The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.
NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. After the destruction of the Second World War, the nations of Europe struggled to rebuild their economies and ensure their security. The former required a massive influx of aid to help the war-torn landscapes re-establish industries and produce food, and the latter required assurances against a resurgent Germany or incursions from the Soviet Union. The United States viewed an economically strong, rearmed, and integrated Europe as vital to the prevention of communist expansion across the continent. As a result, Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a program of large-scale economic aid to Europe. The resulting European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, not only facilitated European economic integration but promoted the idea of shared interests and cooperation between the United States and Europe. Soviet refusal either to participate in the Marshall Plan or to allow its satellite states in Eastern Europe to accept the economic assistance helped to reinforce the growing division between east and west in Europe.
In 1947–1948, a series of events caused the nations of Western Europe to become concerned about their physical and political security and the United States to become more closely involved with European affairs. The ongoing civil war in Greece, along with tensions in Turkey, led President Harry S. Truman to assert that the United States would provide economic and military aid to both countries, as well as to any other nation struggling against an attempt at subjugation. A Soviet-sponsored coup in Czechoslovakia resulted in a communist government coming to power on the borders of Germany. Attention also focused on elections in Italy as the communist party had made significant gains among Italian voters. Furthermore, events in Germany also caused concern. The occupation and governance of Germany after the war had long been disputed, and in mid-1948, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin chose to test Western resolve by implementing a blockade against West Berlin, which was then under joint U.S., British, and French control but surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany. This Berlin Crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of conflict, although a massive airlift to resupply the city for the duration of the blockade helped to prevent an outright confrontation. These events caused U.S. officials to grow increasingly wary of the possibility that the countries of Western Europe might deal with their security concerns by negotiating with the Soviets. To counter this possible turn of events, the Truman Administration considered the possibility of forming a European-American alliance that would commit the United States to bolstering the security of Western Europe.
The Western European countries were willing to consider a collective security solution. In response to increasing tensions and security concerns, representatives of several countries of Western Europe gathered together to create a military alliance. Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg signed the Brussels Treaty in March, 1948. Their treaty provided collective defense; if any one of these nations was attacked, the others were bound to help defend it. At the same time, the Truman Administration instituted a peacetime draft, increased military spending, and called upon the historically isolationist Republican Congress to consider a military alliance with Europe. In May of 1948, Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg proposed a resolution suggesting that the President seek a security treaty with Western Europe that would adhere to the United Nations charter but exist outside of the Security Council where the Soviet Union held veto power. The Vandenburg Resolution passed, and negotiations began for the North Atlantic Treaty.
In spite of general agreement on the concept behind the treaty, it took several months to work out the exact terms. The U.S. Congress had embraced the pursuit of the international alliance, but it remained concerned about the wording of the treaty. The nations of Western Europe wanted assurances that the United States would intervene automatically in the event of an attack, but under the U.S. Constitution the power to declare war rested with Congress. Negotiations worked toward finding language that would reassure the European states but not obligate the United States to act in a way that violated its own laws. Additionally, European contributions to collective security would require large-scale military assistance from the United States to help rebuild Western Europe’s defense capabilities. While the European nations argued for individual grants and aid, the United States wanted to make aid conditional on regional coordination. A third issue was the question of scope. The Brussels Treaty signatories preferred that membership in the alliance be restricted to the members of that treaty plus the United States. The U.S. negotiators felt there was more to be gained from enlarging the new treaty to include the countries of the North Atlantic, including Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, and Portugal. Together, these countries held territory that formed a bridge between the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean, which would facilitate military action if it became necessary.
The result of these extensive negotiations was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. In this agreement, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom agreed to consider attack against one an attack against all, along with consultations about threats and defense matters. This collective defense arrangement only formally applied to attacks against the signatories that occurred in Europe or North America; it did not include conflicts in colonial territories. After the treaty was signed, a number of the signatories made requests to the United States for military aid. Later in 1949, President Truman proposed a military assistance program, and the Mutual Defense Assistance Program passed the U.S. Congress in October, appropriating some $1.4 billion dollars for the purpose of building Western European defenses.
Soon after the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the outbreak of the Korean War led the members to move quickly to integrate and coordinate their defense forces through a centralized headquarters. The North Korean attack on South Korea was widely viewed at the time to be an example of communist aggression directed by Moscow, so the United States bolstered its troop commitments to Europe to provide assurances against Soviet aggression on the European continent. In 1952, the members agreed to admit Greece and Turkey to NATO and added the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. West German entry led the Soviet Union to retaliate with its own regional alliance, which took the form of the Warsaw Treaty Organization and included the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe as members.
