By David T. Jones on July 16, 2018
Washington, DC ~ NATO was conceived in 1949 as an international security alliance against the imminent prospect of a Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion to conquer that part of Europe it did not already dominate. The situation was, if not desperate, intensely challenging as massive Soviet forces had smashed Nazi armies on the Eastern Front and captured Berlin in 1945—only four years earlier—and consequently held the eastern half of pre-war Germany as well as half of Austria. And, subsequently, Moscow eradicated any traces of incipient democracy in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania. More disconcerting, the Soviets orchestrated a coup in struggling democracy Czechoslovakia, transforming it into a Soviet satrap. Communist parties were strong in France, Italy, and Greece (where armed insurgency was in progress).
