The “Agonizing Reappraisal”: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the European Defense Community

Extract

On 14 December 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stood before the North Atlantic Council. His address began on familiar ground, stressing the persistent nature of the Soviet threat and the need for strength and resolve within the Atlantic community. European union, he said, would form the “solid core” of Atlantic association; the European Defense Community (EDC) would be the heart of Western European security. He realized that some present feared that the EDC was but a first step toward an American abandonment of Western Europe. The United States, he assured his listeners, contemplated no such action. At the Bermuda conference only days before, the United States had again promised “intimate and durable cooperation” in the defense of the Atlantic world and unflagging support of the EDC. And who could doubt former General Dwight David Eisenhower—Supreme Allied Commander—in his commitment to a free and democratic Western Europe?

After reassuring the council that the United States would continue to help the nations of Western Europe defend themselves, Dulles warned that they would have to contribute to their own defense. The plan before them awaited action: French Premier René Pleven's 1950 proposal for a European Defense Community—a supranational army composed of divisional units contributed by France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, and Germany, all serving within NATO. In the Bonn Convention and the Treaty of Paris signed in May 1952, the NATO allies made the ratification of the EDC a condition for the restoration of German sovereignty. But the treaty still hung fire. The United States considered a German contribution to the common defense absolutely essential to the security of the Atlantic community. The EDC seemed the best way to secure that contribution without rekindling fears of German militarism, because German forces would be safely integrated into the larger organization under international control. “If, however,” he warned, “the European Defense Community should not become effective, … there would indeed be grave doubt as to whether Continental Europe could be made a place of safety. That would compel an agonizing reappraisal of basic United States policy.”1