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Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order

December 10, 2019 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

This recording is the property of the SMU Center for Presidential History and may only be used for research and teaching purposes. It cannot be copied or reproduced for profit. © 2019


Enduring Alliance

Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some seventy years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era.

In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO.

As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.

Timothy A. Sayle is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, former postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History, and co-editor of The Last Card: Inside George W. Bush’s Decision to Surge in Iraq.

Co-sponsored by our partners at the George W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum and the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth.

Details

Date:
December 10, 2019
Time:
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Event Category:

Organizers

Brian Franklin
Ronna Spitz

Venue

Dallas Hall 306 (McCord Auditorium)
3225 University Blvd
Dallas, TX 75205 United States
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