1. NATO was created in 1949 during the first intense confrontation of the Cold War in the context of a worsening of relations between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Western countries were particularly antagonistic to the Soviet Union consolidating its control of the areas of Eastern Europe which the Soviet Army had occupied at the end of the war. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed between a group of West European states (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium) and the USA and Canada.
2. The core of NATO is a collective defence regime outlined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty: 'The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all' and that they will take 'such action as they deem necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.' The Treaty also provides for the Parties to 'separately and jointly' to 'maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack' (Article 3). Furthermore, the Treaty commits the Parties to seek peaceful solutions to international conflicts (Article 1) and to promote co-operation on economic matters between the Parties (Article 2).
3. As such, NATO became the dominant security organization for Western states. The UN Security Council represented a substantial concession to great power politics through the veto powers accorded to the permanent five and it was paralysed by Cold War rivalries, when both the USA and USSR made recurrent use of the veto until the 1990s. However, among Western states, NATO represented a remarkable development. Here, among some of the most powerful states in the world, extensive co-operation was developed on the core issue of security, including joint planning in the military field which penetrated deep into these states' core purposes. Furthermore, the period after the Second World War saw the elimination of armed conflict between Western powers in sharp contrast to the repeated wars of the previous 150 years and more.
4. Under NATO's security umbrella, extensive forms of economic and political co-operation prospered. Post-war recovery saw the economies of Western Europe (and Japan) rapidly catching up with the USA, at least until the 1970s, and the Atlantic powers appeared to consider their collective position vis-а-vis the Soviet Union as far more important than the relative position of each within the alliance. However, at no stage was US military preponderance within NATO ever in doubt. In fact, the continuing imbalance in military power within NATO, even as the two sides of the Atlantic became more equal economically, was and remains a major source of tension.
5. With the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, many concluded that NATO's original purpose had largely evaporated. NATO began a process of enlargement to include states that had formerly fallen under Soviet control in Eastern Europe, while the EU also began accession talks with many of the same countries. At the same time, the EU began to develop a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) (Общая внешняя политика и политика безопасности). On the European side, membership of NATO and the EU increasingly overlapped. This posed the question of the division of labour between NATO and the CFSP of the EU, in turn raising the question of the definition and purpose of NATO.
6. Established in order to commit US military power to preventing the reemergence of a hegemonic power in Europe, from an American point of view NATO was a military alliance with a clear rationale. Enlargement ran the danger of turning it into a strategically neutral organization for collective defence, with no defined mission. Increasingly, the USA bypasses NATO for its 'out of area' operations, preferring ad hoc arrangements with those of its members (as well as other non-NATO states such as Australia) that join a 'coalition of the willing'. Underlying all this uncertainty has been the fact that the already marked imbalance between European and US military capabilities widened after the end of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, some in Washington began to ask whether the USA needed NATO.