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NATO vs Russia: 75-year standoff
416 Plays1 year ago
The war in Ukraine has reinvigorated NATO as a bulwark against Russian aggression. But has NATO been a force for peace, or for military escalation? Historian Timothy Sayle digs into the alliance's 75-year history and explores its role in the world today.
Episode graphic: copyright NATO
Theme music: "Red River Jig" by Alex Kusturok
Music & soundclip credits: All soundclips courtesy NATO except the following:
00:00 - Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 - II. Aase's Death – Edvard Grieg - Czech National Symphony Orchestra – Public Domain / creative commons license / https://musopen.org/music/777-peer-gynt-suite-no-1-op-46/
00:48 - Chiselling – freesound.org / creative commons license / https://freesound.org/people/acostadelgado/sounds/200803/
00:50 - Outdoor crowd – freesound.org/ creative commons license / http://www.freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/
06:41 - Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 - II. Aase's Death – Edvard Grieg - Czech National Symphony Orchestra – Public Domain / creative commons license / https://musopen.org/music/777-peer-gynt-suite-no-1-op-46/
06:45 –– Dwight Eisenhower report to a joint session of Congress on the war in Europe and Africa, June 18, 1945 / US National archives (38.15) / unrestricted use https://catalog.archives.gov/id/2363636
08:48 – Soviet Anthem / Wikimedia commons / creative commons attribution – share alike license / https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Anthem1955_vocals.ogg
21:58 – Beethoven Moonlight Sonata, Op. 27 No. 2 / performed by Paul Pitman / public domain / creative commons license / https://musopen.org/music/2547-piano-sonata-no-14-in-c-sharp-minor-moonlight-sonata-op-27-no-2/
22:05 – President Ronald Reagan – speech at the Berlin Wall – 1987-06-12 / White House Television Office / public domain - https://ia801907.us.archive.org/5/items/ReagansSpeechAtTheBerlinWall/President%20Ronald%20Reagans%20Speech%20at%20the%20Berlin%20Wall%201987-06-12.mp4
29:34 – Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture – Skidmore College Orchestra – Creative Commons licence - https://musopen.org/music/5072-1812-overture-op-49/
30:28 - Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking at a joint press conference with U.S president George H.W. Bush, July 31 1991 / public domain / George Bush Presidential library / https://bush41library.tamu.edu/audiovisual/videos/77
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Transcript
Formation of NATO in 1949
00:00:05
Speaker
This is an undertaking of 12 sovereign nations, which have freely decided that free men can, in the face of danger, unite to the end that both freedom and peace may be preserved. In 1949, the NATO military alliance of North American and Western European nations grew out of the rubble of the Second World War. On the shoulder of every man in this headquarters is a patch
00:00:33
Speaker
which bears a message as old as the language of free man. It says, vigilance is the price of liberty. On Europe's eastern flank, NATO troops faced the Soviet Union across the Iron Curtain until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
00:00:57
Speaker
In the detente that followed, some said the world no longer needed NATO. Yet the war in Ukraine has brought the military alliance once more into the spotlight. When President Putin invaded Ukraine last year, he underestimated the bravery of the Ukrainian people, the courage of the Ukrainian forces and the determination of the Ukrainian political leadership.
NATO's Role in Peace and Global Security
00:01:26
Speaker
But you also underestimated the unity and strength of the NATO Alliance. How did NATO develop? Has it been a force for peace or for nuclear escalation? And what is its role in the world today? This is Stories Behind the History.
00:01:53
Speaker
Welcome to Stories Behind the History. I'm Kate Chaimit, Senior Editor of Canada's History Magazine. In this podcast, I speak with leading historians and witnesses to history to discover the people and events that shaped our nation. Today, we bring you a special episode on the history of NATO with historian Timothy Sale.
00:02:13
Speaker
Timothy Sale is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and the author of Enduring Alliance, A History of NATO and the Post-War Global Order. He spoke at a Canada's History Society event at Toronto's National Club, where this episode was recorded.
