As of: April 5, 2024, 10:34 a.m
By: Christiane Kühl
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75 years ago, twelve states concluded the North Atlantic Treaty. The resulting NATO now has 32 members - and has had to continually reposition itself after crises. Same now.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO for short, turns 75 this Thursday. And it finds itself at a delicate point in its history. The war in Ukraine, started by Russian President Vladimir Putin, is not only raging in Eastern Europe. At the same time, the most important military partner in the alliance, the USA, is threatening to turn away. If former President Donald Trump returns to the White House in the US election in November, there is a risk that his motto “America First” will return. Trump's Republicans in the US Congress are already blocking $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine.
The ongoing NATO foreign ministers' meeting will "discuss how NATO could take on more responsibility for the coordination of military equipment and training for Ukraine and anchor this in a solid NATO framework," said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday at the start Brussels. He proposed a joint military package worth 100 million euros.
Korean War and Cuban Missile Crisis: First dramatic crises for NATO
However, the current crisis is not the first difficult phase for the alliance. The first dramatic hours brought NATO the Soviet Union and North Korea. In 1949, the Soviets detonated their first nuclear test, and in 1950, communist North Korea invaded South Korea, starting the Korean War. Having just been founded, NATO had only twelve members and no military structure at the time. It was realized that a command structure with a military headquarters was urgently needed. The first European commander was US general and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The civilian secretariat followed shortly afterwards. This structure still exists today.
75 years of NATO
NATO was founded on April 4, 1949 by twelve signatories under the influence of the Second World War with 36.5 million deaths in Europe and the beginning of the East-West conflict. The goals were to deter the Soviet Union through military strength, to integrate Europe - and to prevent militant nationalism from spreading again in Europe through a strong US presence. The goal formula has been passed down from the first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay: “keep the Russians away, keep the Americans in the game and keep the Germans down.”
In 1952, Greece and Turkey joined NATO, followed in 1955 by the West German Federal Republic. In response to Germany's accession, the Soviet Union founded the Warsaw Pact with the socialist states of Eastern Europe, including the GDR. The Berlin Wall was built in 1961. At that time, NATO said it decided on the strategic doctrine of “massive retaliation”: If the Soviet Union attacked, the alliance would respond with nuclear weapons.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the Soviet Union and the USA narrowly avoided nuclear war in 1962 after Moscow wanted to station nuclear missiles on the communist Caribbean island, took place far away from NATO and Europe - and yet had a major impact on the alliance. At that time, US President John F. Kennedy introduced a new doctrine that renounced the extreme strategy – either peace or all-out nuclear war. His new NATO concept of “flexible response” envisaged a military response below the nuclear threshold.
NATO anniversary: double decision and start of disarmament
But the thaw didn't last long. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and deployed SS20 missiles with nuclear warheads in Eastern Europe. Many of them were aimed at the Federal Republic. NATO was facing its worst security crisis. After a tough struggle, it responded in December 1979 with the so-called NATO double decision: They wanted to negotiate with the Soviet Union about dismantling the SS20 missiles - but if these talks failed, they wanted to station US Pershing II medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe from 1983 onwards. The double decision triggered stormy protests in Western Europe. At the beginning of the 1980s, the peace movement mobilized hundreds of thousands in the Federal Republic alone against retrofitting and NATO in general.
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The Pershing missiles were nevertheless stationed in 1983, also in Germany - because the disarmament negotiations between the USA and the USSR had failed. Only when Mikhail Gorbachev took office as head of state and party leader of the USSR in 1985 did disarmament gain momentum. In 1987, the USA and USSR signed the first treaty on the disarmament of intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which is now seen as the first sign of the end of the Cold War.
Soldiers with a Pershing II nuclear missile in Germany: Their stationing as a result of the NATO double decision triggered huge peace demonstrations in Europe. © bonn-sequence/Imago
75 years of NATO: After the Cold War came the Yugoslavian War
After the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, lasting peace in Europe seemed possible. Nevertheless, the Eastern European countries pushed into NATO out of fear; Poland (joined in 1999) and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (2004) have never completely lost their fear of Russia - rightly so, as we can see today.
First, however, the wars in the disintegrating Yugoslavia suddenly destroyed the hope for peace in Europe. In 1995 they broke a taboo for NATO. In the face of war crimes and ethnic cleansing, it first implemented a no-fly zone, violating UN resolutions. In 1995, the alliance bombed Bosnian Serb positions, which repeatedly carried out massacres of civilians in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was NATO's first military deployment in Europe. It was controversial, but brought the Serbs to the negotiating table and led to the Dayton Peace Agreement.
New challenges for NATO – temporarily
From the beginning, the central element of NATO was Article 5 of its treaty, the so-called guarantee of assistance, also known as the alliance case. Article 5 states that an attack against one or more members “will be considered an attack against them all”. This alliance was only declared once, after the Islamist terrorist attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001.
The NATO partners sided with Washington, the joint operation “Enduring Freedom” protected US airspace and the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa from the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Several NATO partners took part in the attacks on terrorist bases in Afghanistan, which at the same time overthrew the radical Islamic Taliban regime.
September 11th changed NATO. Islamist terrorist attacks on public transport in Madrid and London followed in 2004 and 2005, resulting in many deaths. It was believed at the time that the greatest threats to transatlantic security no longer came from Europe, but from dangers beyond the continent.
NATO anniversary: Threat from Russia
As a result, Europe in particular reformed its military - away from national defense and towards rapid reaction forces for conflicts around the world. Military budgets fell so sharply that the 2014 NATO summit decided that each member would spend at least two percent of its economic output on defense. At that time, only three NATO members could do that. Former US President Donald Trump threatened defaulting payers with withdrawal of support starting in 2017; he had already declared NATO “obsolete” several times during his election campaign at the end of 2016. French President Emmanuel Macron also described NATO as “brain dead” in 2019. NATO was facing a crisis of meaning.
The Ukraine war changed that. NATO was suddenly central to Europe's security again; the states along its eastern flank see it as a guarantee of existence. Finland and Sweden gave up their neutrality and joined NATO in 2023 and 2024. 18 members will meet the two percent target this year. “Steadfast Defender,” the largest NATO maneuver since the end of the Cold War, is currently underway; it simulates the relocation of troops to the east for months.
NATO has survived a lot, but its most delicate hour may yet lie ahead. Many military experts believe that if Russia wins in Ukraine, it will be in a position to challenge NATO in a few years. The alliance must prepare for this - so that it doesn't happen at all.