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Backgrounder: NATO Looks to Expand Mission and Membership

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Lionel Beehner, Staff Writer
July 27, 2006

Introduction

Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remain divided on whether to enlarge the alliance and expand its mission further. NATO officials will meet this November in Riga, Latvia to discuss enlarging the organization to include Ukraine and Georgia in addition to the Balkan states of Croatia, Macedonia, and Albania at some further date. Some U.S.-based experts say NATO must enlarge to meet the changing nature of transnational threats, from terrorism to typhoons to turmoil in the Middle East. Yet others say expanding NATO may put too much strain on the alliance, weaken its collective defense mechanism, and needlessly upset Russia, which still harbor suspicions of the Cold-War-era bloc. In recent years, NATO has stretched its mandate to provide security forces in southern Afghanistan, deliver relief items to tsunami and earthquake victims in Southern Asia, and train and equip troops in Iraq. More recently, there have been calls for NATO forces to stabilize the border between Israel and Lebanon.

What is the history of NATO?

NATO was created in 1949 to protect Europe from the threats, both ideological and military, posed by the Soviet Union. “To keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” is how some experts described its mission. The twelve-member defense alliance expanded in the 1950s to include Greece, Turkey, and West Germany and in 1982, Spain. After the Soviet Union’s breakup, NATO absorbed a united Germany, and in the 1990s intervened in conflicts in the Balkans. The alliance expanded again in 1999 to include the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and in 2004 enlarged a final time to include seven more East European members. The day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the alliance invoked Article 5 for the first time.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.