Historical Interest and Relevance of NATO
00:02:30
Speaker
Thanks everyone for joining us here tonight to talk about NATO. I have to say it's a real pleasure to be here and of course I'm happy to be here but it is also one of those topics where if you have written about international security and people want to hear from you, things aren't so great in the world.
00:02:52
Speaker
NATO does matter, again. I've noticed just far more interest and awareness by Canadians, by Canadian students, just about what NATO is. And I want to use my time tonight to look back on the history of the alliance, try to bring it up to the present day, to try and think about how this alliance that began with the treaty in 1949,
00:03:19
Speaker
really continues to shape our world today. There's been so much discussion about what NATO could do or should do or shouldn't have done that I think it's important to look at its history in this broader perspective.
00:03:37
Speaker
And I have to say that the future of NATO has always been in doubt. There have always been people who thought NATO was in crisis and about to end. And indeed, Prime Minister and President, time and again, when they took office,
00:03:53
Speaker
Many of them asked, do we really need NATO? And so this question has been asked over and over again. And what's striking in the archives is that you see every presidency, every premiership ultimately conclude that NATO must remain in existence. And of course, that is why it remains with us today.
00:04:19
Speaker
I'm going to touch on three parts of the Alliance's history just to get us started. I'm going to talk about why the Alliance was created, why this treaty was signed in 1949. I want to talk about the challenges of maintaining an Alliance, even when the world is nominally at peace.
00:04:40
Speaker
And I want to talk about why NATO survived the end of the Cold War and why it is with us today.
Foundations of NATO's Collective Security
00:04:48
Speaker
I'll start, though, with one major riddle, and I guess that is, I think it's crucial to understand why the people that created NATO, why the men who created NATO, and they were all men at the beginning, why they believed they needed to create it and why they believe it worked.
00:05:08
Speaker
The answer lies in the personal history of the men who started the Alliance. And their personal history, of course, we're talking about the late 1940s, their personal history was war. Dwight Eisenhower, Field Marshal Montgomery, who's going to play this major role in the land invasion of Europe.
00:05:34
Speaker
If we fast forward, though, less than 10 years, Eisenhower is the supreme allied commander of NATO, and Montgomery is his deputy. And there were many of their staff officers from the Second World War went to serve them in NATO. And one of them wrote in his diary that watching Eisenhower and Montgomery working in Paris in the early 50s reminded them of the early 1940s.
00:06:02
Speaker
This is the military command structure. It's not only like the command structure of the Second World War, it is the same men. The same men who believe this is important and they believe it's important because of their experience.
00:06:16
Speaker
These men had all seen war and lived through war. And at the council tables of NATO, underneath the suits, the Mufti worn by the men, there was real scar tissue. Real scar tissue gained during war. Things that had convinced these men that peace was not the natural condition of international affairs, that peace did not just happen, that it had to be achieved.
00:06:46
Speaker
When the Germans launched their blitzkriegs through Poland, below countries, and France, featuring tactical use of air power with the mechanized units on the ground, it seemed to a fearful world that at last there had been achieved the ultimate in destructive force, that nothing could stand against the German army. When America entered the war arena, the Nazi machine was at the zenith of its power. In 1940, it had overrun practically the whole of Western Europe. And a year later, in the east,
00:07:16
Speaker
that hammered back the Great Red Army into the far reaches of the Russian territory. American General Dwight Eisenhower speaking to a joint session of Congress, June 18, 1945.
00:07:30
Speaker
And let me take this just one step further, just to show these historical connections. There's Erwin Rommel, a German commander in charge of the defense of Normandy. He was actually away from the front on the night of June 5th, 6th, before D-Day. And so his bespectacled chief of staff, Speidel, was in charge of the defenses. If we fast forward,
00:07:56
Speaker
though, Shpedo is actually going to be the commander of Allied troops in Western Europe. Not only had these men, some of them fought together, some of the men that made up NATO had actually fought against each other in the Second World War before coming together in this alliance.
00:08:17
Speaker
And it really does grow out of the devastation of the Second World War. Europe, after 1945, was, in many places, simply rubble. It was a place of awful hardship, famine, disease, and privation, and that connected with the politics of the day. And the officials in London
00:08:41
Speaker
in Ottawa and in Washington all worried that the people of Europe living in these conditions would do anything to avoid a return to war. And more so that these people in these awful conditions would find local communist parties and especially communist parties backed by the great promise of the Soviet Union as the best political future.
