How an English trade unionist and a Missouri farmer forged the world’s foremost military alliance.
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Today’s politics suggest an electorate divided on foreign policy: voters without college educations more inclined toward isolationism on one side, and “elites” with college degrees who favor strong transatlantic relations on the other. It might appear strange that the men behind NATO would largely fit into the former, rather than the latter.
Ernest Bevin, widely credited as NATO’s main architect, was raised in Somerset by an illiterate single mother who died when he was eight years old. He left school at 11, working as a laborer and truck driver, until finally becoming a trade union leader.
Like many trade unionists with first-hand experience of the far left, he developed a distaste for communism and a lucid awareness of the threat posed by totalitarianism to the democratic West. Though they strongly disagreed on almost everything else, Winston Churchill rated Bevin highly, calling him the “most distinguished man the Labour Party has thrown up in some time.”
Harry S Truman, who had become president on Roosevelt’s death in 1945, was an equally ardent believer in the transatlantic alliance. He was also the only US president not to have attended college, having grown up in a Missouri family unable to afford it.
After working odd jobs as a bank clerk and helping out on the family farm, he enlisted in the US Army during World War I. Upon his return, Truman became a judge, a job that ultimately brought him to the US Senate and eventually to the Oval Office.
Bevin was the leading force behind the alliance. Though he was inspired by earlier proposals from Churchill and Canadian Minister for External Affairs Louis St. Laurent, the idea for NATO was “largely his own initiative,” according to diplomatic history professor Alan Henrikson.
Acutely aware of the threat from the East, of Europe’s post-war exhaustion and remembering the US withdrawal from Europe after World War 1, Bevin saw the need for a transatlantic military alliance as soon as he became foreign secretary in 1945. He set to work lobbying the US government. Weakened and near-bankrupt after six years of all-out global war, Britain was in no condition to oppose the Soviet Union. European allies like France were in an even worse condition. Without US backing, Western Europe would be extremely vulnerable to Kremlin pressure or open aggression.
During an impassioned speech in the House of Commons in January 1948, Bevin argued for a “spiritual federation of the West.” He warned that the only salvation for the “kindred souls” of the democratic world was a strong union guaranteeing mutual military assistance in case of a Russian attack.
The warnings were prescient. The month after his speech, a coup in Czechoslovakia installed a Soviet-backed government under a new constitution. Then, in March 1948, an emboldened Soviet Union tried to push Western allied forces out of their post-war jurisdictions in West Berlin, blocking all rail, road, and water access to the city.
Faced with the potential of yet another war on the continent, France and the UK joined forces to push the Americans for stronger military assurances.
The US hesitated. Truman faced a Congress and Senate divided, with concerns that Washington would become a military “fairy godmother” to Europe (a sentiment echoed in some parts of US politics today by politicians pointing to years of feeble military spending by European allies).
Europe addressed American concerns in March 1948 by signing the Brussels Treaty, under which the UK, France, and the Benelux countries committed to mutual military assistance in case of attack.
Reassured that the Europeans were not simply relying on their ally across the Atlantic, Truman told a joint session of Congress that “the determination of the free countries of Europe to protect themselves will be matched by an equal determination on our part to help them protect themselves.”
Just five days after the treaty was signed in Brussels, the UK, US and Canada (notably, not France) began secret meetings in the Pentagon. Differences soon emerged. Bevin wanted strong assurances that the US would come to Europe’s defense in case of attack, a promise that the constitution forbade Truman from giving.
Despite this, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the man behind much of Truman’s foreign policy, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican isolationist turned internationalist, pushed the NATO bill through Congress and the Senate.
What came to be known as the “Vandenberg Resolution” came into effect in June 1948. The first step toward NATO had been made.
Negotiations stalled pending the results of the US elections that November. After Truman’s re-election, efforts to establish NATO gained momentum, culminating in the formalization of the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949.
Ratifying US accession into the alliance, Truman declared it was a “shield against aggression and the fear of aggression — a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”
It was this promise that attracted new members over the ensuing 75 years, and it still does today, with the threat from Russia more present than ever.
Clara Riedenstein is an incoming graduate student at Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations and a research assistant with the Digital Innovation Initiative team at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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