appropriate for regional action, provided that such arrangements or agencies and their activities are consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.
(2) The Members of the United Nations entering into such arrangements or constituting such agencies shall make every effort to achieve pacific settlement of local disputes through such regional arrangements or by such regional agencies before referring them to the Security Council.
(3) The Security Council shall encourage the development of pacific settlement of local disputes through such regional arrangements or by such regional agencies either on the initiative of the states concerned or by reference from the Security Council.
(4) This Article in no way impairs the application of Articles 34 and 35.
The foregoing should be read in conjunction with Article 51 of the Charter, which reads as follows:
“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective [italics added] self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. . . . ”
From the Treaty of Rio it was but a logical progression in point of time, and in consideration of the political algebra that U.S.S.R. vs UN did not equal PAX, to the development and passage of the so-called “Vandenberg Resolution,” on June 11, 1948. This basic policy statement of the Senate advised the President, among other things, to pursue the following objectives within the United Nations Charter:
(1) Progressive development of regional and other collective arrangements for individual and collective self-defense in accordance with the purposes, principles, and provisions of the Charter.
(2) Association of the United States, by constitutional process, with such regional and other collective arrangements as are based on continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, and as affect its national security.
(3) Contributing to the maintenance of peace by making clear its determination to exercise the right of individual or collective self-defense under article 51 should any armed attack occur affecting its national security.
Meanwhile, stimulated by the example of the American States in Petropolis and by the Treaty which was the edifice of their architecture, an equally important development had taken place across the Atlantic. If a regional arrangement for self-defense within the Charter could work on one side of the Western Ocean, it might work on the other, where the imperatives of time were more insistent and the imminence of danger more great. Since the Soviet Union chose not “to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors” and was not “determined ... to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights ... in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,” but on the contrary proclaimed the inevitability of conflict and girded its outer bastions with moats dug in the soil of Czechoslovakia and Poland, then it was time to follow the example of the Western World.
Thus it was that under the wise leadership of Paul Henri Spaak, and with the solid backing of Britain, the Western Union was formed. The treaty signed at Brussels on March 17, 1948 closely followed the Rio pattern and Articles 51 and 52 of the Charter. Although certain articles of the treaty provided for close cooperation to promote the economic recovery of Europe, for cultural collaboration and a strengthening of social bonds, the nuclear element of the pact was Article IV, which provided thg.t:
If any of the High Contracting Parties should be the object of armed attack in Europe, the other High Contracting Parties will, in accordance with the provisions of Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, afford the party so attacked all the military and other aid and assistance in their power.
The treaty also provided in Article IX that:
The High Contracting Parties may, by agreement, invite any other State to accede to the present Treaty on conditions to be agreed between them and the State so invited.
At the same time, the United States with a prescience born of its new world responsibility was undertaking to restore that part of Europe which was willing to help itself, by the Marshall Plan, the European Recovery Program. Hungry men make Communists; fed men do not. A Europe integrated economically on lines of mutual advantage would be a peaceful Europe; if all the Continent could not be so organized, at least Western Europe could be helped to help itself; and with this infusion of economic aid the sick body would restore itself. Certainly if the remorseless dialectic of the Kremlin had to be worked out, Western Europe must be made strong. The fate of the world, in a struggle between the super-Powers, lay not with the UN unaided, but with the United States and other nations which were resolved to live up to the principles of the Charter and to band together under the Charter to see that the rule of right conduct was preserved, if necessary, by force.
Thus it was that the idea of a North Atlantic Pact was developed. Analysis showed that the elements of an enduring alliance were present. The recent war had not only weakened Western Europe but had created a power vacuum in Germany, with the result that the military and political balance of power on the Continent was perilously one-sided. Furthermore the publicly proclaimed intentions of the U.S.S.R. were admittedly expansionist. And finally, the westward projection of Soviet power had made it strategically possible for the Soviet Union to dominate the rest of Europe by force. Given this situation, it was necessary for the West to combine in a collective defense arrangement, pledged to operate within the confines of the Charter, and thus by definition estopped from aggressive intent against the Soviet Union. A pact so conceived and so limited could not be regarded as inimical to a U.S.S.R. which really desired peace. It could only be regarded as an instrument for the restoration of confidence, which might become the base for a future pacific arrangement of interest between the great powers and their smaller coadjutors.
To specify more particularly the elements of such an enduring alliance: It should be within the framework of the United Nations Charter and operate “consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.” It should contribute to the maintenance of peace by providing greater national security to the members of the alliance through increasing their individual and collective capacities for self defense. It would make unmistakably clear the determination of the peoples concerned jointly to resist aggression from whatever quarter it might come. It should be operative within a carefully defined area and have adequate machinery for immediate action. Finally, it should be based on the principle of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid in all fields.
In formulating an enduring alliance such as the proposed North Atlantic Pact it is a first principle to define the area of its effect: to know exactly which states are to give immediate aid to which other states in the event of attack; the amount and nature of such aid; and the outer areas which might require consultation among the allies on given situations but which might not necessarily result in the automatic operation of the defensive system. The Rio Treaty, for example, specifically delineated the area in which its obligations became operative.1 This Treaty also established two kinds of obligations: one providing that any attack within the delimited area should be regarded as an attack against all the parties, with each party in consequence obligated to assist in meeting the attack; and the other merely requiring consultation in event of armed attack outside the delimited area, or any other event indirectly threatening the parties.2
It is thus necessary to establish the “heart land” of the Atlantic Alliance. Which states are to be bound by the rule of d’Artagnan, of one for all and all for one? Which should send instant and continuous aid to what other partner under threat of attack; and what areas should be defined as limiting the geographical scope of the treaty?