00:09:07
Speaker
for Europe. So there's real fear that the destruction of Europe is going to create political opportunity for the Soviet Union in Western Europe. The idea here in the 1940s isn't that the Soviet Union is going to invade Western Europe. That's not what anyone is worried about. What leaders are worried about is that the Soviet Union is going to use its muscle
00:09:37
Speaker
to convince the people of Western Europe to join their side of what will become the Cold War. And I want to give you some sort of practical explanations of what this looks like. So three quick examples, Finland, Norway, and Czechoslovakia.
00:09:56
Speaker
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union basically made Finland an offer it couldn't refuse. It said that if the Soviet Union could direct the Finnish foreign and defense policy, Finland could remain its own state.
00:10:12
Speaker
And of course, Finnish leaders not about to return to war with the Soviet Union accepted this compromise. And for the rest of the Cold War, we'd have this phrase, Finlandization, which was the idea that the state would continue to exist, but it would be in thrall to Moscow.
00:10:29
Speaker
Now in 1947, the Soviets began making similar sounds to Norway. Norway also had had a damaging war, and the Soviets were beginning to make suggestions of deals that Norway might strike with Moscow, mostly about access, sea access. And the leaders of Norway were worried that their citizens would prefer
00:10:58
Speaker
that Norway can cede to the Soviet Union rather than create a crisis or possibly a return to war.
00:11:05
Speaker
And we know this because the Norwegian leaders actually reached out to, again, London, Ottawa, and Washington asking for these countries to stand with Norway so that Norway wouldn't have to stand by itself against the Soviet Union. And it's actually this impending threat against Norway that's going to start a series of negotiations between the Americans, Brits, and Canadians that are going to develop into the alliance.
00:11:31
Speaker
And then in 1948, in Czechoslovakia, there's just one more warning or example of what sort of the European world might look like without NATO. And that's this coup, uprising in coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, when Czechoslovak communists
00:11:51
Speaker
stage a coup and a revolt taking over Czechoslovakia. So it wasn't an invasion by the Soviet Union, but the Soviets had troops nearby and they had indicated that they would intervene to support the coup plotters if they needed it. So that's the kind of
00:12:10
Speaker
worry that was facing Western European and North American leaders at the time, not again that the Soviet Union was going to roll tanks west, but they could get whatever they wanted without firing a shot.
NATO's Protective Role Against Soviet Influence
00:12:25
Speaker
The solution then was to create an alliance, a system that signaled that no state in Western Europe would have to stand up to the Soviet Union itself or just concede to the Soviet demands. It would have been called salami tactics, so the Soviets just slowly slicing bits of Western Europe bit by bit.
00:12:49
Speaker
And this wasn't a terribly new idea. The French had proposed something like this after the end of the First World War. It made sense to the British, to the Canadians. Canadian diplomats said at these meetings that if we had had some system like this in the 1930s, then maybe there would not have been a Second World War.
00:13:10
Speaker
The Americans took a little bit more convincing, and we can get into that, but ultimately the United States did agree to signing an alliance with Canada and these Western European states, and so the alliance was created in 1949. That is what led to NATO, this idea that these states being allied would give the countries freedom to pursue the foreign policies and domestic policies they wished, and not to be isolated in Europe.
00:13:37
Speaker
This is an undertaking of 12 sovereign nations, which have freely decided that free men can, in the face of danger, unite to the end that both freedom and peace may be preserved. The question that confronts us is whether we can achieve, by individual and collective cooperation, adequate defense of our way of life. It is for us to prove that we can't
00:14:06
Speaker
of our own free will produce a unity and a steadfastness of purpose to match the fanaticism and the enforced unity of communistic dictatorship.
00:14:19
Speaker
American General Dwight Eisenhower, 1951. Over the 1950s, the alliance will continue and it will grow. It's as a result of the Korean War that Canada and the United States send these ground forces and air forces to Europe, and they're all there to demonstrate
00:14:41
Speaker
the solidarity of the allies to one another to make sure, first of all, that the Soviets don't even think about threatening anyone because if they did, they would have to face the whole alliance.
