NATO
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Justice Anthony M.
Kennedy, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. : Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Stephen
G. Breyer, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Clarence
Thomas,
The
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO /ˈneɪtoʊ/; French: Organisation du
Traité de l'Atlantique Nord; OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is
an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which
was signed on 4 April 1949.
The
organization constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member
states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.
NATO's headquarters are located in Haren, Brussels, Belgium, where the Supreme
Allied Commander also resides. Belgium is one of the 28 member states across
North America and Europe, the newest of which, Albania and Croatia, joined in
April 2009.
An additional 22 countries participate in
NATO's Partnership for Peace program, with 15 other countries involved in
institutionalized dialogue programmes. The combined military spending of all
NATO members constitutes over 70 percent of the global total.
Members' defense spending is supposed to
amount to 2 percent of GDP.
NATO
was little more than a political association until the Korean War galvanized
the organization's member states, and an integrated military structure was
built up under the direction of two US supreme commanders. The course of the
Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact, which formed in
1955.
Doubts
over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the
United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the
NATO defence against a prospective Soviet invasion—doubts that led to the
development of the independent French nuclear deterrent and the withdrawal of
France from NATO's military structure in 1966 for 30 years.
After
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the organization was drawn into the
breakup of Yugoslavia, and conducted its first military interventions in Bosnia
from 1992 to 1995 and later Yugoslavia in 1999. Politically, the organization
sought better relations with former Warsaw Pact countries, several of which
joined the alliance in 1999 and 2004.
Article
5 of the North Atlantic treaty, requiring member states to come to the aid of
any member state subject to an armed attack, was invoked for the first and only
time after the September 11 attacks, after which troops were deployed to
Afghanistan under the NATO-led ISAF.
The organization has operated a range of
additional roles since then, including sending trainers to Iraq, assisting in
counter-piracy operations and in 2011 enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya in
accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973.
The
less potent Article 4, which merely invokes consultation among NATO members,
has
been invoked five times: by Turkey in 2003 over the Iraq War; twice in 2012 by Turkey over the Syrian Civil War, after the
downing of an unarmed Turkish F-4 reconnaissance jet, and after a mortar was
fired at Turkey from Syria; in 2014 by Poland, following the Russian intervention
in Crimea; and again by Turkey in 2015 after threats by the Islamic State to
its territorial integrity.
The
Treaty of Brussels, signed on 17 March 1948 by Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg,
France, and the United Kingdom, is considered the precursor to the NATO
agreement. The treaty and the Soviet Berlin Blockade led to the creation of the
Western European Union's Defence Organization in September 1948.
However,
participation of the United States was thought necessary both to counter the
military power of the USSR and to prevent the revival of nationalist
militarism, so talks for a new military alliance began almost immediately
resulting in the North Atlantic Treaty, which was signed in Washington, D.C. on
4 April 1949. It included the five Treaty of Brussels states plus the United
States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.
The
first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, stated in 1949 that the
organization's goal was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and
the Germans down."
Popular
support for the Treaty was not unanimous, and some Icelanders participated in a
pro-neutrality, anti-membership riot in March 1949. The creation of NATO can be
seen as the primary institutional consequence of a school of thought called
Atlanticism which stressed the importance of trans-Atlantic cooperation.
The
members agreed that an armed attack against any one of them in Europe or North
America would be considered an attack against them all. Consequently, they
agreed that, if an armed attack occurred, each of them, in exercise of the
right of individual or collective self-defence, would assist the member being
attacked, taking such action as it deemed necessary, including the use of armed
force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
The treaty does not require members to respond
with military action against an aggressor. Although obliged to respond, they
maintain the freedom to choose the method by which they do so. This differs
from Article IV of the Treaty of Brussels, which clearly states that the
response will be military in nature. It is nonetheless assumed that NATO
members will aid the attacked member militarily.
The
treaty was later clarified to include both the member's territory and their
"vessels, forces or aircraft" above the Tropic of Cancer, including
some Overseas departments of France.
The
creation of NATO brought about some standardization of allied military terminology,
procedures, and technology, which in many cases meant European countries
adopting US practices.
The roughly 1300 Standardization Agreements
(STANAG) codified many of the common practices that NATO has achieved. Hence,
the 7.62×51mm NATO rifle cartridge was introduced in the 1950s as a standard
firearm cartridge among many NATO countries. Fabrique Nationale de Herstal's
FAL, which used 7.62 NATO cartridge, was adopted by 75 countries, including
many outside of NATO.
Also,
aircraft marshalling signals were standardized, so that any NATO aircraft could
land at any NATO base. Other standards such as the NATO phonetic alphabet have
made their way beyond NATO into civilian use.
