The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO or NATO, its acronym in English) is a military alliance made by the countries of North America and Western Europe under the leadership of the United States. It was created in 1949 in the context of the Cold War between the US and the USSR, with the main objective of protecting each member from military attacks from other countries.
An attack on one of the NATO members was considered an attack on all other members. They were part of NATO at the time of the Cold War: Canada, USA, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, West Germany, Turkey, Greece, Italy, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Portugal. Greece and Turkey joined NATO in 1952, while West Germany joined the organization in 1955.
NATO constituted a kind of military siege to the countries of Eastern Europe, which during World War II had been occupied by USSR troops in the fight against the Nazi army. This military pressure from Western countries further stirred up the tempers between the US and the USSR, which despite not being in a war opened, began to invest very large sums of capital in weapons development, the most notable being the development of bombs. atomic.
Afraid of this Western military alliance, Soviet leaders instead created the Warsaw Pact in 1955. The objective was the same as that of NATO: to achieve mutual protection between the members of the pact. With the end of the USSR in 1991, the Warsaw Pact also fell apart.
This fact did not happen with NATO, as this organization exists to this day. At the beginning of the 21st century, it was of paramount importance for the defense of US interests in the Middle East and Asia, and it is necessary to mention the fact that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was carried out by NATO after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001.
In the previous decade, the 1990s, NATO played a central role in the military attack during the Balkan War, showing that its function as the military arm of the main capitalist powers was not restricted to the context of Cold War.
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* Image Credit: Boris15 and Shutterstock.com
By Tales Pinto
Graduated in History