History of NATO and Policy Recommendations Towards NATO

History of NATO and Policy Recommendations Towards NATO

In this paper I will first explain the history of NATO and the United States policy towards it. I will then give three reasonable policy recommendations for the United States towards NATO. This is important because NATO is an organization with a very brief history but it has molded Europe and other countries and has made a safe-haven from war for the past five decades. NATO was spawn out of the Western countries of Europe fearing the expansion of the greedy, hungry Stalin of the Soviet Union which would directly lead to the expansion of communist governments. Also, “in 1949 most of the states of Europe were still enfeebled by wartime devastation, striving for economic recovery, attempting to reestablish shattered political institutions, resettle refugees and recover from the second major upheaval in 30 years.”1 After the second world war Stalin, of the Soviet Union, started to spread his communist government to many Eastern European countries fast. Just a couple years before all of this an alliance was made between many nations called The United Nations. This is where the base idea of NATO came out of. There is a particular article in the United Nation’s charter, article 51, which paved the way. Article 51 read: Nothing in the present charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations, until the security council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.2 So, armed with this article, ten European countries turned to the United States and Canada to draft a pledge of mutual security and on April 4, 1949, they all met in Washington to sign the North Atlantic Treaty. The fear that created this alliance could not better be seen than in Winston Churchill’s, prime minister of Great Britain, telegram to President Truman saying: “An iron curtain is being drawn down upon their(Soviet Union) front. We do not know what is going on ...

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...world. I hope the information I gave here has been interesting and something you might look at differently now.

Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY NATO Information Service. 1989. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation: Facts and Figures. Brussels: NATO Kaplan, Lawrence S, ed. 1968. NATO And The Policy Of Containment. Boston: Raytheon Education Company. Richard D. Lawrence, and Jeffrey Record, eds. 1974. U.S. Force Structure in NATO. Washington, D.C: The Brookings Institution. Faringdon, Hugh. 1989. Strategic Geography: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Superpowers. London and New York: Routledge. Knorr, Klaus. 1959. NATO And American Security. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. NATO Information Service. 1983. NATO Handbook. Brussels: NATO Coffey, Joseph I. 1997. The Future Role Of NATO. New York: Foreign Policy Association. NATO Information Service. 1984. NATO And The Warsaw Pact: Force Comparisons. Brussels: NATO Bolles, Blair, and Francis O. Wilcox. Bagby, Wesley M. 1999. America’s International Relations Since World War I. New York: Oxford University Press Rosati, Jerel A. 1999. The Politics Of United States Foreign Policy. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers