The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a political and military alliance of 29 nations (see Table 1), formed in 1949 to counter the threat from the USSR and the spread of communism. It committed members to the principles of the United Nations (UN), which had been established 4 years earlier, and provided means collectively to ‘safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’.
After West Germany joined NATO in 1955, the USSR produced its own version of collective defence: the Warsaw Pact. During the Cold War, the threat of ‘massive retaliation’ (i.e. a nuclear response) by NATO helped to deter the USSR from invading any non-Communist European states. When the Warsaw Pact’s dissolution was followed by the collapse of the USSR in 1991, NATO’s raison d’être vanished, raising questions about its future in a post-Cold War world.
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