Andrew M. Johnston

The construction of NATO's medium term defence plan and the diplomacy of conventional strategy, 1949–50

This article examines NATOs first strategic project, the Medium Term Defence Plan (MTDP) of 1950, and the plan that led to the 1952 Lisbon Force Goals, a landmark in the evolution of NATOs strategic thinking because the failure to reach the Lisbon goals allegedly drove NATO into its subsequent dependence on nuclear weapons from which it has never been weaned. The article disputes this interpretation by showing that the MTDP was conditioned by the desire of the United States to maintain its autonomy over the use of atomic weapons, and its freedom from the constraints of the new alliance. The MTDP was a paradox: a conventional strategy designed to mask the rules governing the balance of decision‐making power within NATO which maintained American peripheralism against the integrative pressures of the alliance. Lisbon was actually part of a deepening nuclear commitment on the part of the United States, sustained by the willingness of the Europeans to endorse the rearmament plan in exchange for promises of further economic assistance.

“Despite Wars, Scholars Remain the Great Workers of the International”: American Sociologists and French Sociology During the First World War

This chapter examines the consequences of the First World War for the discipline of sociology. Andrew Johnston interrogates the international and national organization of sociology, with a focus on France and the United States and the international contexts in which they operated. The outbreak of war saw sociologists apply their learning to fundamental questions raised by the war about the organization of national and international society. The chapter argues that American sociology came increasingly under the influence of French sociology in wartime, leading to a shift in the practice of American sociology towards positivism. Much of this derived from the fragmentation of the academic world during the war and the wider questioning of German scholarship which followed the outbreak of war.

The Disappearance of Emily G. Balch, Social Scientist

Emily Greene Balch is probably best known as the second American women to win the Nobel Peace Prize—a tireless pacifist and feminist who served as the first secretary of the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom in the early 1920s. But she was, before that, an innovative social scientist whose scholarly contributions were only later overshadowed by her activism and by formalist tendencies in sociology, which subsequently ignored her critical work on immigration. Balch started her career espousing the “objectivity” of science, but her experience as a researcher of immigration and as a pacifist in search of an understanding of the social psychology of war moved her closer toward a methodological hermeneutic that made formalist sociological principles anathema. Where she blended theory-development with social practice, her male colleagues attempted to conceal political purpose behind disinterested discipline. After 1918, women sociologists were transferred into other fields, namely, back into social work. In Balchs case, she turned to international organizations and the gritty practice of reconciliation, but her profile as a social scientist disappeared altogether. The fate of her intellectual work provides a glimpse of the affinities between gender and certain forms of disciplinary knowledge in the early social sciences.

Culture,War, Empire

“Culture” is a controversial term in diplomatic history but this is not the place to offer a full exegesis on its meaning. I offer instead a brief tour of the debate in diplomatic history before proposing ways in which it can be applied to the study of strategy. Historians often speak of nations having “styles of war,” but we are not always clear about how they work. Strategic culture, I suggest, does not exist as a kind of Zeitgeist about a nation’s military habits but is made by political entrepreneurs from the materials of national memory (or its inverse, national amnesia) to serve specific interests.1 It then acts as a “social fact” that determines the contours of “appropriate” behavior. In the final section, I examine how these strategic identities are affected by the distribution of power between nations, how some exert influence over others to remake their strategic cultures. This tackles the question of whether it is better to describe NATO’s doctrine as multilateral or hegemonic and what difference it makes. I argue that the opposition between dominance and autonomy in imperialism is complicated by the historical characteristics of American Empire. The American way of managing its internal political diversity through a system of constantly balanced “counterpowers” provides for endless expansion through inclusion, a kind of continuous incorporation of peoples into networks of shared subjectivity, namely the universal claim that the United States speaks for the “liberty of mankind.” American hegemony is not so much punitive as regulatory, remaking identities through mechanisms that pursue the “interiorization” and arrangement of all differences into “an effective apparatus of command.”2 First-use was the strategic desire of these hegemonic practices.

Hegemony Versus Multilateralism

Under Eisenhower’s New Look extended deterrence rested on transcending NATO’s variegated interests. Integration went a long way toward that end creating, as the TCC hoped, one military-economic authority that would weaken nationalism.This process, however, did not fully include the United States. It had to retain enough its own ideals to hold together as a nation, while speaking the language of universalism to represent the interests of “civilization.” Creating a self-sufficient security community in Europe actually insulated American nationalism. The uneven distribution of power across NATO worked itself into the 1949 strategic concept, the MTDP, SHAPE, and the TCC report, each differentiating between what was collective (Europe’s decision-making institutions) and what was national (the rules of American assistance and its control over nuclear strategic power). Dulles’s need to restore dynamism by backing deterrence with brinkmanship posed new questions for this social structure. Massive Retaliation would only work if America’s allies internalized it, embraced it so seamlessly that their national control over the instruments of war and peace all but disappeared. Even if deterrence worked perfectly—installing Europe under the wing of U.S. protection— the symbolism of surrendering such authority raised the question, as I have from the outset, of whether the nuclearization of NATO was a product of multilateral agreement, or a system of hegemony.

