“… the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down”, as Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, is said to have put it.

Suspicious minds

The end of WWII was an uneasy time for East-West relations. Grateful as they were for Stalin’s help, the U.S. and its allies remained wary, as Churchill’s 1946 “iron curtain” speech, showed. NATO officially came into being in April 1949. After Stalin’s death, the U.S.S.R sought NATO membership, but was rebutted for fear that it would undermine it from within.

Subsequent security measures by each side appeared suspect or menacing. Thus, the U.S.S.R reacted to West Germany’s 1955 accession to NATO by forming the Warsaw Pact, later suppressing the Hungarian revolution and repressing Czechoslovakians’ protests up to the 1968 Prague Spring. In 1961, the Berlin Wall went up.

Mounting mutual mistrust inevitably led to debilitating arms and space races, punctuated by some frightening near-misses. A period of détente ensued.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire, eastern European states, which had suffered Soviet aggression and repression, sought NATO membership. A weakened Russia sought its own security assurances, agreeing to united Germany’s NATO membership against assurances that it would host no foreign troops or nuclear weapons, even soliciting western advice on developing a market economy. Optimists in the West hoped for East-West friendship. But others remained wary.

Among the cautious were Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State, and Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State. Both had personal experience of authoritarian states, having fled Nazism and/ or communism. The West would attempt a middle path, encouraging and........

© Pearls and Irritations