In the first post-war years Belgium emerged as a convinced supporter of Western European defence arrangements under British leadership. Only in 1947 did Belgium gradually discover a privileged partner in the United States, though initially only at the economic and financial level. It would take till the summer of 1948 before Belgian diplomacy shelved its post-war project for European defence and signed up to an Atlantic alliance. In the decades that followed, Belgium proved itself a loyal NATO partner. Nevertheless, the good relations between Brussels and Washington did not prevent profound crises disturbing the calm now and then. Moreover, unlike the Netherlands, Belgium was to make its own original contribution to détente between East and West. The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, and the implosion of the Soviet Union, in 1991, brought an end to the Cold War and to the bipolar world order. This led to a debate about new European defence architecture in all the NATO countries, including Belgium, now the continent was no longer divided between East and West. In Belgium the debate was settled fairly quickly when the body politic, across party borders, returned to the original European defence option Paul-Henri Spaak had championed from 1945 to 1948. Combining European primacy and autonomy in the field of defence with Atlantic loyalty became a balancing act that turned out not always to be easy.