NATO's 75 Years In Photos

This image shows the first meeting of the North Atlantic Council in September 1949.

One month before this Washington D.C. meeting, a treaty signed by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and nine other European countries came into force, heralding the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 

British soldiers during a NATO exercise inside the U.K.-controlled sector of Germany in September 1951.

Amid increasing tensions with Stalin’s Soviet Union, NATO signatories declared that an attack on one member would be viewed as an attack on all. This provision was included in a key section of the NATO treaty known as Article 5. 
 

German girls watch a British soldier during the 1951 NATO exercise.

The idea of a trans-Atlantic military alliance had been formed after World War II as the U.S.S.R. appeared poised to bully its way across an exhausted Europe. In 1948 the Kremlin backed a communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and began to pressure Norway into forming a “non-aggression” pact.
 

NATO’s temporary headquarters in Paris, photographed in the early 1950s.

America’s European Affairs director John D. Hickerson in 1948 called for the United States to show “concrete evidence of American determination to resist further communist encroachment” across Europe. “Willingness to fight for liberty is closely related to the strength of the help available,” the diplomat noted.  
 

An unidentified tank during a joint exercise on the border between France and Germany in September 1952. 

NATO would also be seen as a way of curtailing any potential “revival of German militarism.” A summary of the alliance’s goals attributed to NATO’s first secretary-general were to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
 

A NATO conference in Paris in 1954.

The "North Atlantic" geographical marker of NATO was reportedly chosen so the alliance could remain open to new membership, while discouraging interest from Latin America and far-flung countries like Australia.

A NATO conference in Paris in 1957 behind the NATO emblem which was adopted in 1953.

NATO's flag features a dark blue, representing the Atlantic Ocean, with a compass rose representing the direction toward peace, and a circle symbolizing unity.  

NATO Secretary-General Manlio Brosio (left) and U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers watch Icelandic Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson cut a NATO-themed cake during celebrations of the alliance’s 20th anniversary in Washington D.C. in 1969.

Eduard Shevardnadze (center) the Soviet Union's Foreign Minister during a visit to NATO's headquarters in Belgium in December 1989. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, communism appeared to be retreating in Europe. 

NATO’s Secretary-General Manfred Worner walks across Red Square during a visit to Moscow in July 1990.

The seeds of a new rift between Moscow and the West were apparently sown when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told the Soviet leadership in February 1990 that, "if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” That sentiment was repeated, though never formally agreed upon, by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel (left) on a visit to NATO Headquarters in Belgium in March 1991. 

With the Cold War won after 1991, existential questions about NATO’s future mounted. U.S. President George Bush remarked that, for a newborn peace, “the real danger came from a general sense of euphoria that everything was going swimmingly.”

 

NATO’s research vessel, the Alliance, during its launch in 1986. The ship is operated by the Italian Navy.

As the “cement of fear” crumbled in the 1990s, NATO rebranded itself for an era in which “a single massive and global threat has given way to diverse and multi-directional risks.”

An F-16 that shot down three of four Serbian jets that were downed over Bosnia. 

The first shots ever fired in combat by NATO came in February 1994 when U.S. fighters shot down four Serbian warplanes that bombed a Bosnian factory during the escalating conflicts across the former Yugoslavia.

Italian soldiers guard suspected arsonists in Sarajevo in March 1996.

Tens of thousands of NATO troops were deployed to the conflict in Bosnia. Since then the alliance invoked Article 5 against Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and intervened in Libya's civil war.

U.S. Coast Guards prepare to board a suspected pirate vessel in the Gulf of Aden in May 2010.

NATO was also involved in the operation to crack down on piracy off the coast of Africa from 2008 to 2016.   

German troops during a NATO exercise in Lithuania in 2024. 

Today, NATO has 32 member states across Europe and North America. Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, individual NATO members have supplied tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Kyiv but the alliance has not directly intervened.

NATO has called the Russian invasion a “brutal and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine,” and has vowed to eventually include Ukraine in the alliance.