Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO

‘Semisesquicentennial’ does not roll off the tongue, nor would such an occasion normally be marked by publishers. But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary, which arrives on 4 April 2024, has already led to the publication of a brace of new books about the past and future of the alliance which, with the recent accession of Finland, now counts 31 states among its members.

With the war in Ukraine – which has re-energised NATO even as it has kept its own involvement in a state of deliberate ambiguity – entering its third year, it is unsurprising that there should be renewed interest in the North Atlantic alliance. But underneath it all is a sense of anxiety, widely but quietly shared, that NATO may not live to show more see its centenary. This anniversary may be the last big one and thus a particularly appropriate time to assess what NATO has accomplished so far and guess what its future will hold.

Peter Apps’ contribution to the occasion, Deterring Armageddon, is a straightforward and breezy history of NATO. A former Reuters correspondent and British army reservist, Apps has an eye for the dramatic, and the book’s almost 500 pages contain few longueurs despite much of it being concerned with bureaucratic debates among politicians with dimly remembered names.

Like a classical tragedy, the story of NATO’s creation, as retold by Apps, possessed unity of action, time and place. The men who assisted in its establishment and who shepherded it through its first years of existence were dramatic figures in their own right. There was Ernest Bevin, the unskilled labourer turned world statesman of the nuclear age. There was Dwight D. Eisenhower, for whom supreme military command of NATO provided a welcome escape from the ennui of peacetime university administration. And there was the middle-ranking Europhile American diplomat with the impossibly WASPish name of Theodore C. Achilles, who hoped the Atlantic alliance would one day turn into a federal union.

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