The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded on April 4, 1949 with 12 members: Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States.
NATO was established on the basis of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty as a defensive political and military alliance. The Brussels-based organization is allegedly aimed at promoting democracy, law and well-being of the Euro-Atlantic region and safeguarding freedom and security of member states through united efforts on collective defense and for the maintenance of peace and security, with political and military means.
Over the past six decades, NATO has made continuous readjustments to its military strategy in line with the changing world situation, and grown from a military defensive organization into the world's only military group.
NATO has undergone fundamental structure and policy changes to meet the new security challenges in Europe following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the political upheavals in central and eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and the dissolution in 1991 of the Warsaw Pact, its long time archenemy.
In recent years, NATO pushed forward new strategic transformation, undertaking a broad range of new missions such as anti-terrorism, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance operations while maintaining its traditional functions.
On March 24, 1999, without UN authorization, NATO started its 78-day airstrikes on Yugoslavia under the pretext of preventing a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo, a province in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Later a NATO-led 15,000-strong peacekeeping force entered Kosovo after Yugoslavian army and police were removed out of the province.
In Afghanistan, NATO officially took over the control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in August 2003. After expansions in four different stages, ISAF, which was initially deployed only in the Afghan capital of Kabul, covered the whole country in 2006.
The peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan was NATO's largest-ever military operation. It was also NATO's first peacekeeping assignment out of the European theater and its second military action out of its "traditional defense area."
NATO has so far made six enlargements, bringing its member states to 28. Following is a brief account of the alliance's enlargements:
February 1952: accession of Greece and Turkey;
May 1955: accession of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany);
May 1982: accession of Spain;
March 1999: accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland;
March 2004: accession of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia;
April 2009: accession of Albania and Croatia.
Source:Xinhua
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