IRMO Brief 04/2019, "Seventy years of NATO: Is the Alliance still needed?"

Introduction

‍This year the North Atlantic Treaty Origination (NATO) marks seventieth anniversary of its creation. Back in 1949, the founding nations gathered around the United States as the leader of Western liberal democracies, establishing NATO as a military and political alliance that was to serve as a barrier against the Soviet Union, and its ‘’export’’ of communism throughout the continent. Just six years later, Moscow assembled the Warsaw Pact together with other Eastern European communist countries, excluding Yugoslavia.

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