According to Robert A. Ford, a distinguished Canadian diplomat who served as the dean of ambassadors in Moscow and as an adviser to NATO on Soviet affairs, it was a “myth“ that what „NATO had actually done was prevent a military invasion.“ The real threat to Europe had been the political disintegration of the allies, and this is what NATO had prevented. Ford’s analysis was not unique; it was shared widely in the alliance from the 1940s through to the early 1990s. Even the State Department’s champions of an Atlantic Pact, men like Theodore Achilles, recalled: „I don’t think there has ever been any serious danger of an all out Soviet armed attack west of the East German—West German frontier. The danger has been, and still is, that the Russians can resort to … subversion and political blackmail backed by the threat of force.“

The great fear of NATO’s leaders throughout the Cold War and beyond was not that the Soviet Union or Russia would launch an invasion of Europe. Instead, they feared that Moscow might threaten—even imply—the use of force. The very hint of war might drive citizens in Europe to press their leaders to concede to the Kremlin’s demands rather than risk another cataclysm on the continent. Thus what American officials called the „inadequacies and anomalies of NATO, the relative unrealism of the military plans, and the slightly fictional aspects of NATO,“ were understood on both sides of the Atlantic to be essential components for providing Europeans with an intangible sense of security.

—Timothy A. Sayle, Enduring Alliance, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 2.