Defense of the West: Transatlantic Security from Truman to Trump

"Sure. I think one has to include in the five a book where the reader would find out everything the needed to know in one place, if they wanted a decent knowledge of NATO. There are three or four books that fit that bill. David Yost’s NATO’s Balancing Act . Lawrence S. Kaplan’s NATO Divided, NATO United . But both those books are at least ten years old, so don’t get much beyond the Obama administration in the United States and certainly don’t have Trump, which is important. Even this only gets as far as 2019. But there is no other book which is comprehensive as this, which takes on board the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Ukraine war. No doubt in a few years’ time there will be a third edition. It is a sort of textbook. For the non-specialist, it would be the one book I would recommend in order to get a thorough grounding in the history of NATO, and how it works. The key dynamic, Stanley Sloan argues, is how the United States and Europe have undertaken what he calls ‘the transatlantic bargain’ in order to keep NATO together. So the United States is the backstop for European security, as long as the Europeans try to contribute as much as they can to their own defense, and—in the early days of the Cold War—also their political stabilisation and economic integration. It’s long, well-footnoted, very well written. Stanley Sloan himself is one of the most reputable scholars on NATO. Larry Kaplan, who sadly passed away a year ago at the age of 95, was probably the single best historian of the alliance, but I couldn’t find one book of his that would fit the bill. This one does. Yes. Trump was certainly an interlude. To be polite, Trump was different in all manner of ways. On NATO, very different, in that he publicly undermined the idea that the United States was committed to the alliance, and publicly criticised a lot of the allies. A lot of American presidents were very critical of the allies in private, and occasionally in public as well, but none had raised the prospect that the United States would actually withdraw from NATO. To be honest, I didn’t actually take that threat seriously. A colleague and I wrote an article where we argued it was performative and inauthentic, and as it happens, the United States did stay in NATO throughout the Trump period. By the end, Trump was actually talking NATO up. But if Trump was still in power, no, I cannot imagine NATO would have got its act together in the way it has over Ukraine; American leadership just would not have been there. So Trump was very damaging. As an aside, there are quite a lot of memoirs around the Trump period; John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened , for instance. I could have picked a memoir, as there are some very good memoirs around the Trump period which go into the damage Trump did to NATO."