Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: When was NATO founded?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ; ; '), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 29 North American and European countries. The organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949. NATO constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party. NATO’s Headquarters are located in Haren, Brussels, Belgium, while the headquarters of Allied Command Operations is near Mons, Belgium.
As of 2018, NATO officially recognizes four aspiring members: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Macedonia and Ukraine. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina within Bosnia and Herzegovina has expressed willingness to join NATO, however, it faces consistent political pressure from Republika Srpska, the other political entity in the country, alongside its partners in Moscow. Macedonia has been prevented from joining the alliance by Greece, one effect of the Macedonian naming dispute. Future expansion is currently a topic of debate in several countries outside the alliance, and countries like Sweden, Finland, and Serbia have open political debate on the topic of membership, while in countries like Ukraine, support and opposition to membership is tied to ethnic and nationalist ideologies. The incorporation of countries formerly part of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union has been a cause of increased tension between NATO countries and Russia.
Ireland had been willing in 1949 to negotiate a bilateral defence pact with the United States, but opposed joining NATO until the question of Northern Ireland was resolved with the United Kingdom (see "The Troubles" 1968–1998). Official NATO–Ireland relations began in 1999 when Ireland became a signatory to NATO's Partnership for Peace programme and the alliance's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. Since then, NATO and Ireland have actively cooperated on peacekeeping, humanitarian, rescue, and crisis management issues and have developed practical cooperation in other military areas of mutual interest, under Ireland's Individual Partnership Programme (IPP) and Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme (IPCP), which is jointly agreed every two years. Irish cooperation with NATO is centred around the country's historic policy of neutrality in armed conflicts, which allows the Irish military to deploy on peacekeeping and humanitarian missions where there is a mandate from the United Nations (UN Security Council resolution or UN General Assembly resolution), subject to cabinet and Dáil Éireann (Irish parliament) approval. This is known as Ireland's "triple-lock" policy.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is headquartered in a complex
in Haren, part of the City of Brussels municipality of Belgium. The staff at the Headquarters is composed of national delegations of member countries and includes civilian and military liaison offices and officers or diplomatic missions and diplomats of partner countries, as well as the International Staff and International Military Staff (IMS) filled from serving members of the armed forces of member states. Non-governmental citizens' groups have also grown up in support of NATO, broadly under the banner of the Atlantic Council/Atlantic Treaty Association movement.
NATO was responsible to the United Nations (UN) for carrying out the Dayton Peace Accords. The Dayton Peace Accords were started on 22 November 1995 by the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, on behalf of Serbia and the Bosnian Serb Republic. The actual signing happened in Paris on 14 December 1995. The peace accords contained a General Framework Agreement and eleven supporting annexes with maps. The accords had three major goals: ending of hostilities, authorization of military and civilian program going into effect, and the establishment of a central Bosnian government while excluding individuals that serve sentences or under indictment by the International War Crimes Tribunals from taking part in the running of the government. IFOR's specific role was to implement the military Annexes of "The General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP) in Bosnia and Herzegovina".
The foundation for the influential position held by Germany today was laid during the (economic miracle) of the 1950s when West Germany rose from the enormous destruction wrought by World War II to become the world's third-largest economy. The first chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who remained in office until 1963, had worked for a full alignment with NATO rather than neutrality. He not only secured a membership in NATO but was also a proponent of agreements that developed into the present-day European Union. When the G6 was established in 1975, there was no question whether the Federal Republic of Germany would be a member as well.
New membership in the alliance has been largely from Central and Eastern Europe, including former members of the Warsaw Pact. Accession to the alliance is governed with individual Membership Action Plans, and requires approval by each current member. NATO currently has two candidate countries that are in the process of joining the alliance: Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Macedonia.
In NATO official statements, the Republic of Macedonia is always referred to as the "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", with a footnote stating that "Turkey recognizes the Republic of Macedonia under its constitutional name". Though Macedonia completed its requirements for membership at the same time as Croatia and Albania, who joined NATO in 2009, its accession was blocked by Greece pending a resolution of the Macedonia naming dispute. In order to support each other in the process, new and potential members in the region formed the Adriatic Charter in 2003. Georgia was also named as an aspiring member, and was promised "future membership" during the 2008 summit in Bucharest, though in 2014, US President Barack Obama said the country was not "currently on a path" to membership.
The 2005 NATO Headquarters summit was a NATO summit held in the NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium on February 22, 2005. During this summit, NATO leaders reaffirmed their support for building stability in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, and commit to strengthening the partnership between NATO and the European Union.
