What was NATO the role of NATO?

Answer 1

NATO in Brief

NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and was an alliance of nations who stood against communism. The major member states included the United Kingdom and United States, France, West Germany and Canada. The official treaty the name of the organisation refers to was a mutual assistance pact against the Communist Block. This meant if any of the NATO member states was attacked by a country in the Warsaw Pact (the communist version of NATO) then the other countries would give military and economic assistance. The treaty directly meant the communist countries although since then the NATO alliance has committed itself to military campaigns else where in the world, most recently during the Libyan Civil War.

Cold War NATO

The NATO of the Cold War was one which owed its existence to a post-war nervous and increasingly paranoid America, who believing that communism would spread through out Europe under Stalin and so created the alliance to combat the threat.

Europe, at the time, was devastated by the recently ended Second World War which had destroyed much of the infrastructure of the continent and and completely wiped out industry in Germany. The first challenge for NATO was to rebuild Europe and produce adequate defences against the powerful Soviet Army in the East which had just defeated Hitler. The first test of United Nations' and NATO power came in 1948 when Stalin blockaded Berlin for 11 months. During this period NATO members flew supplies in to Berlin to feed the starving Germans. On the 12th May 1949, Stalin stopped the blockade and allowed supplies in to the city by road again. Although the Berlin Blockade was over and NATO power and promises looked good, the USSR now had built and tested their first nuclear weapon meaning America wasn't the only country in the world with "the bomb!"

Modern NATO

The NATO of today is very different to the NATO of the Berlin Blockade. Today the alliance stands as almost the military wing of the United Nations and is consulted on matters regarding international security. NATO troops led the way in to Iraq in August 1990 and Afghanistan in October 2001. It now includes 28 nations from around the Atlantic and from across Europe, even crossing in to the communist block with countries such as Albania (communist 1944-1992), Hungary (communist 1947-1989) and Poland (communist 1945-1989). This shows the amount of cooperation between the countries with in Europe to allow former enemies in to their alliance. NATO has and forever will protect the people within its alliance and its promises will always be kept.

Answer 2

The role of NATO was to provide a system of collective defense in which the member states agree to mutual defense in the event of an attack by an external party.