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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a military alliance created by the North Atlantic Treaty signed by 12 states in Washington on 4 April 1949. The key article included the statement that ‘an armed attack against one or more of [the parties] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’. Conceived as an anti-Soviet alliance under American leadership, NATO became the major safeguard of the West during the Cold War. Four more European states acceded to the Treaty between 1952 and 1982 (with appropriate extensions of the Treaty\'s area of responsibility), to be followed in 1999 – to the disquiet of Russia – by three states which, in whole or in part, had been members of the former Warsaw Pact: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In 2002 seven more states (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) were invited to begin accession talks and are expected to join in 2004. The supreme body within NATO is the North Atlantic Council; its headquarters is located in Brussels.
Since the end of the Cold War NATO has been used as a vehicle for coordinating the response of its members to ‘out-of-area’ threats, notably in Iraq and in the former Yugoslavia. In the case of the latter, NATO is playing a prominent role, and is currently in effect administering the Serbian province of Kosovo. However, in respect of Iraq, the attempt of the United States and Britain to enlist NATO support for their intervention in early 2003 did not succeed. See also Partnership for Peace; silence procedure. |
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