The UN officially came into existence on 24 October 1945 upon ratification of the Charter by the five then-permanent members of the Security Council and by a majority of the other 46 signatories. On 17 January 1946, the Security Council met for the first time at Church House, Westminster, in London, United Kingdom.
As a result of the space race between USA and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, NASA was created in 1958 from NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, formed 1915) and other related organizations.
Following an agreement in June 2018 to rename the country the Republic of North Macedonia, NATO agreed to consider extending an invitation to the country to join at its summit on 11–12 July. On 11 July 2018, NATO invited Macedonia to begin membership talks, saying the country could join the organization once the naming issue was resolved. Formal accession talks began on 18 October 2018. Greece is expected to be the first NATO member state to ratify Macedonia’s NATO accession protocol.
The earliest concrete plan for a new world organization began under the aegis of the US State Department in 1939. Roosevelt first coined the term United Nations to describe the Allied countries."On New Year's Day 1942, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, Maxim Litvinov, of the USSR, and T. V. Soong, of China, signed a short document which later came to be known as the United Nations Declaration and the next day the representatives of twenty-two other nations added their signatures." The term United Nations was first officially used when 26 governments signed this Declaration. By 1 March 1945, 21 additional states had signed. "Four Policemen" was coined to refer to the four major Allied countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. and became the foundation of an executive branch of the United Nations, the Security Council.
Five EU member states, all who have declared their non-alignment with military alliances, are not NATO members: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Malta, and Sweden. Switzerland, which is surrounded by the EU, has also maintained their neutrality by staying out of the bloc. All these countries, however, have joined the Partnership for Peace programme and at least Sweden and Finland signed a specific host country support agreement with NATO in 2014.
The term "Cold War" was introduced in 1947 by Americans Bernard Baruch and Walter Lippmann to describe emerging tensions between the two former wartime allies. There never was a direct military engagement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but there was a half-century of military buildup, and political battles for support around the world, including significant involvement of allied and satellite nations. Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been allied against Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of World War II. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the world, as the U.S. sought the "containment" of communism and forged numerous alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Belgium became the host nation for both NATO's political headquarters and SHAPE. General Lyman Lemnitzer, SACEUR at the time, had hoped that SHAPE could be located near to NATO Headquarters, as had been the case in Paris, but the Belgian authorities decided that SHAPE should be located at least 50 kilometres from Brussels, NATO's new location, because SHAPE was a major wartime military target. The Belgian government offered Camp Casteau, a 2 km² Belgian Army summer training camp near Mons, which was an area in serious need of additional economic investment. In September 1966, NATO agreed that Belgium should host SHAPE at Casteau. SHAPE closed its facility at Rocquencourt near Paris on 30 March 1967, and the next day held a ceremony to mark the opening of the new headquarters at Casteau.
Despite the authoritarian character of the regime, Portugal did not experience the same levels of international isolation as Spain did following World War II. Unlike Spain, Portugal under Salazar was accepted into the Marshall Plan (1947–1948) in return for the aid it gave to the Allies during the final stages of the war. Furthermore, also unlike Spain, it was one of the 12 founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, a reflection of Portugal's role as an ally against communism during the Cold War in spite of its status as the only non-democratic founder. In 1950, Portugal joined the European Payments Union and participated in the founding of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1960 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961. It joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1962, and finally, Portugal signed a free trade agreement with the European Economic Community in 1972, still under the auspices of the "Estado Novo".
On October 3, 1951, the naval ashore unit Headquarters, Support Activities was created to support Allied Forces Southern Europe, and later the Sixth Fleet. In August, 1953, the support unit became Commander, Subordinate command, U.S. Naval Forces Eastern Atlantic / Commander, Headquarters Support Activities, and re-designated U.S. Naval Activities, Italy / U.S. Naval Support Activity, Naples in November 1957. U.S. Naval Activities, Italy was consolidated with U.S. Naval Support Activity, Naples on August 8, 1966.
On February 16, 1918, Lithuania was re-established as a democratic state. It remained independent until the outset of World War II, when it was occupied by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Following a brief occupation by Nazi Germany after the Nazis waged war on the Soviet Union, Lithuania was again absorbed into the Soviet Union for nearly 50 years. In 1990–1991, Lithuania restored its sovereignty with the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania. Lithuania joined the NATO alliance in 2004 and the European Union as part of its enlargement in 2004.
