Volume 7, Number 1 · July 28, 1966
The Day They Buried NATO
By Ronald Steel
Europe's Future: The Grand Alternatives
by David P. Calleo
Horizon, 192 pp., $4.95
Germany and the Atlantic Alliance
by James L. Richardson
Harvard, 403 pp., $8.95
The day they buried NATO was warm and sunny, and everybody was too busy to come to the funeral. The French were off flirting with the Russians in Siberia, the British were immobilized by strikes, the Greeks and Turks were threatening war over Cyprus, the West Germans were busy debating with the East Germans on television, the Italians were having a governmental crisis, the Portuguese were fighting in Angola, the Belgians were rioting about what language they speak, and the Americans were launching a new intervention in the Caribbean. It was, in short, a typical day, and all the members of the family sent their regrets. The deceased was quietly laid to rest in a filling cabinet overlooking the Potomac, and nobody seemed to pay any attention, except for a Russian with binoculars. The nearest of kin held a brief wake in NATO's elegant Paris quarters—which was soon to become the new Chinese Embassy—and then went their separate ways exchanging vows to write one another regularly.
Review, 3576 words
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