The collective defense arrangements in NATO served to place the whole of Western Europe under the American “nuclear umbrella.” In the 1950s, one of the first military doctrines of NATO emerged in the form of “massive retaliation,” or the idea that if any member was attacked, the United States would respond with a large-scale nuclear attack. The threat of this form of response was meant to serve as a deterrent against Soviet aggression on the continent. Although formed in response to the exigencies of the developing Cold War, NATO has lasted beyond the end of that conflict, with membership even expanding to include some former Soviet states. It remains the largest peacetime military alliance in the world.
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a political and military alliance between the United States, Canada, and numerous European countries. Established in 1949 as a defense against the Soviet Union and its eastern European allies, NATO changed its membership and its goals following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. NATO headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium.
The original 12 members of NATO were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom (Great Britain), and the United States. They were joined by Greece and Turkey in 1952, West Germany in 1955 (replaced by a united Germany in 1990), Spain in 1982, and Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic in 1999. These were followed in 2004 by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Albania and Croatia became NATO members in 2009. Montenegro joined the alliance in 2017, and North Macedonia joined in 2020, bringing the number of members to 30. After a long period of remaining neutral, Sweden and Finland applied to become members in May 2022. The following month, as part of the membership process, NATO formally invited the two countries to join the alliance.
Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States fought as allies during World War II. But as soon as the war ended in 1945, the alliance disintegrated. The United States, with its democratic government and free market economy, had developed into the world’s leading political and economic power. The single greatest power in Europe, however, was the Soviet Union, with its communist system and government-controlled economy. The rest of the European countries were economically and socially devastated.
The Soviet Union, despite its own wartime losses, wasted no time in incorporating the weakened countries of eastern Europe into a chain of satellites along its western frontier. In addition, communist political parties gained influence in other parts of Europe, seemingly increasing the likelihood that the Soviet sphere of influence would spread. Meanwhile the United States, Great Britain, and France had drastically reduced their military strength in Europe after the war’s end. A general sense of weakness and vulnerability pervaded western Europe.
In 1947 United States President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would aid anticommunist forces throughout the world. This policy became known as the Truman Doctrine. In 1948 a communist coup overthrew the government of Czechoslovakia and aligned it with the Soviets, causing alarm in western Europe and the United States. In the same year the United States launched the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, which aimed in part to resist communist inroads by reviving the region’s war-torn economies. The Marshall Plan poured billions of dollars of aid into Europe. However, the Soviet Union did not allow its eastern European satellites to participate in the plan.
Not everyone had faith in economic solutions alone. Many advocated greater military spending and planning to counter Soviet strength. This brought about the immediate precursor to NATO—a defensive alliance known as the Brussels Treaty. It was concluded on March 17, 1948—one month after the coup in Czechoslovakia—by Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. It was generally believed, however, that without the assistance of the United States the treaty would not deter the Soviets. Therefore the United States, along with Canada, was consulted about an enlarged defense arrangement. On April 4, 1949, 12 countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, D.C. In Article 5, the heart of the treaty, the member countries agreed that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”
The creation of NATO was among the most important events in the early years of the Cold War. For more than 40 years this tense rivalry pitted the Soviet Union and its supporters against the United States and its allies.
NATO’s development during the Cold War can be divided into four main periods: (1) NATO’s initial organization in 1949–55; (2) building the alliance’s strength from 1955 to 1967; (3) the 1967–79 period of détente; and (4) increasing tensions from 1979 to the late 1980s. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In NATO’s early period, member countries jointly planned, financed, and built infrastructure such as bases, airfields, pipelines, and communications networks. The United States provided the largest share of the funding. In 1950 NATO began to set up an integrated military force in Europe under the command of United States Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. This established the precedent that the military leader of NATO would be American, while the political leader would be European. In 1955 West Germany, the most populous nation of western Europe, was admitted to NATO. This alarmed the Soviet Union, which responded by creating the Warsaw Pact, a security alliance made up of the Soviet satellites in eastern Europe.
During NATO’s second period (1955–67), the alliance emphasized building military strength. Nuclear weapons were the basis of NATO’s defense system. This decision was made partly because of the high cost of stationing large numbers of United States troops in Europe and also because of American nuclear superiority in the early stages of the Cold War. NATO’s nuclear buildup was seen as a deterrent to war because it assured that a Soviet attack could be met by an overwhelming nuclear response.
