President Truman Signs NATO Agreement

April 4, 1949

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On April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established when the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by eleven Western democracies-the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Iceland, and Canada-and Portugal. President Harry Truman signed the document for the United States. The treaty, intended as a safeguard against the threat of Soviet aggression, provided for a collective self-defense and was designed to encourage greater political and economic cooperation in the Atlantic region. The U.S.-dominated military alliance greatly increased American influence in Western Europe and also led to the establishment of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led Eastern European military alliance, in 1955. In 1952, Greece and Turkey joined NATO, followed by West Germany in 1955. In 1965, France withdrew from the alliance, citing increasing U.S. domination in violation of the 1949 treaty. With the end of the Cold War, NATO members approved the use of its military forces for peacekeeping missions in countries outside the alliance. In 1994, in the first actions in its forty-five-year history, NATO planes enforced the no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina and struck at Bosnian Serb military positions and airfields on a number of occasions. Then, in late 1995, NATO began the mass deployment of 60,000 troops to enforce the Dayton peace accords, signed in Paris by the belligerent parties of the former Yugoslavia six days before. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic-former Warsaw Pact nations-joined NATO in 1999.