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Sto caricando le informazioni... Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATOdi Peter Apps
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'HUGELY IMPRESSIVE' - THE INDEPENDENT 'AN ASTONISHINGLY FINE HISTORY' - COUNTRY LIFE 'FASCINATING' - DAILY MAIL The history of the world's most successful military alliance, from the wrecked Europe of 1945 to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. As they signed NATO into being after World War II, its founders fervently believed that only if the West's democracies banded permanently together could they avoid a catastrophic global atomic conflict. Over the 75 years since, the alliance has indeed avoided war with Russia, also becoming a major political, strategic and diplomatic player well beyond its borders. It has survived disagreements between leaders from Eisenhower, Churchill and de Gaulle to Trump, Stoltenberg and Merkel, faced down Kremlin foes from Stalin to Putin and endured unending questions and debate over what new nations might be allowed to join. Deterring Armageddon takes the reader from backroom deals that led to NATO's creation, through the Cold War, the Balkans and Afghanistan to the current confrontation with the Kremlin following the invasion of Ukraine. It examines the tightrope walked by alliance leaders between a powerful United States sometimes flirting with isolationism and European nations with their ever-evolving wishes for autonomy and influence. Having spent much of its life preparing for conflicts that might never come, NATO has sometimes found itself in wars that few had predicted - and with its members now again planning for a potential major European conflict. It is a tale of tension, danger, rivalry, conflict, big personalities and high-stakes military and diplomatic posturing - as well as espionage, politics and protest. From the Korean War to the pandemic, the Berlin and Cuba crises to the chaotic evacuation from Kabul, Deterring Armageddon tells how the alliance has shaped and been shaped by history - and looks ahead to what might be the most dangerous era it has ever faced. 'Utterly eye-opening - compelling, haunting and continually illuminating. As Peter Apps so brilliantly demonstrates in this gripping book, the story of the NATO alliance is in many ways a parallel global history of the last 75 years. As well as all the outbreaks of seething tension between the US and its European allies - and the counter-moves of rival powers - this is also an account of just how often in those postwar years that we all stood on the edge of the most terrible abyss. With mesmerising fluency, and dazzling research, Apps follows the criss-crossing threads of the Cold War and beyond. Those threads converge in our shadowed present, and the conflict in Ukraine. In order to fathom today's dark world, Apps has explored a labyrinth of once-classified history, and he brings dazzling clarity.' - Sinclair McKay Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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With the war in Ukraine – which has re-energised NATO even as it has kept its own involvement in a state of deliberate ambiguity – entering its third year, it is unsurprising that there should be renewed interest in the North Atlantic alliance. But underneath it all is a sense of anxiety, widely but quietly shared, that NATO may not live to see its centenary. This anniversary may be the last big one and thus a particularly appropriate time to assess what NATO has accomplished so far and guess what its future will hold.
Peter Apps’ contribution to the occasion, Deterring Armageddon, is a straightforward and breezy history of NATO. A former Reuters correspondent and British army reservist, Apps has an eye for the dramatic, and the book’s almost 500 pages contain few longueurs despite much of it being concerned with bureaucratic debates among politicians with dimly remembered names.
Like a classical tragedy, the story of NATO’s creation, as retold by Apps, possessed unity of action, time and place. The men who assisted in its establishment and who shepherded it through its first years of existence were dramatic figures in their own right. There was Ernest Bevin, the unskilled labourer turned world statesman of the nuclear age. There was Dwight D. Eisenhower, for whom supreme military command of NATO provided a welcome escape from the ennui of peacetime university administration. And there was the middle-ranking Europhile American diplomat with the impossibly WASPish name of Theodore C. Achilles, who hoped the Atlantic alliance would one day turn into a federal union.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Yuan Yi Zhu is Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Law at Leiden University.