The countries that are part of NATO, like the organization itself, have a rather ambiguous reputation. Let's figure out what the countries that are members of NATO, and the bloc itself, are, looking at the principles of its activities and the prerequisites for the unification of the states of Western Europe and America.
Prerequisites for the emergence of the Alliance
In the Soviet era, the block was associated exclusively with bloody war crimes and the corresponding appearance of its soldiers. But what were the countries that are members of NATO really for the USSR? Even at the final stage of World War II, there was talk in the political leadership of the Western allies that the Soviet state would become their next rival. And in fact it happened. The common victory not only brought together, but divided yesterday's allies. When the common goal (the destruction of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany) disappeared, East and West began to rapidly turn into the most irreconcilable rivals. Differences between the socialist and capitalist systems, postponed for the time being with the outbreak of the Second World War, again came to the surface. Modern historians associate the conditional beginning of the coldof the war with the famous speech of W. Churchill in the city of Fulton, where he stated that "an iron curtain has now appeared in Europe." The tension also manifested itself 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 progressively brought to power through the regimes of the so-called "people's democracies". The controversy of this period culminated in the Berlin Crisis. The threat of a direct military confrontation forced the Western states to unite in the face of 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 an agreement on mutual
help twelve states emerged North Atlantic Territorial Alliance (NATO). Later, in response to the existence of the North Atlantic military treaty, the Warsaw Pact organization was created on the initiative of the Soviet Union (in 1955). The confrontation of these two blocks determined the history of the planet for the next four decades. How many countries are in NATO today? Initially, there were only twelve founding states: Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, France, the United States. The following members joined in the 1950s. They were Greece, Germany and Turkey. And subsequent significant expansions took place already in the nineties and two thousandths at the expense of countries that were previously members of the organizationWarsaw Pact (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 member states. Partnership relations have been declared in the political relations of modern Russia and the North Atlantic bloc.
Internal reaction of the Soviet state
Actually, it is not surprising that the media of the Soviet Union presented the countries that are members of NATO in a completely ominous light. After all, the emergence of the organization already had a pronounced anti-Soviet character, since formally it was created as a regional bloc to protect the states of Europe and America from Soviet interference. At the same time, the leadership of the USSR, which did not consider itself an aggressive side at all and had excellent ideas about the perpetrators and instigators of the beginning Cold War, of course, perceived the emergence of NATO as a direct threat to its own existence. Thus, although the countries that are members of NATO have cultural and economic ties and programs in their program of activities, the bloc is primarily a military one.
Modern ideas about the block
Similar to the Soviet ideas are still present today, but in general they have softened. In today's Russian society, there are very different moods regarding this organization. Most often they are associated with the corresponding political sympathies of citizens, theiropinion on government policy and the desired external course of the state.
