Sten Rynning's "NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance"

Sten Rynning has researched and written on NATO for twenty-five years. He is a professor and director of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark, and the author of NATO in Afghanistan and NATO Renewed.

Rynning applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works moderately well for NATO. It captures a key event in the history of the alliance still of great relevance today. But it comes out of a discussion of the fine grains of 1960s alliance politics that for the browser of the book may come across as a bit of ‘inside baseball.’

The fine grains are important, though, because for the reader of the book—as opposed to the browser—they tell the story of why the political seams of the alliance were coming undone. The allies lacked trust, and they were pursuing incompatible national approaches to East-West relations. France had decided to kick NATO headquarters off its territory, and NATO was in addition approaching its twentieth anniversary (in 1969), which by its treaty allowed individual allies to leave the alliance at a one-year notice. Might France be tempted to leave? Might West Germany leave to pursue German unification? The one sure thing was the Soviet desire to stoke trouble.

Into all this—and on page 99 of the book—stepped Pierre Harmel, Belgium’s foreign minister, and undertook a study of NATO’s “future tasks.” This proved a crucial moment for the alliance. Pierre Harmel succeeded in establishing principles that brought allies together and which resonate to this day—that NATO must be able to do both collective defense and East-West diplomacy, and, critically, that defense must come first.

“Defense first” was NATO’s Cold War recipe for countering the threat of political fragmentation. NATO leaders have since invoked this recipe multiple times, also in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, NATO allies diverge in their level of support to Ukraine and in their willingness to stand up to Russia. In essence, allies disagree on what “defense first” today means. Page 99 of NATO will help the browser—and especially the reader—understand why this present-day rerun of the Harmel debate is so momentous for the alliance.

Learn more about NATO at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: NATO in Afghanistan.

--Marshal Zeringue