00:14:55
Speaker
On the one hand, I am saying to you that NATO was formed to maintain a balance of power in Europe. But I'm also saying something else too, that international relations in this period had changed and that leaders had recognized that democracy and elections made international affairs in Europe more volatile.
00:15:19
Speaker
more susceptible to shifts in public opinion. NATO is not built because it is an alliance of democracies. In fact, it's better to think of it as a sort of democracy insurance alliance that is going to prevent any nervous or frightened public from urging its leadership to concede in times of crisis in case the Soviet Union came knocking and made some sort of bullying threat.
00:15:48
Speaker
The Ace Mobile Force. It's made up of specially trained units from NATO countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Italy, and others. In the event of a crisis involving, just for an example, the North Cape area of Norway, the Ace Mobile Force would be among the first NATO reinforcements to arrive on the scene.
00:16:18
Speaker
The purpose of this multinational brigade-sized force is to guarantee that war will not break out because of a miscalculation about the willingness of the United States or the other allies to come to the aid of any NATO member.
00:16:37
Speaker
The conditions that might have led to conflict, a change in the balance of power, did not lead to a third world war. And already in the very early 1950s, there were people asking, has NATO put itself out of business? Does NATO need to exist at all, or has it done its job?
00:16:58
Speaker
The argument of the people who wanted to maintain NATO, the prime ministers and presidents who thought it was important, argued that simply by existing, NATO was working. And of course you had this other opposite argument that it was just the whistle that kept the tiger away. How could you know that it was working? And so leaders have always understood this paradox at the heart of NATO that its greatest success
00:17:27
Speaker
its purpose of maintaining peace is also gonna give strength to those who argue it's unnecessary. And this argument is going to be permanent, and it's been with the alliance from the 1950s almost all the way until today, although perhaps our current situation has sort of reminded people of this equation.
00:17:49
Speaker
So the alliance is built, and there are these questions about it, but because war does not come, you have more and more people asking if it's necessary, and in fact, more and more people in NATO countries arguing that it's not only unnecessary, but that it's dangerous.
NATO's Internal Tensions and Nuclear Policy
00:18:07
Speaker
And so I'll just give you an example of this dynamic when we think about the enormous anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s and 1980s. Fundamental to a Cold War military alliance or indeed a Cold War alliance today is nuclear weapons.
00:18:25
Speaker
We don't talk about it very much, but at the heart of NATO's strength is a nuclear arsenal. And the nuclear weapons are integrated into NATO's plans. It is a part of the alliance. And yet you had this large number of citizens who were objecting to these weapons, and especially to objecting to having these weapons in their country. So the Germans, the Brits, but especially in Germany, these massive protests against the weapons.
00:18:55
Speaker
And I'm going to give you sort of three examples of how this plays out in the 1970s and 80s, this clash between public opinion and sort of the strategic necessity of nukes. The first comes in the late 70s when NATO is going to modernize its nuclear weapons in Europe. And the Americans plan on introducing something called an enhanced radiation weapon that was really known in the press as the neutron bomb.
00:19:24
Speaker
This really controversial weapon that instead of having a very big explosion actually sort of irradiates the area around it. And the Soviets had a field day with this in their propaganda because what better capitalist weapon than one that just kills people but leaves infrastructure intact. So there was this major outpouring of protest against this one particular weapon.
00:19:47
Speaker
And it was so great that the United States ultimately didn't deploy it. They did not end up sending it to Europe and they canceled their plans. Then a few years later, the United States, again, is trying to modernize its weapons and is going to introduce a new missile, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces. That's been in the news recently because there was a treaty about them.
00:20:11
Speaker
There were major protests, a major election in Germany about the deployment of these missiles. These protests were deeply related to it. The largest street protests in Europe before the Iraq war were over these weapons, and they were deployed. They did go to Europe.
