Sten Rynning

The repetitive nature of NATO’s history also provides the starting point for Sten Rynning’s contribution to the anniversary, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance. A Danish academic specialising in NATO, Rynning begins his book in severe didactic fashion, with subheadings laying down prescriptions such as ‘How to think about NATO’ and ‘NATO’s future must not resemble its past’. Yet the end product is a subtle and thought-provoking show more book, unflinching in its sober realism about the tensions at the core of NATO’s existence.

Rynning argues that NATO’s history is characterised by cycles of boom and bust between moments of great ambition – its initial establishment in 1949 and the collapse of the Soviet Union – and the subsequent disillusionment, as the alliance struggled with closing the gap between aspiration and reality. Unusually, instead of beginning his narrative at the conclusion of the Second World War, Rynning chooses 1939 as his starting point, when US engagement with the world stood on the brink of a permanent transformation.

Postwar America, Rynning writes, had initially aimed to create a global collective security regime, a new world order based on cooperation and the fostering of communities of shared values, with the United Nations at its core. It is not for nothing that Article 1 of the North Atlantic Treaty (an astonishingly elegant document, which the book helpfully reprints in full) speaks of compliance with the UN Charter, while Article 2, a Canadian initiative, is concerned with the fostering of non-military co-operation and understanding among NATO members – in other words, of a genuine Atlantic political community.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Yuan Yi Zhu is Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Law at Leiden University. show less