3

The United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Jack L. Granatstein

Ten years ago, just as twenty or forty years ago, no one worried about the
relationship between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United
Nations. NATO and the UN, while not wholly separate and certainly not
wholly equal, were different organizations, each operating in its own
sphere, not ordinarily congruent nor in opposition. The United Nations had
important obligations in the area of security, just as did NATO, and for
years it had conducted peacekeeping and, latterly, peacemaking operations.
For its part, NATO functioned as a defensive organization directed against
Soviet aggression in the (expanded) North Atlantic area, an object that
lasted until the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Thereafter NATO continued and expanded, though its purposes were less
focussed. Even so, there was no overt clash with the aims of the United Na-
tions.
The war with Yugoslavia in 1999 has changed all this. It has highlighted
the suddenly difficult relationship between the UN and NATO and made it
a subject of importance. Indeed, it has caused concern in some countries
that NATO, because it did not secure a UN resolution authorizing its mili-
tary actions against the Milosevic regime, was acting illegally. The Rus-
sians and Chinese and the Belgrade government, not surprisingly, took this
line in New York and in the media, but even in NATO countries, the same
argument was raised. Weak though it may be, incapable though it has been
of protecting minorities or preserving the peace, the United Nations con-
tinues to have its supporters.
Should it? It is worth recalling the reasons why the North Atlantic
Treaty came about in the years immediately after the Second World War. In
Western nations, the Soviet Union was seen as a military and political
threat to Europe and Asia -the Eastern European nations had been swal-

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G. Schmidt (ed.), A History of NATO — The First Fifty Years
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2001
30 United Nations

lowed and party-lining regimes installed. Czechoslovakia saw a democratic

regime toppled and a Communist government put in place. There were
lightly veiled threats to Norway. 1 The sense existed throughout the West
that just as Hitler had picked off nations one by one in the 1930s, history
was repeating itsele And while this race to Armageddon was going on,
what did the United Nations do? The Security Council talked and argued
and talked some more, and action was prevented by the veto exercised by
Moscow. There remained a strong commitment to the United Nations in the
West: a yenuine desire still to make it work, but the disillusionment was
growmg.
There was in fact substantial despair in the West in the years that imme-
diately followed the Allied victory in 1945. The United States was still
heavily isolationist in attitude, and some in North America, all but writing
off Europe, looked to a joint economic/defense unit formed of Canada and
United States. In Western Europe, there was hopelessness in a continent
ruined by war and with its social systems devastated by collaboration and
defeat. There even seemed to be a real possibility that Italy and France
might democratically elect communist governments. The main enemies
were despair, apathy, doubt, and fear-and the attractive force of Commu-
nism as an answer to these concerns.
There had to be a spiritual rebirth, some indication that democratic val-
ues had currency, some "dynamic counter-attraction to Communism," as the
Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, Louis St. Laurent, put it in
1948.4 Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, used almost exactly the
same phrase when he wrote to the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie
King, in 1948 to propose a democratic alliance that would build up a
"counter attraction to [the] tenets of Communism." Attlee argued that
Britain could provide the political and moral leadership while America
could offer economic assistance. 5 Canadians and Americans were less
certain about Britain's - or Europe's - capacity to provide rallying leader-
ship. Only North America, rich and untouched by war's devastation, could
provide this. And only the United States could provide the military power
required to resist the Soviet Union.
The first idea for a grouping of the nations of the North Atlantic seems
to have been offered several months earlier by Escott Reid, a senior official
of the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. 6 In a speech in August
1947, he noted that

the West was not debarred by the Charter of the United Nations from
creating new international political institutions to maintain peace ....
Nothing in the Charter precludes the existence of regional political ar-
rangements . . . entitled to take measures of collective self-defense
against armed attack . . . . The world is now so small that the whole of