Pactomania

• 1. Introduction

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  Pactomania is the nickname for a burst of American treaty-making between 1945 and 1955, and the word itself first appeared in an article in The New York Times in 1955. In those years the United States concluded or ratified a striking number of alliances, treaties, and pacts. For most of its earlier history, the country had kept formal alliances at arm's length. So what made it change course so completely? Who drove the effort, and what were they afraid of? And which of these agreements still bind nations today, while others quietly disappeared? The first answer lies in an old piece of advice that American leaders had long treated almost as a rule.

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• 2. Washington's Warning

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  George Washington's farewell address discouraged involvement in other countries' affairs, and the Monroe Doctrine carried the same caution forward. American foreign policy followed that line, apart from the two world wars. Historians describe the United States of this earlier period as interventionist in world affairs, yet isolationist when it came to alliances. Political scientists such as Bear Braumoeller argue that Washington used other tools, especially financial ones, to shape events abroad while avoiding pacts.

  The end of World War II broke that habit. American forces occupied Japan, southern Korea, and zones in Germany and Austria. The country hosted the new United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Through the Bretton Woods system, it also made the US dollar the world's reserve currency.

  Defense planning began modestly. At first the US backed the idea of collective security among the five powers on the UN Security Council. It concentrated on guarding its own sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, using the Organization of American States and the multilateral Rio Pact. Then the Cold War split the world in two, and both the Soviet Union and the US set out to gather allies. Trouble was already building in Greece, where a civil war was underway.

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• 3. Containment Takes Shape

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  The Greek Civil War and the Turkish Straits crisis showed that the United Kingdom could not handle these pressures on its own. Washington had its own reasons for alarm. It saw a large Soviet military presence, satellite states installed in Eastern Europe, and espionage inside the United States. Officials also feared that communism could spread through devastated Europe and through nations emerging from colonial rule. The answer was the Truman Doctrine, a policy of containing communism.

  Economic ruin made the fear sharper. In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall suggested a plan that would carry his name. Several European countries were in shambles. Their cities could not produce enough goods to trade with resource-producing regions, and they could not feed their own people. Meanwhile the Soviet Union had taken control of Eastern Europe, which threatened the west of the continent.

  The Marshall Plan proposed that the US pay to rebuild Europe's economic infrastructure. It was also meant to slow further Soviet expansion. The man who would later run American diplomacy under President Eisenhower had a lawyer's faith in a different tool, the signed agreement.

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• 4. The Treaty Lawyer

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  John Foster Dulles served as Secretary of State to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after a brief stretch as a senator. His career in law shaped his values and gave him a lasting conviction that treaties were a strong weapon against communist forces. He kept returning to that strategy. In 1945, he helped create the UN Charter. In 1954, he helped create both the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and the Middle East Treaty Organization.

  One of his ideas never took off. Dulles proposed a Northeast Asia Treaty Organization, known as NEATO, but it was shelved. The US chose bilateral alliances with the individual states concerned instead.

  Before his death, he also contributed to the Eisenhower Doctrine. His earliest treaty work, the UN Charter of 1945, belonged to an organization with a troubled predecessor.

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• 5. Charter and Rio

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  In November 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the idea of the United Nations to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. China, the USSR, the UK, and the US then discussed and proposed it jointly. The new body was meant to replace the League of Nations. Former President Woodrow Wilson had helped found that League after the First World War, yet the US never joined it.

  The Declaration of the United Nations was crafted at the Arcadia Conference in 1942. The organization itself was officially created with the signing of the UN Charter in 1945, and both events took place in American cities. President Harry Truman wanted America to take part in more international organizations. The US became a founding member and the first country to ratify the Charter. The Charter set up separate bodies called organs, including the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council, and the International Court of Justice.

  The Rio Pact, also called the Rio Treaty, took far longer to arrive. Leaders of the Americas had discussed it since the late 1930s, meeting in several South American cities. They could not agree, partly because of hesitance from the US and Uruguay. In 1947, Senator Vandenburg publicly backed the idea in a speech, and the Senate accepted it. Nations could then sign the treaty in Rio de Janeiro.

