For several months, a heartbreaking chorus of “European” leaders (United Kingdom included) has deplored the irreversible attack on “European” defense by a crude American President threatening to ruining excellent European-American relations and exposing them to Russian aggression, after nearly 80 years of a loyal and secure defense alliance. The success of this campaign is based on the ignorance in which the populations have been kept regarding reality. of this “Alliance”: with the partial exception of De Gaulle’s second presidential term, where he ordered France’s withdrawal from the military organization of the Atlantic Pact, in fact, contested in the United States the only substance of the said Pact: their naval air bases. An important but incomplete decision – de Gaulle did not denounce the Atlantic Pact – was called into question in the following presidencies, and Nicolas Sarkozy dealt him a fatal blow, the effort being continued by his successors, minus Nuclear, we are told. See…
The “peripheral strategy” of the United States
The “Pact” signed on April 4, 1949 consecrated the triumph of the “peripheral strategy” implemented by the United States since the First World War. It consisted of obtaining total control of the continent European, without participation in most of the fighting (a structurally impossible task for the army of a country which had not Never been subjected to external attack). It would be replaced by a financial contribution to “the war effort”, via arms credits granted to a group of belligerents (who would spend the post-war period repaying them, subject to the related pressures) to defeat the other group and impose on them, via defeat, a new “compromise”, more favorable to the United States. In the first two world wars, it was Germany, a major business partner, but too greedy a rival. The United States chipped away at its claims with European soldiers before “rebuilding” it with a flood of American credits – largely and notoriously dedicated to its “revenge” rearmament. This strategy assumed military absence until definitive determination of the outcome of the conflict, spring-summer 1918, summer 1944, then final military intervention, before definitive determination of the gains of the “Allied” financial and total winner of the two conflicts.
The official balance sheet of losses in the two world wars is explicit, very low for the United States: First World War, 117,000 including 53,000 “dead in combat”, especially in France; Second World War: less than 300,000 deaths on the Asian and European fronts, again, especially in France (and Belgium). In both wars, zero civilian casualties. The two countries most affected in the First, Russia (1914-1917), more than 1.8 million military deaths, 1.5 million civilian deaths (record broken for both categories), approximately 7 million additional for the undeclared war of the “West”, including Japan, 1918-1920; France, 1914-November 1918, respectively 1.4 million and 300,000. 1941-1945, the USSR, according to the American military historian David Glantz, 35 million dead, including 20 million civilians. These figures dispense with debate on the identity of the military victors.
And its mortal perils for the “Allies”
The “peripheral strategy”, based, since the Second World War, on overwhelming air superiority, via “strategic bombing”, was at the heart of the preparations for the next one, from 1942-1943. It was a matter of wresting military control of the world, against the enemy, the USSR, an objective presented (obviously without designation) by General Henry Arnold, Chief of the Air Staff, in November 1943: it is impossible to “tolerate restrictions on our ability to station and operate military aviation in and over certain territories under foreign sovereignty”; the next war will have “the backbone of American strategic bombers”; “An international army, an instrument of American policy,” will be responsible for menial tasks.terrestrial– which will “internationalize and legitimize American power.†The next great war would be fought, on the American side, more radically than the previous one, not against Germany, but against the Soviet rival (22.4 million km2 since 1940-1941 then 1945, and such tempting natural resources).
Each “ally” of the United States would therefore provide them with air and naval attack bases, like those which the English had had to release to them, from the summer of 1940 to 1941, pressure on “credits” helping, (from Newfoundland, Caribbean, 1940, Greenland, Iceland, 1941, etc.). Michael Sherry’s essential work on these issues must be translated. The gigantic harvest of the Second World War (French “Empire” included, since the invasion of North Africa in November 1942), grew further after May 1945. The list, confirmed or extended after the war by all the cedants, including France, was codified when Washington imposed on its “allies” its Pact, concluded for 50 years, and renewable (it was in 1999). These leaders of countries driven by the American rules of Bretton Woods on the unchallenged reign of the dollar were all the more docile as the borrower and “protector” protected them from their people radicalized by the Crisis and then the war: 1947-1948 demonstrated this in France (May 1947) then in Italy (May 1947 and April 1948). No risk of internal change would resist American “protection”. The Atlantic Pact was above all “a Holy Alliance”, as the Secretary General of the Quai d’Orsay, Jean Chauvel, wrote in March 1948 (a year before signing). It remains so.
