Atlanticists seem to have largely forgotten about the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and the role he played in the creation of NATO – for example, few of my former colleagues at the German Marshall Fund seemed to have even heard of him. As NATO approaches its 70^thanniversary, which it will celebrate at a summit in London in December amid much uncertainty about its future, it seems like a good time to remember Bevin. But it is not just Atlanticists that seem to have forgotten him. It’s also the British left. With the Labour Party divided between centre-left Blairites and far-left Corybnistas, it seems to me that Bevin matters because he reminds us that a left-wing economic policy and a realistic, robust foreign policy can go together.

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