Abstract
Crafted in the late 1960s, Harlan Cleveland’s description of NATO as a “transatlantic bargain” remains today a helpful prism through which to analyze the North Atlantic alliance. The alliance, of course, is far more than the sort of deal struck between business partners. Although the transatlantic bargain is firmly based on unsentimental calculations of national self-interest on both sides of the Atlantic, it at the same time depends on some amorphous but vital shared ideas about man, government, and society. It is a “bargain,” to be sure, but a bargain with roots in the hearts as well as in the minds of the partners.
The glue that has held the allies more or less together is a large, complex and dynamic bargain—partly an understanding among the Europeans, but mostly a deal between them and the United States of America.
Harlan Cleveland, NATO: The Transatlantic Bargain
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Endnotes
Christopher S. Raj, American Military in Europe ( New Delhi, India: ABC Publishing House, 1983 ), p. 8.
Timothy P. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, The Origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981 ), p. 119.
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© 1986 Stanley R. Sloan
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Sloan, S.R. (1986). The Original Bargain. In: NATO’s Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08362-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08362-6_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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