7.1.7 to 7.1.14

History The US President, NATO Secretary General, and the Prime Ministers of Latvia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Estonia after a South Lawn ceremony welcoming them into NATO on 29 March 2004. Beginnings The Treaty of Brussels, signed on 17 March 1948 by Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg (the Benelux countries), France, and the United Kingdom, is considered the precursor to the NATO agreement. This treaty established a military alliance, later to become the Western European Union. However, American participation was thought necessary in order to counter the military power of the Soviet Union, and therefore talks for a new military alliance began almost immediately. These talks resulted in the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington, DC, in the United States, on 4 April 1949, and included the five Treaty of Brussels states (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and the UK), United States and Canada from North America, Portugal and Italy and the three Nordic countries of Norway, Denmark and Iceland. Three years later, on 18 February 1952, Greece and Turkey also joined. The incorporation of West Germany into the organisation on 9 May 1955 was described as "a decisive turning point in the history of our continent" by Halvard Lange, Foreign Minister of Norway at the time. [2] Indeed, one of its immediate results was the creation of the Warsaw Pact, signed on 14 May 1955 by the Soviet Union and its satellite states as a formal response to this event, firmly establishing the two opposing sides of the Cold War. Early Cold War -Crisis with France The unity of NATO was breached early on in its history, with a crisis occurring during Charles de Gaulle's presidency of France from 1958 onwards. De Gaulle protested the United States' hegemonical role in the organization and protested what he perceived as a special relationship between the United States and Great Britain. In a memorandum he sent on 17 September 1958 to President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, he argued for the creation of a tripartite Directorate that would put France on an equal footing with the United States and the United Kingdom, and also for the expansion of NATO's coverage to include geographical areas of interest to France.