In spite of general agreement on the concept behind the treaty, it took several months to work out the exact terms. The U. Congress had embraced the pursuit of the international alliance, but it remained concerned about the wording of the treaty. The nations of Western Europe wanted assurances that the United States would intervene automatically in the event of an attack, but under the U. Constitution the power to declare war rested with Congress. Negotiations worked toward finding language that would reassure the European states but not obligate the United States to act in a way that violated its own laws.
While the European nations argued for individual grants and aid, the United States wanted to make aid conditional on regional coordination. A third issue was the question of scope. The Brussels Treaty signatories preferred that membership in the alliance be restricted to the members of that treaty plus the United States. Together, these countries held territory that formed a bridge between the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean, which would facilitate military action if it became necessary.
The result of these extensive negotiations was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in In this agreement, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom agreed to consider attack against one an attack against all, along with consultations about threats and defense matters.
This collective defense arrangement only formally applied to attacks against the signatories that occurred in Europe or North America; it did not include conflicts in colonial territories. After the treaty was signed, a number of the signatories made requests to the United States for military aid. Like a similar invasion of Hungary in and military repression in Berlin in , Soviet actions demonstrated what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine: given the choice between short-term control of Eastern European client states and long-run political and economic reform, the Soviet Union would choose to maintain short-term control.
The end of this policy would await a Soviet leader willing to choose long-run reform. US President John F. The role of NATO had become not merely to preserve the status quo, but to help change it. The Harmel Report helped to lay the foundation for the convening of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Two years later, the Conference led to the negotiation of the Helsinki Final Act.
The Act bound its signatories — including the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact — to respect the fundamental freedom of their citizens, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief. Soviet rulers internally played down these clauses within the Act, attaching more importance to the Western recognition of the Soviet role in Eastern Europe.
Eventually, however, the Soviets came to learn that they had bound themselves to powerful and potentially subversive ideas. The deployment was not scheduled to begin until In the meantime, the Allies hoped to achieve an arms control agreement that would eliminate the need for the weapons.
By the mids, most international observers believed that Soviet Communism had lost the intellectual battle with the West. Soon other democratic activists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself would begin to demand those very rights.
By this time, command economies in the Warsaw Pact were disintegrating. The Soviet Union was spending three times as much as the United States on defence with an economy that was one-third the size. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with the intention of fundamentally reforming the communist system.
When the East German regime began to collapse in , the Soviet Union did not intervene, reversing the Brezhnev Doctrine. This time, the Soviets chose long-run reform over a short-run control that was increasingly beyond their capabilities, setting in motion a train of events that led to the break-up of the Warsaw Pact.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November seemed to proclaim a new era of open markets, democracy and peace, and Allies reacted with incredulous joy as emboldened demonstrators overthrew Eastern European Communist governments. But there were also frightening uncertainties. Would a united Germany be neutral?
What would become of nuclear weapons in former Soviet republics? Would nationalism once again curse European politics? Before the consolidation of peace and security could begin, however, one spectre haunting European politics remained to be exorcised.
Since the Franco-Prussian War, Europe had struggled to come to terms with a united Germany at its heart. The incorporation of a re-unified Germany into the Alliance put this most ancient and destructive of dilemmas to rest.
In as in , NATO was to be the foundation stone for a larger, pan-European security architecture. This forum brought the Allies together with their Central European, Eastern European, and Central Asian neighbours for joint consultations.
Many of these newly liberated countries — or partners, as they were soon called — saw a relationship with NATO as fundamental to their own aspirations for stability, democracy, and European integration.
Cooperation also extended southward. The Dialogue seeks to contribute to security and stability in the Mediterranean through better mutual understanding. The Yugoslav conflict - and other contemporaneous conflicts in the Caucasus and elsewhere - made clear that the post-Cold War power vacuum was a source of dangerous instability. Mechanisms for partnership had to be strengthened in a way that would allow non-NATO countries to cooperate with the Alliance to reform still-evolving democratic and military institutions and to relive their strategic isolation.
As part of this evolving effort, Allies created the Partnership for Peace programme, or PfP, in Partners were encouraged to choose their own level of involvement with the Alliance. The path to full membership would remain open to those who decided to pursue it.
This process reached an important milestone at the Washington Summit when three former Partners — Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary — took their seats as full Alliance members following their completion of a political and military reform programme.
Through enlargement, NATO had played a crucial role in consolidating democracy and stability in Europe. By the end of , over Kosovar Albanians had fled their homes during conflict between Albanian separatists in Kosovo and Serbian military and police. Following the failure of intense international efforts to resolve the crisis, the Alliance conducted air strikes for 78 days and flew 38 sorties with the goal of allowing a multinational peacekeeping force to enter Kosovo and cease ethnic cleansing in the region.
The alignment of nearly every European nation into one of the two opposing camps formalized the political division of the European continent that had taken place since World War II This alignment provided the framework for the military standoff that continued throughout the Cold War The USSR oversaw the installation of pro-Soviet governments in many of the areas it had taken from the Nazis during the war.
In response, the U. In , U. Events of the following year prompted American leaders to adopt a more militaristic stance toward the Soviets. In February , a coup sponsored by the Soviet Union overthrew the democratic government of Czechoslovakia and brought that nation firmly into the Communist camp. Within a few days, U. The discussions between the Western nations concluded on April 4, , when the foreign ministers of 12 countries in North America and Western Europe gathered in Washington , D.
It was primarily a security pact, with Article 5 stating that a military attack against any of the signatories would be considered an attack against them all. When U. Secretary of State Dean Acheson put his signature on the document, it reflected an important change in American foreign policy. For the first time since the s, the U. Unhappy with its role in the organization, France opted to withdraw from military participation in NATO in and did not return until
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