The countries that make up NATO, like the organization itself, have a rather mixed reputation. Let us see what the NATO countries are like, and the bloc itself, looking at the principles of its activity and the prerequisites for the unification of the states of Western Europe and America.
Alliance Background
In the Soviet era, the bloc was associated exclusively with bloody war crimes and the corresponding appearance of its soldiers. But what were the countries that are part of NATO for the USSR in reality? Even at the final stage of World War II, there was talk among the political leaders of the Western Allies that the Soviet state would become their next rival. And actually it happened. The common victory didn’t so much bring together as it divided the allies of yesterday. When the common goal disappeared (the destruction of Nazi Germany by Adolf Hitler), East and West began to rapidly turn into the most implacable rivals. The disagreements between the socialist and capitalist systems, postponed at the outbreak of World War II, once again came to the surface. Modern historians connect the conditional beginning of the Cold War with the famous speech of W. Churchill in the city of Fulton, where he stated that "the Iron Curtain has now appeared in Europe." The tension was also manifested in the establishment of socialist regimes in a number of states of central and eastern Europe (occupied by the Red Army), where puppet governments were brought to power through the regimes of the so-called "people's democracies". The climax of the disagreements of this period fell on the Berlin crisis. The threat of a direct military clash forced the Western states to unite before the “threat of communism”.
The emergence and development of the alliance
All this led to the fact that in the spring of 1949 after the signing of the agreement on mutual
With help from twelve states, the North Atlantic Territorial Alliance (NATO) arose. Later, in response to the existence of the North Atlantic military treaty, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (in 1955) was created at the initiative of the Soviet Union. The confrontation of these two blocks and determined the history of the planet for the next four decades. How many countries are NATO members today? Initially, there were only twelve founding states: Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, France, and the United States. The following members joined in the 1950s. They were Greece, Germany and Turkey. And subsequent significant expansion took place already in the nineties and two thousandths at the expense of countries that were previously parties to the Warsaw Pact organization (Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Poland). And some countries that are members of NATO today were part of the Soviet Union itself (Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia). To date, the structure includes 28 participating States. In the political relations of modern Russia and the North Atlantic bloc, partnerships have been declared.
The internal reaction of the Soviet state
Actually, it is not surprising that the media of the Soviet Union represented the countries that are members of NATO in a completely ominous light. After all, the emergence of the organization was clearly anti-Soviet in nature, since formally it was created as a regional bloc to protect the states of Europe and America from Soviet intervention. At the same time, the leadership of the USSR, which did not at all consider itself an aggressive side and had excellent ideas about the culprits and instigators of the outgoing Cold War, of course, perceived the emergence of NATO as a direct threat to its own existence. Thus, although the countries belonging to NATO have cultural and economic ties and programs in the program of their activities, the bloc is primarily military.