The alliance was somewhat weakened in 1956 after France and Britain unsuccessfully attempted to take the Suez Canal back from Egypt—an attack that the United States criticized harshly. In 1966 the French government, concerned that the United States was unduly dominating the alliance, withdrew from NATO’s integrated military force, though it remained a NATO member and promised to help repel any unprovoked invasion. (France resumed its position in NATO’s military command in 2009.) In addition, many questioned the role of NATO, and some believed that it had outlived its usefulness.
The third phase of NATO’s history (1967–79) was the era of détente, a French word that means “the easing of tension.” This was a time of increased cooperation and trade with the Soviet Union and the signing of the strategic arms limitation treaties known as SALT I and SALT II. However, several new types of missiles were also deployed during this period. Détente definitively ended in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, causing many NATO members to believe that Soviet expansionism had begun again. (See also disarmament.)
The fourth period of NATO’s Cold War history was a time of growing international tensions. The United States aided Afghan rebels and shifted forces to the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf because of fears of further Soviet actions. The Soviet Union maintained nuclear missile sites in eastern Europe, and NATO planted new nuclear missiles in western Europe. The United States and the Soviet Union sent large amounts of military aid to opposing forces in Central America, Africa, and other regions to fund civil wars. In addition, many people throughout the world felt that the renewed focus on strategic weapons was increasing the risk of nuclear war, whether on a global scale or in a limited European war.
In the 1980s NATO remained strong militarily, but it was beset with controversies and political problems. Many European members were reluctant to accept new nuclear weapons on their soil, and the United States complained about the cost of stationing hundreds of thousands of its troops in Europe. Meanwhile the United States military spent vast sums building ships, aircraft, and missiles and researching a missile-defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. Many NATO allies argued that SDI would violate earlier arms-control treaties and accelerate the arms race.
By the late 1980s, however, the Cold War was winding down as the Soviet Union began to unravel. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed for greater economic and political freedom in the Soviet bloc, and anti-Soviet independence movements gained strength. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and a reunited Germany joined NATO in 1990. The governments of several Warsaw Pact countries soon fell or reorganized along noncommunist principles, drastically changing the political and military balance between eastern and western Europe. In July 1990, at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO and Warsaw Pact leaders signed a major arms-control treaty and declared that they were no longer adversaries. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved in 1991.
After the Cold War many political analysts again questioned the usefulness of NATO. Others, however, cautioned that Russia could again become a threat and that NATO might be needed to protect the newly independent countries of eastern Europe. Regardless of such debates, NATO continued to provide one undeniable benefit to its members: the ability to share resources such as weapons, supplies, and communications.
NATO reevaluated its mission when civil war and ethnic cleansing erupted in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. On one occasion in 1994 and several times in 1995, NATO warplanes struck Serbian and Bosnian Serb forces, primarily around the city of Sarajevo. Following the 1995 Dayton peace accords, tens of thousands of NATO peacekeeping troops entered the region. In 1999 NATO launched massive air strikes against Serbian forces to protect ethnic Albanians (who were mainly Muslims) in the province of Kosovo. As hostilities ceased, NATO sent a peacekeeping force to occupy the province.
Terrorism also became a major concern for NATO in the post–Cold War era. After the deadly terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, NATO invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty for the first time. Alliance members provided substantial aid to the United States in its efforts to pursue al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the attacks, and other international terrorist networks. Because of the controversial nature of the United States–led invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, a number of NATO members were reluctant to participate in the war and subsequent occupation of the country.
The most visible sign of NATO’s changes after the Cold War was its increased membership. In 1994 strict military, political, and economic guidelines were adopted for NATO applicants, including support for democracy and free market economic policies. In 1999 three countries of the former Warsaw Pact—Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic—joined NATO. Seven more formerly communist countries joined in 2004: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Albania and Croatia joined the alliance in 2009, and Montenegro joined in 2017. North Macedonia became a member in 2020.
NATO also began to consult with nonmember countries through its Partnership for Peace, established in 1994. This program enhanced cooperation on security and defense matters between NATO members and non-NATO states, including Russia, several former Soviet allies, and Switzerland. By working with these countries, NATO sought to promote European stability while reaching out to onetime rivals. The Partnership also allowed countries to prepare for future NATO membership by introducing them to NATO military and political practices. The cooperative relationship between the alliance and Russia was furthered with the creation of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002. That relationship was frequently strained, often because of political matters within Russia. NATO-Russia relations later severely worsened because of Russian aggression against Ukraine. In 2014 Russia illegally took control of Crimea, a republic of Ukraine, and made it part of Russia. In early 2022 Russia attacked Ukraine and started a war there. As a result, the long-neutral countries of Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO.