French Told U.S. that West Germany Could Join NATO as Long as There Was “No Independent Wehrmacht”

State Department Intelligence Saw NATO as a “Place” to Help West Germany “Satisfy its Reasonable Aspirations and Contain any Potential Unreasonable Ones”

A lot more things are making sense...

Washington, D.C., December 11, 2018 – In the Fall of 1966, as part of an ongoing debate about the U.S. troop presence in Western Europe and the role of NATO during the Cold War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sent an illuminating memo to President Lyndon B. Johnson to explain the political reasons for keeping U.S. troops in Europe. The rationales, he wrote, were to maintain NATO’s “cohesion,” to prevent Soviet “political blackmail,” to deter “any bilateral Soviet-FRG [Federal Republic of Germany] security agreement,” and to discourage “the revival of German militarism,” according to a collection of previously classified documents published today for the first time by the National Security Archive,

Against the current backdrop of discussions at the top levels of the U.S. government over security guarantees in Europe , McNamara’s memo and a selection of other declassified U.S. documentation posted today by the National Security Archive provide historical context for decades of U.S. policy toward Europe and more specifically the functions of NATO and the relationship between Germany and European security. Since the formation of the North Atlantic alliance in the early years of the Cold War and the decision to keep U.S. troops in Europe, U.S. policymakers have generally seen those commitments as critical to both U.S. and European security.

With World War II then only two decades past, concern that a West Germany unmoored from alliance relations could turn revanchist or make deals with the Soviet Union remained in the thinking of top American policymakers. Declassified documents in today’s Web posting demonstrate how the United States and its allies established NATO partly to reassure France about Germany. The allies then brought West Germany into the alliance as a deterrent against the Soviet Union but also to ensure that it did not develop independent military forces. During the 1960s State Department intelligence analysts described that arrangement as a means to “contain” the West German state so that it developed in harmonious association with former adversaries and avoided militarism or security arrangements with the Soviet Union.