  Original signers included Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and the United States. The core promise was that an attack on one member obliged the others to help defend it, if asked. Cuba was suspended in 1964 because of its support for communism. The US asked for support under the treaty after the 9/11 attacks, but otherwise it has fallen into disuse. Its design influenced the Vandenburg Resolution, which pointed across the Atlantic.

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• 6. Road to NATO

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  On the 11th of June 1948, a draft resolution by Arthur H. Vandenburg was introduced in the Senate, where it was approved. Vandenburg was a Republican senator, a former candidate for his party's presidential nomination, and an avid supporter of multilateralism. The Rio Treaty and the Marshall Plan had come first. Together they gave Americans the idea of a similar collective defense agreement with Europe, aimed at preventing Soviet control. The resolution pushed the country toward NATO and showed how much weight international agreements now carried.

  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a collective defense treaty meant to maintain peace in the North Atlantic region. Its most prominent feature was collective defense itself. The US and its European partners worried about Soviet expansion, and such an agreement would keep nations from standing defenseless against a Soviet invasion. The first outline of the idea came from the Vandenburg Resolution.

  In 1948, the US, the UK, and Canada began to brainstorm the organization. In 1949, twelve members signed the treaty in Washington, DC. Across the Pacific, the story would run through a defense perimeter drawn on a map.

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• 7. Spokes Across the Pacific

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  In Asia, the US first relied on the Acheson Line, a so-called defense perimeter that did not put China, Korea, or Taiwan at the top of its priorities. Then China fell to communism, and the public outcry in the United States forced a rethink. America entered the Korean War and built a web of bilateral security alliances along the western Pacific Rim. This arrangement is often called the hub-and-spoke system. The spokes ran to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.

  The Treaty of Peace with Japan was signed in San Francisco on the 8th of September 1951. It ended hostilities, settled some land disputes among China, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the US, and arranged compensation for people harmed in the war. It did not, however, guarantee that foreign military occupation would leave Japan. Shortly afterward, the two countries signed a mutual security treaty.

  Also in 1951, the US and the Philippines signed a bilateral Mutual Defense Treaty. If either nation were endangered, the other could use military force to help. The two countries have remained allies under it ever since, and it ranks among the longest-lasting mutual defense treaties in the world.

  ANZUS, signed in 1951 by Australia, New Zealand, and the US, was less a mutual defense treaty than a pact of mutual aid. The US first thought the idea unnecessary, until the three nations shared worries about the spread of communism. America proposed it to Australia, and New Zealand was brought in afterward. In 1984, New Zealand banned nuclear weapons, and the US cut its treaty ties with New Zealand.

  The 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty with the Republic of Korea followed the Korean War. It protects South Korea from the common enemy of both nations, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. One more Asian pact, signed in Manila, would take a very different shape from these bilateral deals.

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• 8. Pacts That Faded

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  SEATO, also known as the Manila Pact, joined the US with France, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Its stated aims were to guard against communism in Southeast Asia and to improve conditions in the region. Some countries held "observer" status. They were still covered by the pact but could not influence it. The organization was officially created in Manila in 1955, with its headquarters in Bangkok. It split in 1977, yet its underlying collective defense treaty remains in force and forms the basis of the US-Thailand mutual security alliance.

  The US-Taiwan mutual defense alliance lasted from 1955 until 1979. That year President Jimmy Carter nullified it on his own, as the US recognized the communist mainland. The Supreme Court affirmed his right to do so in Goldwater v. Carter. Congress then passed the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979, and through it the US retains significant military relations with Taiwan.

  The Middle East Treaty Organization, or the Baghdad Pact, was meant to contribute to peace in the region. The US came up with the idea but stayed an observer for the pact's entire life, and the source attributes this to "the pro-Israel lobby". Tensions with Arab states, particularly Iraq, led to a relocation and a new name, the Central Treaty Organization. The Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah, and CENTO ended in 1979.

  Many of these alliances still stand. Their influence reaches from the Vietnam War to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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