When was NATO founded?
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NATO has added new members seven times since its founding in 1949, and since 2017 NATO has had 29 members. Twelve countries were part of the founding of NATO: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 1952, Greece and Turkey became members of the Alliance, joined later by West Germany (in 1955) and Spain (in 1982). In 1990, with the reunification of Germany, NATO grew to include the former country of East Germany. Between 1994 and 1997, wider forums for regional cooperation between NATO and its neighbors were set up, including the Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue initiative and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. In 1997, three former Warsaw Pact countries, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, were invited to join NATO. After this fourth enlargement in 1999, the Vilnius group of the Baltics and seven East European countries formed in May 2000 to cooperate and lobby for further NATO membership. Seven of these countries joined in the fifth enlargement in 2004. The Adriatic States Albania and Croatia joined in the sixth enlargement in 2009, Montenegro in 2017.
Member states of NATO
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After its formation in 1949 with twelve founding members, NATO grew by including Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955, and then later Spain in 1982. After the Cold War ended, and Germany reunited in 1990, there was a debate in NATO about continued expansion eastward. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined the organization, amid much debate within the organization and Russian opposition. Another expansion came with the accession of seven Central and Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. These nations were first invited to start talks of membership during the 2002 Prague summit, and joined NATO shortly before the 2004 Istanbul summit. Albania and Croatia joined on 1 April 2009, prior to the 2009 Strasbourg–Kehl summit. The most recent member state to be added to NATO is Montenegro on 5 June 2017.
Enlargement of NATO
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ; ; '), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 29 North American and European countries. The organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949. NATO constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party. NATO’s Headquarters are located in Haren, Brussels, Belgium, while the headquarters of Allied Command Operations is near Mons, Belgium.
NATO
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Georgia and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) relations officially began in 1994 when Georgia joined the NATO-run Partnership for Peace. Georgia has moved quickly following the Rose Revolution in 2003 to seek closer ties and eventual membership with NATO. Georgia's powerful northern neighbor, Russia, has opposed the closer ties, including those expressed at the 2008 Bucharest summit where NATO members promised that Georgia would eventually join the organization. In the 7 December 2011 statement of the North Atlantic Council Georgia was designated as an "aspirant country".
Georgia–NATO relations
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Relations officially began when Ukraine became the first CIS country to enter NATO's Partnership for Peace program in February 1994. In the summer of 1995 NATO stepped up to help to mitigate consequences of the Kharkiv Drinking Water Disaster. This was the first cooperation between NATO and Ukraine. On May 7, 1997 the first-ever official NATO Information and Documentation Center opened in Kyiv, aimed to foster transparency about the alliance. A Ukrainian public opinion poll of May 6 showed 37% in favor of joining NATO with 28% opposed and 34% undecided. On July 9, 1997, a NATO-Ukraine Commission was established. In 2002 relations with the government of the United States and other NATO countries deteriorated after one of the recordings made during the Cassette Scandal revealed an alleged transfer of a sophisticated Ukrainian defense system to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. At the NATO enlargement summit in November 2002, the NATO–Ukraine commission adopted a Ukraine–NATO Action Plan. President Kuchma's declaration that Ukraine wanted to join NATO (also in 2002) and the sending of Ukrainian troops to Iraq in 2003 could not mend relations between Kuchma and NATO. Currently, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are working with NATO in Iraq.
Ukraine–NATO relations
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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. Whilst there was no formal commitment in the agreement not to expand NATO to the east, there are diverging views on whether negotiators gave informal commitments regarding further NATO expansion. 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. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister at that time, said in a conversation with Eduard Shevardnadze that "[f]or us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east." 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. However in 2014 Gorbachev stated the opposite – that "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all [in 1990], and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either." 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. Harvard University historian Mark Kramer also rejects that an informal agreement existed.
History of NATO
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Was established in 1999 at the Washington Summit as a Consortium of the Willing and founded in the spirit of Partnership for Peace (PfP). By Military Committee direction, the NATO Defense College "is the focal military point of contact within NATO" for the consortium, composed of 300 organizations in 46 countries. The NDC is actively involved in 6 of the 10 working groups.
NATO Defense College
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The foundation for cooperation between NATO and the NATO-PA was strengthened in December 1967 when the North Atlantic Council (NAC) authorized the NATO Secretary General to study how to achieve closer cooperation between the two bodies. As a result of these deliberations over the following year, the NATO Secretary General, after consultation with the NAC, implemented several measures to enhance the working relationship between NATO and the Assembly. These measures included the Secretary General providing a response to all Assembly recommendations and resolutions adopted in its Plenary Sessions.
NATO Parliamentary Assembly
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Ireland had been willing in 1949 to negotiate a bilateral defence pact with the United States, but opposed joining NATO until the question of Northern Ireland was resolved with the United Kingdom (see "The Troubles" 1968–1998). Official NATO–Ireland relations began in 1999 when Ireland became a signatory to NATO's Partnership for Peace programme and the alliance's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. Since then, NATO and Ireland have actively cooperated on peacekeeping, humanitarian, rescue, and crisis management issues and have developed practical cooperation in other military areas of mutual interest, under Ireland's Individual Partnership Programme (IPP) and Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme (IPCP), which is jointly agreed every two years. Irish cooperation with NATO is centred around the country's historic policy of neutrality in armed conflicts, which allows the Irish military to deploy on peacekeeping and humanitarian missions where there is a mandate from the United Nations (UN Security Council resolution or UN General Assembly resolution), subject to cabinet and Dáil Éireann (Irish parliament) approval. This is known as Ireland's "triple-lock" policy.
Ireland–NATO relations
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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 the 7.62mm 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.
History of NATO
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The ships as of 29 January 2019 consist of:On 11 July 1992 the force was directed to deploy to the Ionian Sea to be prepared for possible future operations, with reference to a NATO ministerial decision to assist the monitoring of compliance with United Nations (UN) resolutions 713 and 757. The North Atlantic Council decided on 15 July 1992 that NATO monitoring operations were to commence at 0800 local time on 16 July, when the first units of STANAVFORMED entered the Adriatic Sea to begin participating in NATO's Operation Maritime Monitor. The Force was temporarily relieved by STANAVFORLANT in this operation on 9–26 September, to conduct the change of command, complete ship turnovers and conduct Force work-ups. From 22 November 1992 to 15 June 1993 the force participated in Operation Maritime Guard which was the NATO contribution towards the enforcement of the UN embargoes on the Former Yugoslavia. The operation was conducted in coordination with the Western European Union (WEU) Operation Sharp Fence.
Standing NATO Maritime Group 2