The Alliance [antikvár]

This book is the story of a small circle of politicians, diplomats, industrialists, bankers, and generals on three continents who created and shaped the postwar worid by building an alliance of North America, Europe, and Japan. This association of industrialized capitalist nations which has already endured longer than the Holy Alliance of the last century, has been the vehicle by which the defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan, were transformed from America's enemies into protectorates and ultimately into formidable commercial rivals. The web of political, economic, and cultural relationships which the United States took the lead in creating at the end of World War II, surely one of the most ingenious political inventions of our century, has over two generations not only produced dramatic changes in the relationships of three continents, but has also exerted strong influence in the domestic life of every member country. The stated purpose of the alliance is the security of its members and while the relationship has served a variety of other functions as well, it rests on a military arrangement. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been organized as a multinational fighting force permanently mobilized for a war beyond experience and imagination, a war few politicians have thought was coming and fewer have believed that their countries could survive. It is commonly asserted that had the United States not organized the recovery of Europe, had West Germany not been integrated into the West, had rearmament not occurred, World War III would have already happened. But history cannot be replayed. All one can say is that in the years since the birth of NATO and the conclusion of the Japanese Peace Treaty neither a nuclear nor