00:20:28
Speaker
So far we're one for two if you're keeping track. And then in the late 80s, the United States wants to modernize its short-range nuclear forces. And unfortunately, these are good for propaganda too because we had West and East Germany and the Soviet and East German propaganda said that the shorter the range, the better the German, the idea that
00:20:47
Speaker
If you fire a short-range nuclear weapon, it doesn't go very far. If it's fired from West Germany, it might only go to East Germany. Major protests and the German government, the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany, asks the United States not to deploy this weapon that the United States thought was necessary for NATO.
00:21:07
Speaker
So at this point, NATO is one for three. And if you're playing for the Blue Jays, hitting 333 is fine. But if you are a nuclear alliance that's dependent on nuclear weapons, you need to do better at modernizing your nuclear weapons. And so this was continuing in the 1980s and really spelled trouble for the alliance.
00:21:29
Speaker
And in August of 1989, Brent Scowcroft, who was George H.W. Bush's National Security Advisor, told President Bush, President Bush the first, managing our relations with Germany is likely to be the most serious political challenge our country faces over the next decade, unless we have to cope with a disintegrating Soviet Union. And guess what?
00:21:56
Speaker
November 1989, months later, the Berlin Wall falls, and the process that's gonna lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has begun. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.
00:22:25
Speaker
Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. American President Ronald Reagan speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, June 12, 1987.
00:22:51
Speaker
So the end of the Cold War didn't solve those major questions about how the alliance manages its weapons and what that's required of populations. Instead, we just have this new problem, which is managing the end of the Cold War.
Post-Cold War Expansion and Russian Relations
00:23:08
Speaker
And the argument I want to make here is that the decisions to expand NATO East in Europe for its membership to grow and that territory to move East
00:23:19
Speaker
actually begins right in this period in 1990 and in 1991. It's actually the way the Cold War ends that is going to necessitate the expansion of the alliance. In private, already in 1990 and 1991,
00:23:39
Speaker
US officials with Canadian counterparts, but especially British counterparts, were establishing the two main arguments for why NATO should continue after the Cold War, for which it was created, and why it should expand. And the first is Germany, Germany's home in Europe.
00:24:02
Speaker
Margaret Thatcher and George Bush talked about this and George Bush told Thatcher that the German problem, what to do with Germany, made NATO fundamental, indeed more important than ever. He's arguing that NATO is now more important than before and he's ruling out all of the Cold War in that calculation and why? Because NATO had been the critical
00:24:31
Speaker
stabilizer and home for the rehabilitation of West Germany. Essentially, the Federal Republic of Germany had grown up as a part of NATO. All of the rules governing the German military and its weapons, its command structure, were all marbled totally into NATO.
00:24:52
Speaker
NATO is the sort of military power political home for Germany. And the question, of course, if NATO falls, what happens to Germany? Where does Germany go in this new world? And there were many people, especially in Europe, who were quite worried about this. And again, had very personal experience about what it had meant, what Germany had meant before 1945.
00:25:16
Speaker
So keeping NATO in place kept all of those treaties in place that governed Germany's military and German's weapons. And in 1990, there is an explicit quid pro quo between President Bush and
00:25:35
Speaker
Chancellor Kohl, that the United States would champion German reunification if Germany stayed in NATO. So that was the deal. That was the deal that let the Americans put their shoulder towards German unification. So that maintains NATO, but it also moves NATO east because a reunified Germany now includes East Germany. So NATO is already expanding at that point.
00:26:01
Speaker
The second major issue is what policymakers call instability in Eastern Europe. And instability can mean a lot of things, but for them specifically, they wanted to know where would Poland, where would Czechoslovakia, where would Hungary look to for their security? These states had all been part of the Soviets Warsaw Pact, right? They'd been part of that alliance. Now there was no Warsaw Pact.
00:26:27
Speaker
Those states wanted to join NATO and they certainly asked to join NATO and they would join NATO. But even before that, officials in Washington especially are pushing this that NATO can provide security to these states. And it would avoid a situation like those before the World Wars in which there were interlocking and sort of rickety systems of alliances in Eastern Europe.
