North Atlantic Treaty Organization

North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On 4 April 1949, the United States signed a treaty of alliance with eleven Western European nations, thereby creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and ending a long tradition of nonentanglement in Europe's political and military affairs.Under Article 5 of the treaty, the United States promised to help defend western Europe in the event of an invasion. Underlying this momentous reversal was U.S. recognition that its disengagement from Europe had helped bring on two world wars in the twentieth century. Even more central to America's change of policy were the new threat posed to the West by the expansion of Soviet communism and the opportunity to promote western Europe's political and economic integration.

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 spurred NATO's transformation from an abstract U.S. commitment to western Europe's defense into an actual military organization. A divided Germany, like a divided Korea, Western leaders feared, might invite Soviet aggression. To forestall an attack from the Soviet Union or its satellites, NATO was expanded to include Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955. (In response, the Soviet Union in 1955 set up its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact.) NATO's military character, under U.S. leadership, dominated the alliance's early years. Beginning with General Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1950, Americans served as the military commanders of NATO, while European statesmen held the lesser post of secretary‐general of the alliance's bureaucracy. Europe's dependence on U.S. military power inhibited, but did not conceal, its resentment of this U.S. dominance.

As a revived and confident Europe moved toward integration, America's leadership of NATO faced growing challenges. Such challenges increased after the launching of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik in 1957, making America vulnerable to an intercontinental missile attack; coupled with America's preoccupation with Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s, the developments raised doubts about the reliability of the U.S. nuclear umbrella and about America's commitment to Europe. The result was France's departure from the NATO organization in 1966 (although not from the military alliance) and the smaller allies' calls for détente with, as well as defense against, the Soviet Union. Despite rising tensions, however, the allies' recognition of NATO's military importance held the alliance intact.

As fear of the Soviets receded in the 1970s, the United States and its NATO allies achieved a détente of their own. A dual‐track initiative in 1979, envisioning both defense and détente, led to negotiations in the 1980s that de‐escalated the military contest with the Warsaw Pact. NATO's solidarity, coupled with Soviet economic difficulties, most scholars agree, brought about the unexpected implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Cold War. The 1990s found the alliance focusing on crisis management on its periphery—particularly in Bosnia—and on expansion eastward through the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as NATO redefined its role in the post–Cold War Era.

With the disappearance of the common enemy, America's future role in NATO became uncertain. Invoking the principle of common defense after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, America's NATO allies fully backed the subsequent attack on the Al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan and the Taliban regime that supported it. But the U.S.‐led Iraq War of 2003 deeply divided the organization, as key NATO allies Germany and France strongly opposed the operation. The admission of seven new NATO members from Eastern Europe in 2004–Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia–represented the biggest expansion in the organization's history, but raised further questions about NATO's purpose and future mission.
See also Anticommunism; Containment; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Internationalism; Isolationism; Marshall Plan; Nuclear Strategy; Vietnam War; War on Terrorism.

Bibliography

Lawrence S. Kaplan , NATO and the United States: The Enduring Alliance, 1994.
Sean Kay , NATO and the Future of European Security, 1998.

Lawrence S. Kaplan

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer