The original members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. NATO formed the backbone of the West`s military bulwark against the USSR and its allies for the next 40 years, with its membership growing during the Cold War. Greece and Turkey were admitted in 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1955 and Spain in 1982. Dissatisfied with its role in the organization, the France decided to withdraw from military involvement in NATO in 1966 and did not return until 1995. Between 1994 and 1997, more comprehensive forums for regional cooperation between NATO and its neighbours were established, such as the Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue Initiative and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. In 1998, the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council was established. Between 1999 and 2020, NATO included the following Central and Eastern European countries, including several former communist states: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. [18] 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, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom agreed to consider an attack on one as an attack on all, as well as consultations on threats and defence issues. This collective defence agreement formally applied only to attacks on signatories that took place in Europe or North America; Conflicts in colonial territories were not taken into account. After the treaty was signed, some signatories requested military assistance from the United States. Later in 1949, President Truman proposed a military support program, and the Mutual Defense Assistance Program was passed by the U.S. Congress in October, allocating about $1.4 billion to build Western European defenses.
and a number of other NATO members have begun working to make West Germany part of the alliance and allow it to form an army under strict restrictions. The Soviets warned that such provocative action would force them to take new security measures in their own sphere of influence, and they kept their word. West Germany officially joined NATO on May 5, 1955, and the Warsaw Pact was signed less than two weeks later, on May 14. The USSR was joined by Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, Poland and Romania. This line remained constant until the end of the Cold War with the dismantling of all communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990. After mountain training, the jungle phase takes place in Belize, Brunei or Malaysia. [141] Candidates learn navigation, training and movement of patrols, as well as jungle survival techniques. [142] They then returned to Britain to begin training in combat plans and foreign weapons, and then took part in combat survival exercises that ended in a week-long escape and evasive training. [143] Candidates are trained in patrols and dressed in World War II-era uniforms with nothing more than a tin can filled with survival gear and invited to drive to a certain destination at sunrise. The final selection test, Resistance to Interrogation (RTI), is arguably the most exhausting and lasts 36 hours. [144] Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate rapidly in 1948.
There were sharp disagreements over the status of post-war Germany, with the Americans insisting on German reconstruction and eventually rearmament, and the Soviets strongly resisting such actions. In June 1948, the Soviets blocked all land travel to the U.S. occupation zone in West Berlin, and only a massive U.S. airlift with food and other necessities supported the area`s population until the Soviets relented and lifted the blockade in May 1949. In January 1949, in his State of the Union address, President Harry S. Truman warned that the forces of democracy and communism were engaged in a dangerous struggle, and he called for an alliance to defend the nations of the North Atlantic – the U.S. military in Korea. In April 1949, representatives of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal join the United States in signing the NATO Agreement.
The signatories agreed: ”An armed attack on one or more of them. will be perceived as an attack on them all. President Truman hailed the organization as a ”shield against aggression.” Members of the Special Air Service were sent to northern Iraq in late August 2014 and, according to former MI6 chief Richard Barrett, would also be sent to Syria to try to hunt down the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist group (ISIL), which the press called the Beatles. [53] [54] [55] Not all Americans welcomed NATO. Isolationists like Senator Robert A. Taft said THAT NATO was ”not a peace program; it is a war program. Most, however, saw the organization as a necessary response to the communist threat. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in June 1949 by a large majority. In the following years, Greece, Turkey and West Germany also joined. The Soviet Union condemned NATO as a warmongering alliance and responded by establishing the Warsaw Pact (a military alliance between the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites) in 1955.
Shortly after the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the outbreak of the Korean War allowed members to quickly integrate and coordinate their defense forces through a central headquarters. The North Korean attack on South Korea was widely regarded at the time as an example of Moscow-led communist aggression, so the United States intensified its troop commitments to Europe to provide assurances against Soviet aggression on the European continent. In 1952, the members agreed on the admission of Greece and Turkey to NATO and in 1955 added the Federal Republic of Germany. West Germany`s accession prompted 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 Harmel Report helped to lay the foundations for the convening of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1973. Two years later, the conference culminated in the Helsinki Final Act. The law obliged its signatories – including the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact – to respect the fundamental freedom of their citizens, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief. Soviet leaders internally downplayed these clauses in the law and attached more importance to Western recognition of the Soviet role in Eastern Europe. Eventually, however, the Soviets learned that they had become attached to powerful and potentially subversive ideas. .