Before the Billions: Securing a Broken Continent

In order to understand the contemporary situation, it is necessary to know how and why NATO came to be.

For this, we must travel back to 1949 towards a fragile Europe trying to heal the scars left behind from the Second World War. In a new, bipolar world divided between the influence of the US and the USSR, twelve nations gathered in Washington to sign a pact that would redraw the strategic map of the West forever.

As the Cold War froze the borders of Europe, NATO’s first expansion focused on securing the Southern Flank and the heart of the continent. In 1952, Greece and Turkey joined to anchor the Mediterranean.

They were followed in 1955 by West Germany, an important move that integrated the former frontline of the war into the Western defense architecture.

By the time Spain joined in 1982, the alliance had grown into a sixteen-nation bulwark.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union fundamentally changed NATO’s purpose. No longer just a Cold War shield, the alliance became a tool for stabilising a newly free and democratic Eastern Europe. In 1999, former Warsaw Pact [1] members Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic led the way and joined the West.

Just five years later, in 2004, NATO underwent its largest expansion to date. Seven nations, including the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, joined together with Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia in a single wave. This move shifted the alliance’s borders directly to the doorstep of the former Soviet Union.

In the last two decades, the focus has shifted again; this time toward the Balkans, with the inclusion of Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. However, the most dramatic pivot occurred in 2023 and 2024; as a direct response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a radically different safety situation, the long-neutral Nordic countries of Finland and Sweden joined the alliance.

What began as a small club of twelve has transformed into a 32-nation powerhouse. [2] As the map grew, so did the friction: can 32 different nations truly share the burden of an alliance that Trump calls "the United States in a trench coat"?

  1. The Warsaw Pact formed NATO's biggest challenger during the Cold War era. Backed by the Soviet Union's nuclear umbrella, many communist countries joined forming a defensive alliance of 8 members a its peak, with a few notable observers. See also: Warsaw Pact. ↩︎

  2. There are some notable countries not included in the NATO alliance. The most well-known is of course Switzerland, which has known a history of neutrality since centuries ago. However, the attentive reader also notices some EU countries missing on the map: Ireland, Austria, Cyprus and Malta are also holding on to their military neutrality, which is often anchored in their constitutions. Even though they have fundamental objection to picking a side, these countries often cooperate with NATO in the so-called Partnership for Peace-programme. ↩︎