NATO: 75 years of peaceful progress
Remember the last time you left home to go to work, run errands, or visit family or friends?
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Maybe you navigated using GPS, bought gas with a credit card, stopped at an ATM or called to say, “I’m running late. I’ll be there soon!”
Many things we take for granted in our daily lives are possible thanks in part to the enduring peace and stability that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has brought to Europe and North America.
It wasn’t always this way.
Twenty-one years after World War I ended, World War II erupted, continuing a centuries-long pattern of war in Europe. Homes, farms and factories were destroyed, and 36 million Europeans — more than half of them civilians — were killed.
Some 100,000 American soldiers who crossed the ocean to liberate a continent never returned home.
When the war ended in 1945, food shortages and power outages were common across Europe. Children scavenged cities for something to eat.
But on April 4, 1949, much of Europe and North America chose a brighter path. Twelve countries founded the NATO Alliance to build a future of peace and stability.
U.S. President Harry Truman called the new Alliance “a shield against aggression” that “will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”
Truman speaks on the promise of NATO after the signing of the Alliance's founding treaty on April 4, 1949. (Harry S. Truman Library)
As NATO marks its 75th anniversary on April 4, 2024, the Alliance celebrates a long period of stability that has allowed a once-tattered Europe to prosper.
Retired U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander for Europe, cites NATO’s “unblemished record of deterring attack against its members” as among the Alliance’s greatest accomplishments.
Soon after NATO was founded, member nations began to rebuild their economies. From 1953 to 1963, the gross national product of NATO countries surged by 75%.
“It is increasingly clear that nations united in freedom are better able to build their economies than those that are repressed by tyranny,” President John F. Kennedy said in Naples, Italy, on July 2, 1963.
Kennedy addresses NATO headquarters in Naples, Italy, July 2, 1963. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library/White House Audio Collection)