On a military level, it’s something else. Contrary to legend, the signatories were not “afraid” of the warlike intentions of the USSR: brought to its knees by the war, ruined, deprived of “reparations” (like the victors of the First World War, including herself), it did not have them. never threatened by the slightest conflict and was not likely to take a liking to it. Everyone knew, in high places, that this post-war period would reproduce previous wars in all respects, including subsequent wars. The fight against the USSR involved rapid rearmament of Germany, begun in March 1945: of the 27 divisions of the Wehrmacht still in the West, 26 were busy evacuating troops and equipment through the northern ports to the “good” enemies; the “170 divisions on the Eastern Front” fought until May 9 inclusive (liberation of Prague), 1969 revelation by Gabriel Kolko (not translated). Why then did the Western “Allies” keep these excellent fighters?
This was clear before the constitution of the FRG entrusted to the old Pan-Germanist Adenauer surrounded by ex-Nazi peers. From 1948 onwards, all we talked about was the imminent rearmament: how to do without the “military potential represented in Germany by many well-seasoned generations” against the “Russian armies”, wrote the French ambassador in Washington, Henri Bonnet, in March 1949. The “potential” was led by the leaders of the Wehrmacht, Nazified to the bone, who formed the “European” framework of the executors of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1950). Everything was put in place when Washington had wrested, via the French capitulation, under Mendès France then Edgar Faure, the official principle of “German rearmament” (October 1954-May 1955). Including credits in dollars “linked” to gigantic purchases of “integrated” American arms, of complete “European” relevance.
During the American ratification debate of May 1949, Clarence Cannon, Democratic chairman of the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives, brutally described the perils of membership, reducing the famous “Article 5” to nothing. “of the Pact, the one today brandished without respite, of “defense”, with the United States at the head, of any “ally” attacked: “consultation” of the allies on this subject would not be worth American “commitment” against “the aggressor”. When Washington attacked “the enemy”, the Europeans would just have to provide what the adversaries of the Atlantic Pact called “cannon fodder” and leave their permanent bases available to the United States.
Cannon assigned them two missions: 1. “to make their contribution by sending the young men necessary to occupy enemy territory after we have demoralized and annihilated it by our aerial attacks”, without prejudice to the maritime nations from their naval contribution; 2° to offer America the free disposal, “on their territory, of air bases for strategic bombings. Thanks to the Atlantic Pact, we will have Allies who have troops and ships and who should also have the opportunity to fulfill their obligations as contracting powers.”New York Times et Washington Post in the lead) immediately tried to put out the fire, calling his remarks an “intrusion […] inept and stupid, of lucubration, of irresponsible delirium”, etc. – which would be exploited by “the communist press of the whole world”.
The American bombings of France (1942-1944) caused 75,000 civilian deaths. The memory remained vivid and a (small) part of the French were informed by L’Humanité of what awaited the population in the event of conflict (the Quai d’Orsay, worried, had already 1947 organisé un service spécialisé de réponse aux « mensonges et exagérations » du journal). Meªme les lecteurs du Monde de Beuve-Méry gleaned information from 1948 to 1951. The Catholic Étienne Gilson, angry with the very long “American neutrality” (pro-German) of the pre-war and early years of the Second, dealt with the perils linked to the loss of sovereignty over the bases américaines. The tandem would be surprised by the current tone of Monde. The silence quickly fell again, Humanité except for several decades.
The topicality of the thing bursts out… The Atlantic Pact consists above all, since signingin bases ceded by the signatories, violating the sovereignty of the cedants, starting point of aggression against other powers exposing them to reprisals from the attacked country. Without any commitment from the assignee “protection”.
The war against Iran, conducted from American bases in Europe and the Gulf, has just demonstrated this.
Annie Lacroix-Riz – historian
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9int%C3%A9gration_de_la_France_dans_le_commandement_int%C3%A9gr%C3%A9_de_l%27 NATO, an often questionable “source”, provides useful quotes here.
The German-Soviet War 1941-1945, myths and realitiesParis, Delga, 2022
Preparing for the next war, American Plans for postwar defense, 1941-1945New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977.
Lacroix-Riz, “The entry of Scandinavia into the Atlantic Pact (1943-1949): an essential “heartbreaking review”, world wars and contemporary conflictsfive articles (instead of two contiguous), stretched from 1988 to 1994 by Jean-Claude Allain (list, https://historiographie.info/cv0420252025.pdf).
The Politics of War. The World and the United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945New York, Random House, 1969.
