Review: NATO, In Search of a Vision.

Reviewed: Aybet, Gulnar, and Rebecca M. Moore. Eds. NATO: In Search of a Vision, (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. 2010) 272 pages.

Helen Keller said that the most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but no vision. Gandhi said that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Somewhere in the continuum between these two ideological axioms, we struggle to understand one of the most critical and powerful socio-political-military institutions in all of human history. The North-Atlantic Treaty Organization is at once predicated upon the failed-concept of retaliation as deterrent, and bound by the inestimable limitations of human patience and understanding. As such, it would be dangerous if it lacked the viscosity which otherwise prevents it from being volatile. In practise, its potency at any given time is inversely proportional to its capacity for bureaucratic complexity. While it lords a hostile array of nuclear armaments over any and everyone it perceives as enemy, through most of its history it has operated with a perfect commitment not to use them. But with time, the mission begins to creep, as it always does. Like any good bureaucracy, its operatives yearn for organic growth, which creates a paradox. As NATO’s ambitious peace keeping and collaboration efforts proceed, ideally, those once marked in the enemy's column are gradually brought over into the allied camp, while other relationships with neutrals and collaborators evolve. All the while, the identity of the thing changes, and so too its concept of enemy, and of other. And so it casts a long diurnal shadow, in perpetual motion across the surface of the modern geopolitical sphere. As has been seen by all, the transition from the Communist to the Islamist front has not been seamless. Nor will be the coming procession from Islamism to Cyber war. But what then? And, perhaps more importantly, what else? To elucidate this foggy subject, dozens of professors and officials from around the world have collaborated in this thrifty, if dated, volume; each attempting to carve out a unique view of the implications of NATO expansion, opposition, cohesion, collaboration, innovation, and change. Together, they have assembled in narrow strokes a path of guideposts to aid the rest of us, supposedly the democratic bodies in being, to whom the mission of NATO is itself dedicated, however ambiguous its genuine allegiances may someday become.

Review: A Military History of the Cold War 1944-1962

House, Jonathan M. A Military History of the Cold War 1944-1962, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. 546 pages.


There is something kind of nefarious about NATO. But whatever that something is can be as elusive as the benevolently proverbial white rabbit himself. How does one (beholden and domestic to the modern western security apparatus) begin to articulate the faintest criticism or concern with an organization credited with “keeping the peace” (at least by its own self, that is) for nearly seventy years? Should such an argument even be made? Perhaps. But one must concede that such an argument must be a kind of tertiary one, neither mainstream or counter-cultural. It must be built upon a foundation which itself is laid upon bedrock. Such bedrock is rarely seen, jutting up at the sky and at Time itself, through the dense and deep sediment and topsoil that is the modern military historicity. Jonathan House offers just such a cornerstone work in this herculean survey of two of the most politicized, polarizing, and pivotal decades in all of global history, leading up to and through the day the whole world almost went away.