December 1999/January 2000 Alan W. Dowd WHEN NATO’s FOUNDING
FATHERS convened in Washington to create the Alliance in 1949,
their primary concern was protecting Western Europe from the Red
Army — not smothering ethnic quarrels in the Balkans. Lord
Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, famously and bluntly
described the organization’s mission as "keeping the Russians
out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." For two
generations, the Alliance succeeded in this three-pronged
mission. But NATO did more than block Moscow’s march across
Europe, maintain a transatlantic bridge, and rehabilitate
Germany. Remarkably, old enemies became allies under NATO’s
umbrella; and Western Europe, the main battleground for two
world wars, became a zone of peace and stability. Today, NATO is
attempting to expand that zone into Eastern Europe. NATO’s
Washington Summit in April 1999 served to underscore the
organization’s newfound concern for the East. Alliance leaders
used the occasion to unveil a new Strategic Concept — a kind