> Again, that's a very modern perspective.
Again, not being autonomous is the purpose of an alliance. It's the only purpose, and this is just as true of NATO-at-inception as it is of everything else. Portugal and France didn't get the ability to tell their own citizens that making trouble would get them squished by the United States. But they did get the ability to tell Spain that.
If you wanted to be strategically autonomous, you wouldn't have to do anything, because that's how you start out.
