North Atlantic Treaty
The North Atlantic Treaty formalized the recommendation of the Vandenberg Resolution “to remove the veto from all questions involving pacific settlements of international disputes and situations.”
...it would be far better to work out all of these things within the general structure of the United Nations and its Security Council. But so long as an arbitrary Soviet veto continues it is impossible to do so. It is equally impossible to remove the veto without Soviet consent unless we scrap the old Charter and write a new one… The great virtue of Article 51 is that it permits peaceful nations to defend international justice and security scrupulously within the Charter but outside the veto. |
"Signature of the North Atlantic Treaty- April 4th 1949 in Washington," North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
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The Foreign Relations committee unanimously approved the pact and brought it to the Senate shortly thereafter. During Senate debate, Vandenberg began his speech by saying:
Hank Meijer on Vandenberg's NATO Hearings. Interview with Mr. Meijer, Personal Interview.
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My view is that this Treaty is the most sensible, powerful, practicable, and economical step the United States can now take in the realistic interest of its own security; In the effective discouragement of aggressive conquest which would touch off World War Three; In the stabilization of Western Germany; and, as declared by its own preamble, in peacefully safeguarding the freedoms and the civilization founded on the safeguarding of the freedoms and the civilization founded on the principles of Democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law. These things… I shall undertake to prove. |
The Treaty passed by a vote of 82 to 13, despite considerable conflict during the debate.
He privately revealed to his wife:
I get so damned sick of that little band of GOP isolationists who are always in the way that I could scream.
-Arthur Vandenberg, July 1949 [3]