On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, this year’s General Assembly focused on dealing mainly with Covid-19. Though the pandemic is a serious situation demanding a global response, it is hard to overstate the stark differences between the world we have now and the one that existed at the UN’s birth three-quarters of a century ago.
None of the challenges we face today are as acute as the violence, instability, and threats of war that characterized the state of global affairs at the time of to the first General Assembly in June 1945–and which four years later gave rise to the creation of NATO.
The rubble from World War II was still smoldering in parts of Europe and Asia and the world was reeling from the stunning deaths of more than 60 million souls; at least 64 million others had been driven from their homes. Economies lay in ruins.
At the beginning of 1945, however, it seemed there was real hope a better, more peaceful world would emerge after the end of the war. In February of that year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minster Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met in Yalta to decide what post-war Europe would look like.
In the summit’s official communique, the three leaders agreed that as soon as Europe had been liberated from Nazi oppression, each nation would be free to, “create democratic institutions of their own choice,” and, that “sovereign rights and self-government [would be returned] to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor Nations.” It didn’t take long, however, for the Soviet Union to expose its true intentions, denying freedom to all the countries under its control.
The dangers didn’t just come from Stalin, however. It’s hard to imagine now, but following Hitler’s defeat, communist parties were springing up all over Western Europe and competing for control of government. In the 1946 French legislative elections, the French Communist Party won 28% of the vote and had more than 800,000 members. In the first post-war election in Italy, the Italian Communist Party won 31% of the 1948 vote. That same year Greece was in the midst of an outright civil war between democratic and communist factions, and in Czechoslovakia, communist forces seized power via a coup.
In 1946, Winston Churchill gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri in which he warned that a “shadow has fallen upon” Europe because of the USSR’s “expansive and proselytizing tendencies” towards exporting communist ideologies. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” the former British Prime Minister said, “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.” Two years later, the dangers posed by that shadow were exposed with the USSR blockade of Berlin, which ultimately proved to be the opening salvo of the Cold War.
And in August 1949, the fear of a global nuclear holocaust was born when the Soviet Union ended America’s short-lived monopoly on nuclear weapons and tested its first atomic bomb. Eastern Europe was now fully entombed under Soviet domination. Western Europe was weak, divided, and vulnerable, both politically and militarily. It is no wonder, then, that the British and French foreign ministers were so aggressive in trying to convince the United States to join them in the trans-Atlantic security relationship which would eventually become NATO.
The volatile security and economic situation that characterized Europe around the time of the establishment of the UN and NATO are long since gone. All the Central European states that were once allied with the Soviet Union are now either independent or allied with the West. The European Union is now one of the strongest, most modern economies in the world. With the threat of Russian invasion now only a shadow of its Soviet past, more Western countries are acting in their own self-interest with less and less regard for alliance unity.
Germany views Russia as no more than a minimal military threat and joined Moscow to build the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline between the two countries. When Berlin and Moscow announced their intention to build a second pipeline, Washington was so angry it threatened “crushing legal and economic sanctions” on Berlin. And showing little concern for alliance unity, Turkey and Greece are waging a war of words against one another over mineral rights, bringing the two sides to the brink of an actual war.
More than 70 years after NATO’s founding, the world has undergone dramatic transformation. Beyond several rounds of unnecessary expansion following the end of the Cold War, however, the Alliance stubbornly clings to the anachronistic past. The world has dramatically changed since the 1940s. It’s time NATO finally caught up.
Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who retired in 2015 after 21 years, including four combat deployments. Follow him @DanielLDavis1
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