North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Member states of NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, more often called NATO, is an anticommunist international military treaty created in the imperial core following World War II.

Its original aim was to defend bourgeois republics against a possible Soviet liberation of Europe. When this reality never materialized, NATO moved to funding anticommunist (more often fascist) acts in Europe and abroad.

Members

The 12 founding members of NATO were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Since that time, other countries have joined the alliance: Greece and Turkey (1952), Germany (1955), Spain (1982), the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017) and North Macedonia (2020).

In 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker claimed NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, although this proved to be a lie.

Anticommunist projects

NATO took over anti-Soviet subversive activities from their predecessors when they started operating Nazi general Richard Gehlen's network of spies in the Soviet Union.

NATO is perhaps best known among European communists for Operation Gladio, which is a name given to a series of operations that consisted of funding fascist groups in Europe to assassinate and destabilize communists in the 20th century.

Imperialist acts

When the USA was attacked on September 11, 2001 and followed with a declaration of war against Iraq for imperialist interests, NATO -- by their own admission -- put their principle of collective defence to practice: if one member country is attacked, then all must join the war in defense. It is important to note that the government of Iraq never claimed responsibility or was ever tied to the terrorist attacks. Notably, president Bush admitted in 2006 that Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq in 2001, was not responsible for the attack.

The Coalition fighting in Afghanistan, in a conflict that started in 1979 when the Afghan government asked the USSR to help fight against the Mujahideen, was sent on the request of NATO.

In June 2022, NATO announced it would increase its standing army in Europe from 40,000 to 300,000 troops, including over 3,000 troops in the Baltic states on the border with Russia.