Exceptional by Dick Cheney Page B

President Truman explained:
    The principal risk involved, Bevin said, was that the Russians might be so provoked by the formation of a defense organization that they would resort to rash measures and plunge the world into war. . . . On the other hand, if a collective security system could be built up effectively, it was more than likely that the Russians might restudy the situation and become more cooperative.
    Recognizing that leaving individual European nations to defend themselves would be the ultimate provocation, the United States and eleven other nations agreed to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The North AtlanticTreaty was signed in Washington on April 4, 1949, and ratified by the Senate on July 21. It would become the most successful military alliance in history.
    For forty years, from the signing of the NATO treaty in 1949 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the alliance was crucial in deterring Soviet aggression and keeping the peace. Without NATO and the commitment of the United States to maintain large numbers of forces in Germany and elsewhere on the continent, there can be no doubt that the Soviets would have moved to expand the territory under their control. The security guarantee provided by NATO was crucial to Western Europe’s ability to rebuild thriving economies, free from the constant threat of Soviet adventurism.
    The twelve original NATO member nations were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States. In 1952, Greece and Turkey joined, and in 1955, West Germany became a member. In 1966, the French, who were seeking improved relations with theSoviets and had doubts about America’s willingness to make good on its extended deterrence commitments to Europe, announced they were pulling out of NATO’s military structure and requested the removal of NATO bases from French territory. When told of French president Charles de Gaulle’s decision, President Lyndon Johnson famously instructed Secretary of State Dean Rusk to ask De Gaulle, “Does your order include the bodies of American soldiersin France’s cemeteries?”
    Spain joined NATO in 1980, and, as the Cold War came to an end, NATO began to offer membership to former Warsaw Pact nations. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic joined in 1999, and Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004.
    The heart of NATO’s defense pact is found in Article 5, which embodies the concept of collective self-defense. It holds that “an armed attack on one or more [members] shall be considered an armed attack on all.” Less than twenty-four hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Article 5 was invoked for the first time in the fifty-year history of the alliance.
    AT 4:00 P.M. ON May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion stepped out of a car at No. 16 Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The white-haired Ben-Gurion entered the city’s art museum, where at 5:00 P.M. he declared the establishment of thestate of Israel. Eleven minutes later, the United States recognized the new country. President Truman had been committed to the cause of the creation of a Jewish state. He recognized Israel despite the fact that, as he described it, “[t]he Department of State’s specialists on the Near East were, almost without exception, unfriendly to theidea of a Jewish state.”
    On May 15, British forces, stationed in Palestine for the previous thirty years,pulled out. Five Arab armies invaded the newly created state. Born in war, Israel has survived and thrived in one of the world’smost dangerous regions to become one of America’s strongest and most important allies—until the Obama administration.
    ON JANUARY 12, 1950, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained American policy in Asia. He described an American “defensive