Cold War
Main article: Cold War
The
outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 was crucial for NATO as it raised the
apparent threat of all Communist countries working together, and forced the
alliance to develop concrete military plans.
Supreme
Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) was formed to direct forces in
Europe, and began work under Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower in
January 1951.
In
September 1950, the NATO Military Committee called for an ambitious buildup of
conventional forces to meet the Soviets, subsequently reaffirming this position
at the February 1952 meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Lisbon.
The Lisbon conference, seeking to provide the
forces necessary for NATO's Long-Term Defence Plan, called for an expansion to
ninety-six divisions. However this requirement was dropped the following year
to roughly thirty-five divisions with heavier use to be made of nuclear
weapons.
At
this time, NATO could call on about fifteen ready divisions in Central Europe,
and another ten in Italy and Scandinavia.
Also at Lisbon, the post of Secretary General
of NATO as the organization's chief civilian was created, and Lord Ismay was
eventually appointed to the post.
Two soldiers crouch under
a tree while a tank sits on a road in front of them.
The
German Bundeswehr provided the largest element of the allied land forces
guarding the frontier in Central Europe.
In
September 1952, the first major NATO maritime exercises began; Exercise
Mainbrace brought together 200 ships and over 50,000 personnel to practice the
defence of Denmark and Norway.
Other
major exercises that followed included Exercise Grand Slam and Exercise
Longstep, naval and amphibious exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, Italic Weld,
a combined air-naval-ground exercise in northern Italy, Grand Repulse,
involving the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR),
The Netherlands Corps and
Allied Air Forces Central Europe (AAFCE), Monte Carlo, a simulated atomic
air-ground exercise involving the Central Army Group, and Weldfast, a combined
amphibious landing exercise in the Mediterranean Sea involving American,
British, Greek, Italian and Turkish naval forces.
Greece
and Turkey also joined the alliance in 1952, forcing a series of controversial
negotiations, in which the United States and Britain were the primary
disputants, over how to bring the two countries into the military command
structure.
While this overt military preparation was
going on, covert stay-behind arrangements initially made by the Western
European Union to continue resistance after a successful Soviet invasion, including
Operation Gladio, were transferred to NATO control.
Ultimately
unofficial bonds began to grow between NATO's armed forces, such as the NATO
Tiger Association and competitions such as the Canadian Army Trophy for tank
gunnery.
In
1954, the Soviet Union suggested that it should join NATO to preserve peace in
Europe. The NATO countries, fearing that the Soviet Union's motive was to
weaken the alliance, ultimately rejected this proposal.
On 17
December 1954, the North Atlantic Council approved MC 48, a key document in the
evolution of NATO nuclear thought. MC 48 emphasized that NATO would have to use
atomic weapons from the outset of a war with the Soviet Union whether or not
the Soviets chose to use them first.
This gave SACEUR the same prerogatives for
automatic use of nuclear weapons as existed for the commander-in-chief of the
US Strategic Air Command.
The
incorporation of West Germany into the organization on 9 May 1955 was described
as "a decisive turning point in the history of our continent" by
Halvard Lange, Foreign Affairs Minister of Norway at the time.
A major reason for Germany's entry into the
alliance was that without German manpower, it would have been impossible to
field enough conventional forces to resist a Soviet invasion.
One of its immediate results was the creation
of the Warsaw Pact, which was signed on 14 May 1955 by the Soviet Union,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and East Germany,
as a formal response to this event, thereby delineating the two opposing sides
of the Cold War.
Three
major exercises were held concurrently in the northern autumn of 1957.
Operation Counter Punch, Operation Strikeback, and Operation Deep Water were
the most ambitious military undertaking for the alliance to date, involving
more than 250,000 men, 300 ships, and 1,500 aircraft operating from Norway to
Turkey.
French withdrawal
A map
of France with red and blue markings indicating air force bases as of 1966.
Map of the NATO air bases in France before
Charles de Gaulle's 1966 withdrawal from NATO military integrated command
NATO's
unity was breached early in its history with a crisis occurring during Charles
de Gaulle's presidency of France.
De
Gaulle protested against the USA's strong role in the organization and what he
perceived as a special relationship between it and the United Kingdom. In a
memorandum sent to
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime
Minister Harold Macmillan on 17 September 1958, he argued for the creation of a
tripartite directorate that would put France on an equal footing with the US
and the UK.
Considering
the response to be unsatisfactory, de Gaulle began constructing an independent
defence force for his country. He wanted to give France, in the event of an
East German incursion into West Germany, the option of coming to a separate
peace with the Eastern bloc instead of being drawn into a larger NATO–Warsaw
Pact war.
