Why is any world treaty ever thought of? This is a question that ponders the mind and a general conclusion comes down, essentially, to world peace. Obviously, world peace can never truly be attained. There will always be some country, somewhere, that is mad at another country for a reason that fifty years from now, is going to seem pointless. So, nations form alliances so that when that agitated nation decides to act on their emotions and attack their opposing country, that opposing country has multiple other countries in its corner. From the other point of view, that attacking country has countries backing them up after their attack is initiated. Thus, one of the essential reasons for the creation and implementation of NATO. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was derived from the United Nations and was brought about due to the rising conflict between the Soviet Union and members and Allied members of the Western World. Its sole purpose is to provide security for the nations bound by this treaty so that when an agitated country decides to attack, backup is available. The roles and objectives of NATO are still carried out today.
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949 to provide for the collective defense and security of the Western world through an international organization. Its members consist of Albania, Bulgaria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States. The necessity for the creation of a defense alliance of Western powers became apparent soon after the end of World War II. The tension which had arisen between the Allied Nations of Western Europe and the Soviet Union came to a peak in 1948 with the “Communist coup d’état in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet blockade of Berlin.” Also, the authority of the United Nations, as “guardian of world peace and security”, had shown itself to be restricted by the use of the veto in the Security Council, which precluded the settlement of many important lingering questions. In the years immediately following the war, the Soviet Union formed a close network of military alliances in Eastern Europe. In answer to this, Belgium, Great Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands created their own defense system in the Western Union, based on the Brussels Treaty of March 17, 1948. However, it was apparent that without the help and the completion of the alliance with the world super power, the United States of America, this alliance would in no way counterbalance the defense system of the Eastern European alliance made by the Soviet Union. Senator Vandenberg, the United States Republican party’s foreign affairs specialist at the time, came up with a resolution that he introduced to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was approved on May 19. 1948. This is now known as the Vandenberg Resolution.
With the Vandenberg Resolution being the backbone of the alliance, negotiations were opened between the members of the Western Union and the U.S.A. with Canada alongside. Further explanatory talks on the proposed North Atlantic Alliance were held in December 1948 and January 1949, but it was only after several weeks of discussion that, in March 1949, the final draft treaty was agreed upon by the U.S.A., Canada, Belgium, Great Britain, France, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and Norway. The treaty was then signed by the eight nations and Greece, Portugal, Iceland, Turkey, Denmark, and Iceland which received invitations to join the pact.
The objectives of the treaty are laid out within the fourteen articles in the treaty itself with the central idea being: if you attack one of us, you attack us all. Article one states that all of the countries signing this treaty will settle all former disputes peacefully and let the past disputes between them stay in the past and move on. Article two states that the countries involved “will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being.” This boils down to the fact that if you sign this treaty you will not be an instigator in world disputes. Article three correlates by saying the members of this treaty will use armed attack on an opposing country as a last resort. To use that armed attack, Article four states that all of the parties will consult and come to a resolution when a participating country feels they have been threatened. In a modern-day example, the U.S.A. cannot just attack Russia without obtaining the consent of the NATO countries before any action is committed. Article five states the main idea and the sole reason for the signing of any treaty and alliance ever made: you attack one of us, you attack us all. It does state that if any country comes under armed attack that the attack has to be reported the NATO security council first which will then decide what the best course of action is to take. Article six claims that an attack, even on an island belonging to any of the participating countries still is deemed as an attack on them all. So, if Russia were to attack Puerto Rico, that is considered an attack on all of the countries bound by NATO. Article seven states that this treaty does not take away the rights of those countries previously bound by the United Nations. The countries bound by both still have a right to uphold those obligations carried out in the United Nations. However, Article eight backs up Article seven by saying that no matter your previous obligations, if one of your former countries attacks a country bound by this treaty, that this treaty trumps your former obligations and you are to be aligned with the countries participating in this treaty. Article eight is used mostly as a form of checks and balances so that there are no loopholes in which a country who signs can get out. Article nine establishes a council that is able to meet at any time promptly and also sets up a defense committee that will decide how to act if Article three or Article five were to come into play. Article number ten states that the parties, after reaching a unanimous agreement, may invite any other European state so long as they agree to further the ideas put forth in this treaty and that when they join they are required to deposit their instrument of accession to the Government of the U.S.A. The Government of the U.S.A. “will then inform each of the Parties of the deposit of each such instrument of accession. In Article eleven it is stated that thus treaty is to be ratified and its requirements or provisions carried out in accordance to their constitutional processes. So, if the U.S.A. were to join as an outside nation they would have to have permission from the legislative and executive branch before joining. Article twelve says that after the treaty has been in place ten years, the treaty is able to be reviewed and, if needed, amended to fit the current situations required to obtain international peace. Thirteen says that after twenty years a nation can leave the treaty only one year after it has put in its notice of denunciation to the Government of the U.S.A. and the U.S.A. will then inform each one of the nation still involved of that nations decision to get out of the treaty. Lastly, article fourteen says that the texts of this treaty are to be deposited into the archives of the Government of the United States of America and copies are to be sent to the governments of the signatories. This treaty is very strong initially and still holds strong today due to the fact that it is very cut and dry, either you are fully in or you are fully out.
