NATO

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance and international organization comprising North American and European countries. It is generally considered to be among the most powerful, long-enduring, and successful alliances of modern times. It has influenced both the study and practice of international security and politics for more than seventy years. Created in 1949 by twelve countries as a classic treaty-based mutual defense pact, its substantive focus, formal organization, and membership grew steadily from its earliest years. The legacy of World War II and the trials of the Cold War dominated NATO’s first four decades, when the organization’s first secretary general described its purposes for Europe as keeping “the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the post–Cold War transformation of NATO’s political and military functions. Yet the central issue in politics among the allies has often been the “burden sharing” or distribution of costs and benefits. The United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have often wielded outsized roles in such politics, though NATO decisions are taken by consensus traditionally. The endurance of NATO after the Cold War and through many crises is one of the great puzzles in the academic discipline of international relations, and the Alliance is a common object of study in all the main theoretical schools of thought. While NATO’s political structures resemble other international organizations, its standing multinational integrated military structure is unique. Its military policy and strategy evolved with thinking about deterrence in the nuclear age. NATO first embarked on “out-of-area” military operations in the Balkan civil wars of the 1990s, but its largest and longest-running mission began in 2003 with its involvement in Afghanistan, far from its original geographic area of concern. NATO has entered into political and military partnerships with dozens of countries around the world, and its enlarged membership reached thirty countries in 2020. Its global ties add to a longer-standing debate about trans-Atlanticism versus autonomy in European security. NATO and the European Union give important context to one another, though their institutional collaboration has not always been as close as their greatly overlapping membership and neighboring headquarters in Belgium might suggest. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 inaugurated a period of increased tension with NATO, though the Alliance has alternated deterrence and dialog in its relations with Russia both during and since the Cold War. Primary sources and archival material about NATO are increasingly accessible.