The origins of NATO
THE WEEK STAFF
MARCH 12, 2022
The alliance that Vladimir Putin blames for his assault on Ukraine originated as a defensive bulwark against Soviet aggression.Here's everything you need to know:
Why was NATO founded?
In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union saw an opportunity to extend communism across a European continent that had been devastated and weakened by war. In 1948, Communists backed by the Soviets overthrew the elected government of Czechoslovakia and purged the opposition; months later, the USSR blockaded Allied-controlled West Berlin in a dispute over Germany's future. Soviet control of eastern and central Europe — an "Iron Curtain," as Winston Churchill called it — deeply alarmed the West and led to meetings about joint security. In 1949, the U.S. and Canada joined 10 European countries in ratifying the North Atlantic Treaty, which established its namesake organization and bound the U.S. to its first-ever peacetime military alliance. "We hope that it will prevent World War III," said President Harry Truman. A key pillar in NATO's founding treaty was Article 5, which states that an attack on any one member was an attack on all and would be met with a collective military response.
What role did NATO play in the Cold War?
After West Germany joined NATO in 1955, the Soviets responded by creating the Warsaw Pact. That agreement bonded the USSR with seven Eastern European countries in its own military alliance. Warsaw Pact nations and NATO were locked in a stalemate through the 1950s. The Cold War remained "cold," and an uneasy peace prevailed, largely because Western and Soviet nuclear arsenals provided "mutually assured destruction." NATO never engaged in direct combat with Warsaw Pact countries and never needed to trigger Article 5 — facts that have led some historians to call it the most successful military alliance in history. (Article 5 has been triggered only once — by the Sept. 1, 2001, attacks on the U.S., which led NATO nations to send troops to Afghanistan to support U.S. forces.) Finally, in 1991, the Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact alliance unraveled.
What happened then?
NATO members became embroiled in an ideological debate over the organization's purpose. Some member states wanted to redefine NATO as a political alliance, but in the end, there was agreement that a continued military presence was prudent. "You don't cancel your home insurance policy just because there have been fewer burglaries on your street in the last 12 months," said British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Former Warsaw Pact nations Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in the 1990s, and the former Soviet Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania followed in 2004. This expansion solidified the West's post–Cold War vision of Europe as democratic and capitalist, but left Russia deeply suspicious of NATO's intentions.
Why the suspicions?
Russia's objections to the growth of NATO predate the rise of Vladimir Putin. In 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said any eastward enlargement of NATO would be "illegal," and this has been one of the few things Russia's political elites have agreed upon over the decades. "Many Russians see NATO as a vestige of the Cold War, inherently directed against their country," Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said in 1995. "They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the West should not do the same." The U.S. saw NATO evolving into a multifaceted security organization against all threats, including terrorist groups based in the Middle East. Putin, however, always considered NATO's eastward expansion to be a betrayal. He claims that when Germany was reunified in 1990, Secretary of State James Baker and other Western officials promised that NATO would not expand into former Soviet-controlled nations in the east. Since that time, NATO has added 14 new members.