A real-world example of NATO’s interaction and role in international affairs comes from the time during the Cold War. Deriving from the book, International Disputes: The Political Aspects, Professor Northedge speaks on NATO’s involvement in the dispute of the Polish-German border line. He says,
It is interesting to see, as an example of the former, how the Federal German Republic seemed to have little disposition to settle its border dispute with Poland so long as NATO was firmly united behind it during the most intense years of the Cold War and was undivided about justice of the Federal German cause. However, as NATO tended to lose some of its cohesion with the advent of the so-called East-West détente and France expressed its satisfaction with the present Polish-German border, a satisfaction which more than one of the other NATO states may be presumed to share, the Federal German negotiating position on the border question has become rather more flexible.
Here NATO was behind Germany during the intense years of the Cold War but as the War seemed to wind down they began to see what the injustice occurring was and settled the dispute calmly, leaving the border the way it was to begin with. NATO handled the big problem at hand first for the betterment of the members of the treaty then dealt with the small issue later.
Post 9/11, NATO had a large impact when the United States wanted to declare war on terrorism in the Middle East. However, after the decision was made to allow the United States to begin this war, the United States decided to allow NATO to stay on the sidelines. Even though Article five states “You attack one, you attack all.” the United States made this decision solely for the preservation of the treaty itself and to not allow their allied forces to become involved in a dispute that was only needed to be settled by the implementation of U.S. force. Philip H. Gordon wrote an article entitled NATO and the War on Terrorism: A Changing Alliance. Here he talks about how NATO was able to ratify the United States decision to declare war and he says the reason for the United States decision on why they did not want NATO getting involved was that “The Americans decided not to ask for a NATO operation for both military and political reasons—only the United States had the right sort of equipment to project military forces halfway around the world, and Washington did not want political interference from 18 allies in the campaign.” Consequentially, the War on Terrorism has costed the United States billions of dollars because they decided not to allow NATO’s involvement whereas if they had it would not have been so expensive. On the other hand, if NATO were to have been involved, it would have been astronomically harder to make military decisions with eighteen different opinions on what the next move should have been.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was heavily involved in the Bosnian conflict. In Statecraft and How to restore America’s Standing in the World, it talks about how the NATO implantation forces (IFOR) helped to draft a peace treaty and how the IFOR mainly helped to construct a major peace conference to settle the Bosnian dispute. The Bosnian War came about because
“Serbs and Croats living in Bosnia wanted to annex Bosnian territory for Serbia and Croatia respectively. There were several mitigating factors in addition to ethnic tensions. The Nationalist leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, was pushing for what he called a "Greater Serbia". The Bosnian Croats and Muslims, fearing that Milosevic would try to take their land if they were still under Yugoslavian control, called for Bosnian independence.”
In Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, it speaks on a series of NATO bombings and the reaction of the victimized countries. It is quoted that the people of Yugoslavia “absorbed the anti-Western messages of Milosevic’s media and then experienced the trauma of the NATO bombing, which the Milosevic regime- and his successor, Kostunica- told them was a criminal act that they had done nothing to deserve.” It is this problem which separates the Western and Eastern world. When leaders of Western governments have total control of the media and are able to control what his citizens can or cannot know, it is easy for them to pin their people against the Western world and NATO when in reality, the West only reciprocates when something is done to them initially. As laid out in the treaty, you attack one, you attack all. So, the people of the free world, essentially the West, know exactly why NATO reacts to certain worldly things. Whereas the people of small, Eastern countries are blinded by the propaganda put out by their all-controlling government. The Bosnian War was resolved, fully, by NATO forces and interaction.
It is my personal opinion that NATO has and always will be one of the greatest international decisions ever made. The foundation that the treaty is built upon is solid in the fourteen articles that reside and it definitely seems to have strongest collective military influence in the world. With major influences in the organization coming from the United States, the Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy the treaty seems as if it dominates international affairs in the Western and European World. Nonetheless there have been relations between NATO and world super-power Russia. The NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed on May 27, 1997 at the NATO summit in Paris, France. The purpose of this act was to “build together a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principles of democracy and cooperative security.” NATO and Russia, because of this act, do not consider each other enemies but they definitely do not consider each other allies as well. NATO is in no way aligned with Russia other than the facts in this act being, on the issue of peacekeeping.
In conclusion NATO was drafted to solidify the bond between countries who oppose the idea of a communist regime. NATO is commonly called the “Treaty of Democratization” because the root of the treaty refers to the idea that democracy is the most efficient form of government. All nations in NATO are democratic in some form and all of the countries believe that democracy is needed for a government to be run efficiently and fairly. On the subject of fairly, democracy is one of the fairest forms of government to the individual citizens of each democratic nation. NATO’s impact on international affairs takes a democratic point of view in needing unanimous decision from all of the party members before making individual military decisions. NATO helps to resolve conflicts all around the world, even when the countries involved are not those part of the treaty itself. The obvious objective of NATO is democratization. If NATO continues to flourish and grow, a fully democratic world seems to be more and more easily attainable. The role NATO plays in international affairs is definitely, in my own personal opinion, far greater than the roles played out by the United Nations and by the European Union.