In February 1959, France withdrew its
Mediterranean Fleet from NATO command, and later banned the stationing of
foreign nuclear weapons on French soil.
This
caused the United States to transfer two hundred military aircraft out of
France and return control of the air force bases that had operated in France
since 1950 to the French by 1967.
Though
France showed solidarity with the rest of NATO during the Cuban Missile Crisis
in 1962, de Gaulle continued his pursuit of an independent defence by removing
France's Atlantic and Channel fleets from NATO command.
In 1966, all French armed forces were removed
from NATO's integrated military command, and all non-French NATO troops were
asked to leave France. US Secretary of State Dean Rusk was later quoted as
asking de Gaulle whether his order included "the bodies of American
soldiers in France's cemeteries?"
This
withdrawal forced the relocation of SHAPE from Rocquencourt, near Paris, to
Casteau, north of Mons,
Belgium,
by 16 October 1967.
France remained a member of the alliance, and
committed to the defence of Europe from possible Warsaw Pact attack with its
own forces stationed in the Federal Republic of Germany throughout the Cold
War. A series of secret accords between US and French officials, the
Lemnitzer–Ailleret Agreements, detailed how French forces would dovetail back
into NATO's command structure should East-West hostilities break out.
Détente and escalation
Main article: Détente
Détente led to many high level meetings
between leaders from both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
During
most of the Cold War, NATO's watch against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact did
not actually lead to direct military action. On 1 July 1968, the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty opened for signature:
NATO argued that its nuclear
sharing arrangements did not breach the treaty as US forces controlled the
weapons until a decision was made to go to war, at which point the treaty would
no longer be controlling.
Few
states knew of the NATO nuclear sharing arrangements at that time, and they
were not challenged. In May 1978, NATO countries officially defined two
complementary aims of the Alliance, to maintain security and pursue détente.
This was supposed to mean matching defences at the level rendered necessary by
the Warsaw Pact's offensive capabilities without spurring a further arms race.
A map
of Europe showing several countries on the left in blue, while ones on the
right are in red. Other unaffiliated countries are in white.
During the Cold War, most of Europe was
divided between two alliances. Members of NATO are shown in blue, with members
of the Warsaw Pact in red.
On 12
December 1979, in light of a build-up of Warsaw Pact nuclear capabilities in
Europe, ministers approved the deployment of US GLCM cruise missiles and
Pershing II theatre nuclear weapons in Europe. The new warheads were also meant
to strengthen the western negotiating position regarding nuclear disarmament.
This
policy was called the Dual Track policy. Similarly, in 1983–84, responding to
the stationing of Warsaw Pact SS-20 medium-range missiles in Europe, NATO
deployed modern Pershing II missiles tasked to hit military targets such as
tank formations in the event of war.
This
action led to peace movement protests throughout Western Europe, and support
for the deployment wavered as many doubted whether the push for deployment
could be sustained.
The
membership of the organization at this time remained largely static. In 1974,
as a consequence of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Greece withdrew its forces
from NATO's military command structure but, with Turkish cooperation, were
readmitted in 1980.
The
Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina did not result in NATO
involvement because article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that
collective self-defense is only applicable to attacks on member state
territories north of the Tropic of Cancer.
On 30 May 1982, NATO gained a new member when,
following a referendum, the newly democratic Spain joined the alliance. At the
peak of the Cold War, 16 member nations maintained an approximate strength of
5,252,800 active military, including as many as 435,000 forward deployed US
forces, under a command structure that reached a peak of 78 headquarters, organized
into four echelons.
After the Cold War
The
Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 removed the
de facto main adversary of NATO and caused a strategic re-evaluation of NATO's
purpose, nature, tasks, and their focus on the continent of Europe.
This
shift started with the 1990 signing in Paris of the Treaty on Conventional
Armed Forces in Europe between NATO and the Soviet Union, which mandated
specific military reductions across the continent that continued after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
At
that time, European countries accounted for 34 percent of NATO's military
spending; by 2012, this had fallen to 21 percent.
NATO
also began a gradual expansion to include newly autonomous Central and Eastern
European nations, and extended its activities into political and humanitarian
situations that had not formerly been NATO concerns.
Two
men in suits sit signing documents at a large table in front of their country's
flags. Two others stand outside watching them.
Reforms
made under Mikhail Gorbachev led to the end of the Warsaw Pact.
The
first post-Cold War expansion of NATO came with German reunification on 3
October 1990, when the former East Germany became part of the Federal Republic
of Germany and the alliance. This had been agreed in the Two Plus Four Treaty
earlier in the year.
