740.5/7–951
Memorandum by the Ambassador at Large (Jessup) to the Deputy Under Secretary of State (Matthews)
Thank you for letting me see Mr. Martin’s memorandum on NATO reorganization.1 I am not sufficiently abreast of developments on this subject to have any useful ideas, but I miss any statement of ultimate objectives in what apparently is a rather basic paper laying out principles [Page 219] which we should follow in regard to NATO. I wonder if we have a clear idea of the kind of development in and through NATO which we would consider desirable. The impression I get from reading this paper (and it may be a wholly erroneous impression) is that we still regard NATO as an interim mechanism for handling a current defense problem. The feeling I got in Europe was that NATO had the potentiality of being a permanent base on which some kind of more solid political structure could be built in the future. In short, it seems to me before determining U.S. policy toward NATO and organizational aspects, we ought to have a clear idea of what we expect NATO to amount to over the course of a number of years not only from the point of view of basic defense needs but from broader political considerations.
- Supra.↩