Past Predictions
Looking back at a 1995 vision for how NATO might evolve.
Like many historians, my early efforts to flesh out a new project involve a lot of time in the library. And on my last trip to the stacks, as I wandered the aisles, I picked up a collection of essays on the alliance published in 1995. The book’s subtitle posed a question on the minds of many: NATO in the Post-Cold War Era: Does It Have a Future?1
The collection opens with a speculative and brief counterfactual history of how early postwar Europe might have evolved without the North Atlantic Treaty penned by the dean of NATO scholars, Lawrence S. Kaplan. Italy, in Kaplan’s fictional past, ends up sucked into the Soviet world, while Belgium crumbles, breaking in two under the weight of its own internal factionalism. France is even more paranoid about its place in Europe. The United Kingdom would have lost its old stature as a great power with imperial weight to throw around even faster. The list goes on.
Any of Kaplan’s alternatives might be contested, of course. But it is an intriguing thought experiment about how much NATO actually mattered and how much it changed European politics.
But what caught my attention were Kaplan’s predictions about his own time, his dabbling in forecasting and futurology about how NATO might evolve in the 1990s.
Take, for instance, this excerpt:
Insufficient as the Partnership for Peace may have been, it was a source of some comfort to the East Europeans. As Russia discovers that America’s presence in Europe through NATO is a stabilizing force, it will become more accepting of the Western alliance. The unsatisfactory partnership with Eastern Europe will be replaced by membership, including the guarantees under Article 5. This does not mean that Polish or Hungarian armies will be rebuilt or their militaries integrated into a SHAPE command. What will make their membership acceptable is that Poland and Hungary’s status will be much like Spain’s or Iceland’s—outside a military structure but inside a security system. NATO for Poland will resemble the alliance as it existed before the Korean War converted it into a military organization.2
For those keeping score at home, we might give Kaplan a few points. He got one big thing right. The partnership with Eastern Europe did prove to be entirely unsatisfactory—and not just to the Eastern Europeans.
On the specifics, though, virtually all of Kaplan’s other guesses missed the mark in some pretty obvious ways. NATO does not resemble its pre-1950 iteration. Polish and Hungarian membership is not muted or diluted. That turned out not to be the price of admission for Warsaw or Budapest.
Perhaps most striking and bittersweet from our vantage point is Kaplan’s Russia. It is almost painful to read the underlying hope of that prediction in 2023. Certainly, that Russia is not the version in our real world, here and now.
It is a good reminder of the sense of uncertainty in the 1990s—of what seemed possible and what seemed impossible, even if those scenarios turned out to be figments of the imagination like the collapse of Belgium.
S. Victor Papacosma and Mary Ann Heiss, eds., NATO in the Post-Cold War Era: Does It Have a Future? (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).
Lawrence S. Kaplan, “NATO After Forty-Five Years: A Counterfactual History,” in NATO in the Post-Cold War Era, 20.