The European core of such a heart land is already established in the Western Union: France, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Great Britain includes Northern Ireland, while strategically all Ireland is one. Eire should, therefore, be included in the enduring alliance. On the North Atlantic lie, to the east, Norway and Denmark; to the West, Canada and the United States. In between are Greenland and Iceland, the former already within the enclave of the American defense system, as defined by the Treaty of Rio. All these islands, plus the Azores and Portugal, would enter the Atlantic defense zone, for the two systems, that of the Rio Treaty and the other of the Atlantic Pact, will in a sense be concentric circles, overlapping in area as well as interest, mutually complementary to each other because the partners are in some cases the same, the threat of aggression identical, and the principle by which they operate established by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, providing for collective defense.
Other states on the borders of the defense zone could be invited to adhere to the regional arrangement, either as full or limited members, if the maintenance of their integrity should be regarded as essential to the security of the group as a whole. Beyond this, the original members of the alliance should declare at the outset that any threat, whether direct or indirect, against the states of Western Europe as far east as the Stettin- Trieste line would call for immediate consultation by parties to the pact.
Pursuant to the Vandenberg Resolution, which expressed the almost unanimous opinion of the United States Senate, the American Government has undertaken conversations with the States members of the Brussels Pact, plus Canada, to work out a collective defense arrangement within the meaning of Articles 51 and 52 of the UN Charter, which will probably be inscribed in the pages of history as the North Atlantic Pact. It will not be called an alliance because the American public mind has for years been exorcised by the ancient shibboleth of “no entangling alliances,” not recalling that even Washington, in his farewell address on September 17, 1796, although he warned against entangling “our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice,” did say that “we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.” Nevertheless, the later phrase of Jefferson in his first Inaugural Address on March 4, 1801—“Entangling alliances with none”—has gone down the years as a warning tocsin to the American people. Because of this national aversion to the word “alliances” we must use the newspaper word “pact,” or the even more generalized Charter word, “regional arrangement,” to describe an otherwise precise and legally binding treaty contract. With such a mandate from the Senate and with the experience we have of the sound, evolutionary growth of such regional arrangements for collective self defense as the Inter-American Defense System established by the Treaty of Rio and the North European defense system set up by the Treaty of Brussels, the reaching of agreement for a North Atlantic Pact should not be far off. Perhaps by the time these pages are printed this newest instrument for keeping the peace will already have taken its place among the enduring alliances.
Sea power will be vital to the Atlantic Alliance. Not only are the islands of essence, but access to the coasts of Europe can only be had by retaining command of the sea. And access from the West to the coasts of Europe is essential to carry out the key principle of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid. Furthermore, the naval implications of a North Atlantic Pact are by no means confined to the North Atlantic. Any conflict with an aggressor Power which fronts on other oceans would involve operations in those other oceans as well.
Without attempting to detail the naval requirements of the North Atlantic Pact, certain basic elements seem fairly apparent. First of all, of course, the merchant tonnage to carry essential supplies to and from European members of the partnership. Second, the fleet of escort craft to convoy the merchantmen. Third, naval vessels to ensure the security of the Atlantic islands which will continue as bases of allied air power. Fourth, carriers to operate offensively off the coasts of such of the Atlantic Partners as may require instant aid to beat off attack. Fifth, naval support and landing craft to establish beach heads on such coasts, if necessary. Sixth, large carriers for long range bombing attack. And finally, the anti-submarine arm of naval power acting with and supplemental to the convoy vessels, for such operations as mining narrow channels of egress. Or hunting down the new fast types of sub-sea vessel.
If the United States becomes a partner of the Atlantic Alliance, its strategic support should in the initial phase, at least, be limited to the three “A’s”—Arsenal, Armada, and Air Power. There are valiant men on the western reaches of Europe still capable of fighting for their homes and for the principles which have imbued European civilization with its deep meaning.
We have seen that the alliances which endure—irrespective of by what name they may go, whether pact, regional arrangement, or treaty—are those which are founded upon enlightened self-interest and mutual accommodation. We have seen also that at this stage in the development of the United Nations the intent of the Charter has not yet been entirely fulfilled. This is not to say that the UN has been tried and found wanting; rather, that governments have not sufficiently tried the UN and have been wanting in their willingness to give the Charter full effect. In consequence, in order to fulfill the promise of the Preamble and to live up to the purposes and principles established by the Charter, it has become necessary to resort to the regional arrangements provided for in Chapter VIII. Thus, the Inter-American Defense System and the Western Union of certain European Powers have come into being, and the even further ranging' program for an Atlantic pact is now before governments who believe that peace must be maintained in accordance with principle.
Basically, it seems possible that if the North Atlantic Pact is accomplished there will be a real hope of lasting peace for years to come. Such an alliance, founded on principle and rooted in the soil of mutual interest, will redress the dangerous imbalance of power which now makes Europe ride like a ship in a high sea, listing toward the East. Once the balance is restored there will come a new confidence to peoples long out-worn with strife and fear. Confidence breeds courage and constructive strength. A Europe thus recovered might rise and look steadfastly to the light, nor fear the red glow on the eastern steppe. And once this psychic victory is won, the danger point will have passed. Faced by strength endowed with principle and meaning, the masters of the Kremlin will have to readjust their sights and set a new course. They might even discover that peace is a prosperous policy.
If unhappily this possibility should not come to pass, there would still remain the Atlantic Alliance.
1. Rio Treaty, Articles 3 and 4.
2. Rio Treaty, Article 6.