129
But in various ways, America’s other partners could also find special avenues of access and convenience in the postwar order that made American power more useful and predictable. America’s partners faced a leading postwar state that was relatively open and accessible.
This allowed them to calculate that they would not be dominated and, indeed, that they could better achieve their interests by participating in the postwar order than resisting it.
Binding Institutions
Restraint and reassurance were also established through postwar institutionsthemselves, which together locked in open, multilateral policy orientationsand bound the major Western states together. United States andEurope each attempted to lock the other party into specific postwar institutionalcommitments. They accomplished this in part by agreeing in turnto operate within those institutions as well, even if sometimes reluctantly.
Governments ordinarily seek to preserve their options, to cooperate with other states but to leave open the option of disengaging. What the United
States and the otherWestern states did after the war was exactly the opposite: they built long-term economic, political, and security commitments that were difficult to retract. The emerging ColdWar provided an impetusfor the most formal and elaborate binding
The most complex and consequential binding institutions were security alliances. These aggregated power to counter the threat of Soviet communism, but they were also institutions that were intended to stabilize and manage power relations among the partner states. The NATO alliance provided a mechanism for the rehabilitation and reintegration of western Germany, an instrument of what has been called dual containment.”
130
But it also locked in America’s reluctant security commitment to Europe and tied the European states together, reinforcing their movement toward regional integration. In this way, the NATOalliance operated along with other postwar institutions as a multifaceted instrument of quadruplecontainment.”
The most consistent British and French objective during and after the war was to bind the United States to Europe. The evolution in American policy, from the goal of a European third force to acceptance of an ongoing security commitment within NATO, was a story of American reluctance and European persistence. The European search for an American security tie was not simply a response to the rise of the Soviet threat. As early as 1943, Winston Churchill proposed a Supreme World Council (composed of the United States, Britain, Russia, and perhaps China) and regional councils for Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and the Pacific.
In an attempt to institutionalize an American link to Europe, Churchill suggested that the United States would be represented in the European Regional Council, in addition to its role in its own hemisphere. Reflecting American ambivalence about a postwar commitment to Europe, one historian notes, Roosevelt feared Churchill’s council as a device for tying the United States down in Europe.”
131
During and after the war, Britain and France sought to bind the United States to Europe in order to make American power more predictable, accessible, and usable. The NATO alliance was particularly useful as an institution that made the exercise of American power more certain and less arbitrary. Despite the vast differences in the size and military power of the various alliance partners, NATO enshrined the principles of equality of status, nondiscrimination, and multilateralism.