To secure Soviet approval
of a united Germany remaining in NATO, it was agreed that foreign troops and
nuclear weapons would not be stationed in the east, and there are diverging
views on whether negotiators gave commitments regarding further NATO expansion
east.
Jack Matlock, American ambassador to the
Soviet Union during its final years, said that the West gave a "clear
commitment" not to expand, and declassified documents indicate that Soviet
negotiators were given the impression that NATO membership was off the table
for countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland.
In 1996, Gorbachev wrote in his Memoirs, that
"during the negotiations on the unification of Germany they gave
assurances that NATO would not extend its zone of operation to the east,"
and repeated this view in an interview in 2008. According to Robert
Zoellick, a State Department official involved in the Two Plus Four negotiating
process, this appears to be a misperception, and no formal commitment regarding
enlargement was made.
As
part of post-Cold War restructuring, NATO's military structure was cut back and
reorganized, with new forces such as the Headquarters Allied Command Europe
Rapid Reaction Corps established.
The
changes brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union on the military
balance in Europe were recognized in the Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in
Europe Treaty, which was signed in 1999.
The
policies of French President Nicolas Sarkozy resulted in a major reform of
France's military position, culminating with the return to full membership on 4
April 2009, which also included France rejoining the NATO Military Command
Structure, while maintaining an independent nuclear deterrent.
Enlargement and reform
Further information:
Enlargement of NATO
A
pale yellow building with square columns with three flags hanging in front and
soldiers and dignitaries saluting them.
The
NATO flag being raised in a ceremony marking Croatia's joining of the alliance
in 2009.
Between
1994 and 1997, wider forums for regional cooperation between NATO and its
neighbors were set up, like the Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean
Dialogue initiative and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. In 1998, the
NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council was established.
On 8
July 1997, three former communist countries, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and
Poland, were invited to join NATO, which each did in 1999. Membership went on
expanding with the accession of seven more Central and Eastern European
countries to NATO: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria,
and Romania.
They
were first invited to start talks of membership during the 2002 Prague summit,
and joined NATO on 29 March 2004, shortly before the 2004 Istanbul summit. In
Istanbul, NATO launched the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative with four Persian Gulf
nations.
New
NATO structures were also formed while old ones were abolished. In 1997, NATO
reached agreement on a significant downsizing of its command structure from 65
headquarters to just 20.
The NATO
Response Force (NRF) was launched at the 2002 Prague summit on 21 November, the
first summit in a former Comecon country. On 19 June 2003, a further
restructuring of the NATO military commands began as the Headquarters of the
Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic were abolished and a new command, Allied
Command Transformation (ACT), was established in Norfolk, Virginia, United
States, and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) became the
Headquarters of Allied Command Operations (ACO).
ACT is responsible for driving transformation
(future capabilities) in NATO, whilst ACO is responsible for current operations.
In March 2004, NATO's Baltic Air Policing
began, which supported the sovereignty of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia by
providing jet fighters to react to any unwanted aerial intrusions. Eight
multinational jet fighters are based in Lithuania, the number of which was increased
from four in 2014.
Two
older Caucasian men in black suits and red ties sit facing each other in a room
with green, white, and gold trimmed walls.
Meetings
between the government of Viktor Yushchenko and NATO leaders led to the
Intensified Dialogue programme.
The
2006 Riga summit was held in Riga, Latvia, and highlighted the issue of energy
security. It was the first NATO summit to be held in a country that had been
part of the Soviet Union.
At the April 2008 summit in Bucharest, Romania, NATO
agreed to the accession of Croatia and Albania and both countries joined NATO
in April 2009.
Ukraine and Georgia were also told that they could eventually
become members.
The issue of Georgian and Ukrainian membership
in NATO prompted harsh criticism from Russia, as did NATO plans for a missile
defence system. Studies for this system began in 2002, with negotiations centered
on anti-ballistic missiles being stationed in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Though NATO leaders gave assurances that the system was not targeting Russia,
both presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev criticized it as a threat.
In
2009, US President Barack Obama proposed using the ship-based Aegis Combat
System, though this plan still includes stations being built in Turkey, Spain,
Portugal, Romania, and Poland.
NATO will also maintain the "status
quo" in its nuclear deterrent in Europe by upgrading the targeting
capabilities of the "tactical" B61 nuclear bombs stationed there and
deploying them on the stealthier Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II.
Following
the 2014 Crimean crisis, NATO committed to forming a new "spearhead"
force of 5,000 troops at bases in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania,
and Bulgaria.
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