The burdens and dilemmas of the Atlantic alliance: John F. Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle and Western Europe, 1961--1963 (France)

This study revises prevailing interpretations of Franco-American relations during the early 1960s that rest on an oversimplified premise of French resistance to U.S. hegemony. Current monographs focus excessively on personalities, alternately chastising French President Charles de Gaulle for nationalistic intransigence or John F. Kennedy for willfully imposing U.S. policies on Western Europe. This study employs a broad array of French archival sources, documents from U.S. government agencies, and British and West German materials. This comprehensive multinational approach demonstrates that the structure and dynamics of the Franco-American bilateral relationship were embedded in complex multilateral relationships. Difficulties between Kennedy and de Gaulle were the outcome of a series of mutually reinforcing strategic and economic dilemmas, driven by domestic agendas, and shaped by differing conceptions about the double containment of Germany, and the Soviet Union. Three primary questions—Berlin, European integration, international finance—were linked in the minds of the Western leaders. Monetary issues became entangled with NATO strategy, Britain's EEC candidacy became enmeshed with nuclear sharing, and the on-going Berlin crisis served as a backdrop to issues. Kennedy's and de Gaulle's competing geostrategies were hemmed in by East-West crises, set against the difficulties posed by decolonization, and shaped by divergent domestic demands of their economies.; The larger historical significance of this study lies in three areas. Western expedients to prop up the tottering financial edifice of Bretton Woods were merely part of a series of “fire extinguisher” methods pursued intermittently from 1958 to the closing of the gold window in 1971. Franco-American disputes during the early 1960s also provide a window into the movement for European unity. Finally, although the Cold War is over, this analysis addresses critical strategic issues within the Western alliance that affected the intensity of the superpower conflict. This study reveals the key dynamics operating within NATO over the handling of the Berlin Crisis, directing German security issues, and meeting national demands for nuclear weapons. Kennedy and de Gaulle's contrasting strategies for Western Europe, which ultimately stood at an impasse, reveal a more variegated and multipolar world in the early 1960s than previous scholars have depicted.