00:26:57
Speaker
When I took office as Secretary General of the North Atlantic Alliance, I could not even receive the ambassador of any of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in our headquarters. Our states were adversaries, even if our peoples did not have this feeling of animosity. Three and a half years later,
00:27:26
Speaker
Here we are, sitting around the same table, celebrating the inaugural meeting of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. NATO Secretary General Manfred Wernher, December 20, 1991. So this thinking I think is summed up pretty well by Scowcroft when he told Bush,
00:27:51
Speaker
that after the Cold War, even when the Cold War is over, he said, geopolitical realities will endure. It's a pretty grand phrase. It's quite good. Geopolitical realities will endure. But I'll tell you the last thing anyone wanted to hear in the 1990s was that geopolitical realities will endure.
00:28:15
Speaker
The Cold War had just ended. This was supposed to be a time to get back to whatever can happen when all those strictures of the Cold War are gone, when the heavy defense spending isn't required. So in the 1990s, you had the strategic reason for keeping NATO, but you had a public relations problem.
00:28:34
Speaker
And NATO tried to solve this problem by doing a facelift, by changing how it spoke about itself and what it existed for. And so you had this heavy escalation in the 90s of this talk of NATO as an alliance of democracies, as an alliance of shared values.
00:28:56
Speaker
But that's not what the people who were going to maintain NATO were saying behind closed doors. One US official said that it was mistrust that the European states had for each other.
00:29:10
Speaker
fear of Russian backsliding, so a real worry about where Russia will go in the world, and the possibility of instability in Eastern Europe that held the alliance together. So what about these new democracies of Eastern Europe that are asking to join the alliance? And officials start writing, as early as 1991, we would make the expansion of NATO a goal.
00:29:34
Speaker
And so I think it's fair to say that the United States and NATO pursued sort of a double-barreled policy towards Russia in the 1990s. And into the 2000s even, they sought to build relations with Russia, but at the same time, they absolutely were taking steps to hedge against a resurgent Russia.
00:30:02
Speaker
I believe the president and I noted the positive developments which are taking place in Europe, and we see that the Soviet Union and the US must participate very actively in building a new Europe.
00:30:21
Speaker
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev speaking through a translator at a press conference with US President George H.W. Bush, July 30, 1991. In recent years, we have heard this argument coming from Moscow that it was the expansion of NATO that caused Putin to invade Ukraine.
00:30:42
Speaker
I do not think that there is a clear line there or that there's a clear argument at all, but you don't have to listen to me. It's more important that I think the Russians have sort of stopped talking about this. They tried out that argument for a while, but they just simply don't make that claim anymore for the invasion.
00:31:01
Speaker
I would say that if you are looking for a connection, it's not the expansion of NATO membership so much as the fact that NATO did start to do some new things in the 1990s. In former Yugoslavia, NATO acted to prevent atrocities, especially with the bombing campaign against Serbia in regards to Kosovo. And that was a real red flag for Moscow.
00:31:30
Speaker
because here was an alliance that claimed to be a defensive alliance that was using its offensive power. I mean, there's a real discussion to have about how the Russians interpreted that, and it doesn't mean that it wasn't a moral policy by NATO, but that's honestly a better place to look for Russian fears about NATO than expansion. But in my last few minutes here, think about NATO's role in this war in Ukraine.
NATO's Impact on Modern Conflicts
00:31:58
Speaker
And it's sort of paradoxical because the alliance insists, and I think quite rightly, that it is not a party to this conflict. This is a war between Russia and Ukraine. Even if individual NATO allies are choosing to support Ukraine, NATO itself doesn't consider itself a belligerent in the war. But
00:32:23
Speaker
One of the reasons that all of these individual countries, whether they're NATO allies or not, are able to provide so much support to Ukraine is because Ukraine's western border borders on NATO. So all of these weapons that we hear about, the movement of troops to be trained, are entering Ukraine through NATO states, through Poland, through Romania, what have you.
00:32:53
Speaker
And of course, the Russians have not moved to intercept the delivery of these weapons, not because they can't, but because they know that that would be violating the sovereignty of these states and that NATO then might very well declare itself a belligerent in this conflict.
