The countries that make up NATO, like the organization itself, have a rather ambiguous reputation. Let's see what the NATO countries are like, and the bloc itself, having looked at the principles of its activity and the prerequisites for the unification of the states of Western Europe and America.
Background of the Alliance
In the Soviet era, the bloc was associated exclusively with bloody war crimes and the corresponding appearance of its soldiers. But what were the countries that are members of NATO really for the USSR? Even at the final stage of the Second World in the political highs of the Western allies, there was talk that the next rival would be the Soviet state. And in fact, it happened. The overall victory is not so much closer, as divided by yesterday's allies. When the single goal (the destruction of Nazi Germany by Adolf Hitler) was lost, the East and West began to turn into the most irreconcilable rivals. The disagreements between the socialist and capitalist systems postponed until the beginning of the Second World War came to the surface again. Contemporary historians associate the conditional beginning of the Cold War with the famous speech of W. Churchill in Fulton, where he stated that "now the Iron Curtain has appeared in Europe." The tension was also manifested in the establishment of socialist regimes in a number of states in central and eastern Europe (occupied by the Red Army), where puppet governments were brought to power through the so-called "people's democracies" regimes. The culmination of the disagreements of this period fell on the Berlin crisis. The threat of a direct military clash forced the Western states to unite before the "threat of communism".
The emergence and development of the alliance
All this led to the fact that in the spring of 1949, after the signing of a mutual A North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) has emerged as the twelve-nation aid. Later, in response to the existence of the North Atlantic Treaty on the initiative of the Soviet Union, an organization of the Warsaw Pact was created (in 1955). The confrontation between these two blocs determined the history of the planet for the next four decades. How many countries are members of NATO today? Initially there were only twelve founding members: Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Norway, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, France, United States. The following participants joined in the 1950s. They were Greece, Germany and Turkey. And subsequent significant expansion took place already in the nineties and 2000s at the expense of countries that previously were participants in the organization of the Warsaw Pact (Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Poland). And some of the countries that are part of NATO now, were part of the direct Soviet Union (Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia). To date, the structure includes 28 States Parties. Partnership relations have been declared in the political relations of modern Russia and the North Atlantic bloc.
The internal reaction of the Soviet state
Actually, it is not surprising that the mass media of the Soviet Union were represented by the countries that are members of NATO in a very ominous light. After all, the emergence of the organization was clearly anti-Soviet in nature, since it was formally created as a regional bloc to protect the states of Europe and America from Soviet interference. At the same time, the leadership of the USSR, which did not consider itself an aggressive party and had excellent views of the perpetrators and instigators of the onset of the "cold war", certainly took the emergence of NATO as a direct threat to its own existence. Thus, although the countries that are members of NATO have cultural and economic ties and programs in the program of their activities, the block is primarily military.
Modern ideas about the block
Similar Soviet ideas are present today, but in general they have softened. In the current Russian society, there are very different sentiments about this organization. Most often they are related to the corresponding political sympathies of citizens, their views on government policy and the desired external course of the state.