From the Washington Treaty to Vilnius: How Blowback in the Kremlin Helped Make NATO the Most Powerful Military Alliance in the World
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Wed, 07/12/2023 – 07:58
International organizations can fade or grow in importance, depending on how they meet shifting challenges in their history. NATO has had its ups and downs since its founding on April 3, 1949, but there can be no question that it has developed today into the most formidable military alliance since the Grand Alliance (the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR) during World War II.
It has done so by being fully integrated into the postwar foreign policy of the increasingly prosperous and internationally ambitious U.S. and by meeting the challenges Washington has faced from its major rivals in the international system, the Soviet Union and today, China excepted, the Russian Federation. From the beginning of the negotiations between the original twelve signatories of the Washington Treaty, NATO’s founding document, the U.S. drove the goals and policies of the Atlantic Alliance. This was even codified in Articles 11 and 13 of the Treaty, which explicitly single out the U.S. government as the repository of the original instruments of ratification and of the documents …read more
Source:: Hoover Institution