00:33:08
Speaker
So, NATO, just by existing and serving its defensive purpose, allowing the freedom of these states to act as they wish, is shaping the war in Ukraine. The war would have gone, I think, completely differently if these arms had not been supplied as they were. Of course, it's the Ukrainians who are doing the fighting, but the fact that they've been able to fight as long as they have is because NATO
00:33:37
Speaker
provides a sort of corridor that allows all of these weapons to enter. If the Russians move to attack Poland, well then Poland could go to NATO, begin a discussion about the Treaty Article, Article Five, and perhaps the alliance might join the war. So that's one way that NATO's shaping the war. The other way, and I think this is equally important, is that the NATO states, and especially Poland here,
00:34:05
Speaker
can make decisions about their role in the war with some sense that they will be protected. If Poland was not part of NATO and did not feel that it would have the backing of the alliance, if the Russians were to attack Poland, then Poland might have felt already compelled to enter this war, either in Ukraine or in Belarus to protect itself.
00:34:29
Speaker
So there's some restraint happening by some of the NATO allies who we might otherwise expect to have joined this war if they didn't feel like they were protected by the alliance. So it's another way that NATO is in a way serving to constrain this war.
00:34:49
Speaker
and has played a big role in, I think, the reasons why it hasn't escalated. This is how wars between two states escalate into regional wars, because other states in the region feel they need to become involved, and that's how regional wars, of course, escalate into general wars. So Finland is...
00:35:08
Speaker
a part of NATO now, Sweden, not yet, but perhaps soon. And that, I guess, is the third way that this war has played a major role in relation to NATO. It reminds me of the quote where the British diplomat essentially said that every time NATO gets into trouble, the Russians come along and save it. And in this case, the war has totally energized the alliance, and it has caused
00:35:36
Speaker
people and politicians in Sweden and Finland to decide that they want to be a part of this alliance because they've seen what the Russians have done in Ukraine. So it is changing Europe, this war, and it is changing NATO.
00:35:53
Speaker
When President Putin invaded Ukraine last year, he underestimated the bravery of the Ukrainian people, the courage of the Ukrainian forces, and the determination of the Ukrainian political leadership. But he also underestimated the unity and strength of the NATO alliance.
00:36:19
Speaker
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, July 12th, 2023. You see that there are, you know, tens of thousands of Allied forces on NATO's border, and they're there to make sure that the war does not spread. And that's why there are Canadians in Latvia, right, to make sure that the Russians don't do what they wanted to do to Norway,
00:36:47
Speaker
what they did in Czechoslovakia, what they were thinking about, or what they most certainly did in Finland, by flexing that force and convincing states to either step away from this conflict, not support Ukraine or whatever. By having all of these forces here, the idea is that these NATO allies are protected.
00:37:08
Speaker
and they're able to make their own choices about what they do, both in regards to Europe and European security more broadly. And that just loops us back, I guess, to this
00:37:21
Speaker
where I tried to begin the talk today, in the 1940s, there was no one who could have predicted the precise situation we're seeing here in the 2020s. I'm not trying to make that argument. But there are real echoes between that world and today's world. And when allied officials built the alliance,
00:37:44
Speaker
At the start of the Cold War, they did it with a logic that wasn't only Cold War logic. It drew on the logic from before the Cold War and what might come after. And I'll just give the last word to Field Marshal Montgomery here, who said, the men of his generation who had fought in the war wanted peace above all.
Enduring Relevance of Military Power for Peace
00:38:04
Speaker
But as he wrote, peace in the modern world cannot be assured without military power. The fact might be sad, but it is true. Peace was, in fact, a byproduct. And it's that thinking that has guided Natal from the 1940s all the way to today and explains why it's still with us shaping our world. So I'll leave it there. Thank you very much.
00:38:30
Speaker
The Stories Behind the History podcast is produced by Canada's History Society. If you enjoyed this podcast, why not subscribe to Canada's History magazine? To subscribe, or simply to find out more about Canada's History Society, visit us at canadathistory.ca. Our theme music is the Red River Jig, performed by Alex Custerock from his album, May T. Fiddling for Dancing. I'm Kate Jamit, thanks for joining me.