Strategies of Peripheralism

The retreat from Lisbon looked simple: U.S. aid evaporated in a climate of retrenchment brought on by the Republicans after 1952, leading the Europeans to plead bankruptcy and demand cheaper security that a fiscally conservative American administration was only too happy to provide. It was not, in fact, this tidy. In this chapter, I look at how France, Britain, and the United States developed national reasons for pursuing nuclear independence, reasons that developed outside these budgetary concerns. I will be criticized for underplaying economic distresses. But the material limits to rearmament were pronounced because of the expansive definitions of interest that the Big Three accepted as the foundation of their identities. In France the cost of Lisbon underlined its vulnerability to German rearmament, a fear that provided the strongest argument for an independent nuclear weapon.

The Persistence of the Old Regime

The postwar strategic cultures of Britain, France, and the United States were framed not just by what was militarily necessary but also by perceived differences between themselves and their prospective allies. Even as each viewed its interests as impeccably rational each interpreted others’ agendas as distorted by cultural eccentricities. When differences cropped up, they were explained by the peculiar baggage carried by others.This involved historical valuations of the place occupied by these nations: the impetuous adolescence of the United States, the aging imperial cynicism of Britain, the emotional instability of France.These refractions altered their conceptions of what was possible in NATO.As the Big Three articulated their natural strategic interests, the prospect of integration altered their conceptions of national security. The question is whether each adapted expediently to these new circumstances, or “learned” new conceptions of its security. In theoretical terms, learning internalizes a changed identity—in this case, a transnational “Atlanticist” culture to augment nationalist ones. Adaptation, on the other hand, involves a tactical shift to accommodate old identities to new conditions so as to extract a temporary advantage. When conditions change, one expects a return to “traditional” behavior. Cooperation under such conditions is fragile, unsettled by signs that adaptation is not working.

Disembodied Military Planning

The Medium Term Defense Plan (MTDP) of 1950 has played a critical heuristic role in the history of NATO’s nuclear policy. It provided the basis of the 1952 Lisbon force goals, a landmark if only because it was the failure to attain them that drove NATO into its irreparable dependence on nuclear weapons.1 The history of the MTDP is important for two reasons: first, because of the seriousness of the lessons historians have taken from its failure; and second, because it institutionalized a division of labor in NATO that reflected the perceived cultural attributes of each state’s role in the alliance.This was the function of a view in Washington that European military integration would dissolve national military forces in order for the United States to retain its peripheral nationality in tact. This deprived NATO of strategic options, establishing the conditions by which U.S. planners sought to convert NATO’s strategy into an extension of their own air power doctrines.

Our Plans Might Not be Purely Defensive

In the legends of nuclear strategy,NATO’s primal scene came at the end of 1954. The EDC had collapsed a few months earlier; two years of Republican rule had unnerved the allies who suspected the New Look was the work of a neo-isolationist ghost moving through the halls of Congress and the White House. And yet, by mid-1954 the formal integration of nuclear weapons into NATO war plans was under way.As the last chapter saw, pressure for a reevaluation of strategy came from many directions.The new JCS saw integration as a way of eliminating obstacles to a preemptive strategy they thought necessary to fight a nuclear war that might be induced by their “bold” plan to end the Cold War. John Foster Dulles demanded a NATO-wide affirmation of Massive Retaliation so America could rediscover its spiritual mission. First-use came out of the confluence of all these forces, but primarily from an inarticulate desire on the part of the United States to universalize its strategic culture in the new Atlantic community.This demanded a resocialized European identity, in which traditional national biases were displaced by an acceptance of the interest the United States had in holding a free hand over the decision to execute a war.

Two Cultures of Massive Retaliation

In 1984, asked what “Massive Retaliation” meant, Curtis LeMay said there were “as many answers to that question as there are people around.” He thought it meant nothing more than what had been U.S. policy all along: have “overwhelming strength so that nobody would dare attack us.”1 This simple statement of deterrence was not, though, how John Foster Dulles presented it at the time. Coming on the heels of the Korean War, Dulles’s Council on Foreign Relations speech in January 1954 was associated with an attempt to differentiate the New Look from its predecessors’.The war showed, Dulles’s said, that “a potential aggressor, who is glutted with manpower, might be tempted to attack in confidence that resistance would be confined to manpower.” The way to “deter aggression is for the free community to be willing to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing.”The United States should “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and places of our own choosing.”The word was “instantly” not massively, and Dulles’s later clarification in Foreign Affairs even suggested that a thermonuclear spasm was “not the kind of power that could most usefully be evoked under all circumstances.”The United States would not turn “every local war into a world war.” Even so, Dulles was both criticized for his inflexibility and lauded for stating what was self-evident.2