UNESCO was founded in 1946 as the United Nations Specialized Organization for Education, Science and Culture. Within its fields of competence, UNESCO will "contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture". It is the only UN Organization having National Commissions. All 193 member states of UNESCO dispose of a National Commission, with varying structures and architecture. All of them have similar tasks though: they involve the educational, scientific, and cultural communities as well as communication media of their countries into the planning, implementation, communication and evaluation of the multi-faceted programmes of UNESCO.
On 28 June 1963, the Turkish Army celebrated the 600th anniversary of its foundation. Back then, the accepted theory was that the Turkish Armed Forces had been founded in 1363, when the Pençik corps (the predecessor of the Janissary corps) had been formed. In the same year, one of the prominent Pan-Turanists, Nihal Atsız, asserted that the Turkish Army had been founded in 209 BC, when Mete Khan of the Xiongnu is thought to have formed an army based on the decimal system. In 1968, Yılmaz Öztuna proposed this theory to Cemal Tural, who was the Chief of the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey at the time. In 1973, when the Turkish Army celebrated the 610th anniversary of its foundation, Nihal Atsız published his claim again. After the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, the Turkish Army formally adopted the date 209 BC as its year of foundation.
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the aerial and space warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the five branches of the United States Armed Forces, and one of the seven American uniformed services. Initially formed as a part of the United States Army on 1 August 1907, the USAF was established as a separate branch of the U.S. Armed Forces on 18 September 1947 with the passing of the National Security Act of 1947. It is the youngest branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, and the fourth in order of precedence. The USAF is the largest and most technologically advanced air force in the world. The Air Force articulates its core missions as air and space superiority, global integrated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, rapid global mobility, global strike, and command and control.
Was established in 1999 at the Washington Summit as a Consortium of the Willing and founded in the spirit of Partnership for Peace (PfP). By Military Committee direction, the NATO Defense College "is the focal military point of contact within NATO" for the consortium, composed of 300 organizations in 46 countries. The NDC is actively involved in 6 of the 10 working groups.
The ships as of 29 January 2019 consist of:On 11 July 1992 the force was directed to deploy to the Ionian Sea to be prepared for possible future operations, with reference to a NATO ministerial decision to assist the monitoring of compliance with United Nations (UN) resolutions 713 and 757. The North Atlantic Council decided on 15 July 1992 that NATO monitoring operations were to commence at 0800 local time on 16 July, when the first units of STANAVFORMED entered the Adriatic Sea to begin participating in NATO's Operation Maritime Monitor. The Force was temporarily relieved by STANAVFORLANT in this operation on 9–26 September, to conduct the change of command, complete ship turnovers and conduct Force work-ups. From 22 November 1992 to 15 June 1993 the force participated in Operation Maritime Guard which was the NATO contribution towards the enforcement of the UN embargoes on the Former Yugoslavia. The operation was conducted in coordination with the Western European Union (WEU) Operation Sharp Fence.
The first post-Cold War expansion of NATO came with German reunification on 3 October 1990, when the former East Germany became part of the Federal Republic of Germany and the alliance. This had been agreed in the Two Plus Four Treaty earlier in the year. To secure Soviet approval of a united Germany remaining in NATO, it was agreed that foreign troops and nuclear weapons would not be stationed in the east. Whilst there was no formal commitment in the agreement not to expand NATO to the east, there are diverging views on whether negotiators gave informal commitments regarding further NATO expansion. Jack Matlock, American ambassador to the Soviet Union during its final years, said that the West gave a "clear commitment" not to expand, and declassified documents indicate that Soviet negotiators were given the impression that NATO membership was off the table for countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister at that time, said in a conversation with Eduard Shevardnadze that "[f]or us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east." In 1996, Gorbachev wrote in his "Memoirs", that "during the negotiations on the unification of Germany they gave assurances that NATO would not extend its zone of operation to the east," and
repeated this view in an interview in 2008. However in 2014 Gorbachev stated the opposite – that "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all [in 1990], and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either." According to Robert Zoellick, a State Department official involved in the Two Plus Four negotiating process, this appears to be a misperception, and no formal commitment regarding enlargement was made. Harvard University historian Mark Kramer also rejects that an informal agreement existed.
Georgia and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) relations officially began in 1994 when Georgia joined the NATO-run Partnership for Peace. Georgia has moved quickly following the Rose Revolution in 2003 to seek closer ties and eventual membership with NATO. Georgia's powerful northern neighbor, Russia, has opposed the closer ties, including those expressed at the 2008 Bucharest summit where NATO members promised that Georgia would eventually join the organization. In the 7 December 2011 statement of the North Atlantic Council Georgia was designated as an "aspirant country".