On 4 April 2019 the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation celebrates its 70th birthday. Yet its first supreme commander, Dwight D Eisenhower, hoped that Nato would not outlast the 1950s. “If in ten years,” he told a friend in February 1951, “all American troops stationed in Europe for national defence purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”
Eisenhower insisted that, “We cannot be a modern Rome guarding the frontiers with our legions.” His philosophy was similar to that of Paul Hoffman, the US administrator of the Marshall Plan, namely “to get Europe on its feet and off our backs”.
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