MAPS & MEMBERSHIP

Of the 29 NATO member countries, two are located in North America (Canada and the United States) and 27 are European countries while Turkey is in Eurasia. All members have militaries, except for Iceland which does not have a typical army (but does, however, have a coast guard and a small unit of civilian specialists for NATO operations). Three of NATO's members are nuclear weapons states: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NATO has 12 original founding member nation states, and from 18 February 1952 to 6 May 1955, it added three more member nations, and a fourth on 30 May 1982. After the end of the Cold War, NATO added 13 more member nations (10 former Warsaw Pact members and three former Yugoslav republics) from 12 March 1999 to 5 June 2017.

NATO has added new members seven times since its founding in 1949, and since 2017 NATO has had 29 members. Twelve countries were part of the founding of NATO: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 1952, Greece and Turkey became members of the Alliance, joined later by West Germany (in 1955) and Spain (in 1982). In 1990, with the reunification of Germany, NATO grew to include the former country of East Germany. Between 1994 and 1997, wider forums for regional cooperation between NATO and its neighbors were set up, including the Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue initiative and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. In 1997, three former Warsaw Pact countries, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, were invited to join NATO. After this fourth enlargement in 1999, the Vilnius group of the Baltics and seven East European countries formed in May 2000 to cooperate and lobby for further NATO membership. Seven of these countries joined in the fifth enlargement in 2004. The Adriatic States Albania and Croatia joined in the sixth enlargement in 2009, Montenegro in 2017.

United States President Donald Trump expressed interest in withdrawing from the organization during his 2016 presidential campaign

As of 2018, NATO officially recognizes four aspiring members: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Macedonia and Ukraine. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina within Bosnia and Herzegovina has expressed willingness to join NATO, however, it faces consistent political pressure from Republika Srpska, the other political entity in the country, alongside its partners in Moscow. Macedonia has been prevented from joining the alliance by Greece, one effect of the Macedonian naming dispute. Future expansion is currently a topic of debate in several countries outside the alliance, and countries like Sweden, Finland, and Serbia have open political debate on the topic of membership, while in countries like Ukraine, support and opposition to membership is tied to ethnic and nationalist ideologies. The incorporation of countries formerly part of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union has been a cause of increased tension between NATO countries and Russia.

Agreements with other countries not members of the Alliance

In November 2002, during the Prague summit, Individual Partnership Action Plans (IPAP) were opened to countries that have the political will and sufficient capacity to have a greater relationship with NATO.

The Partnership for Peace (PFP) is a program originally initiated in 1994 and based on bilateral relations between each partner country and NATO: each country can choose to what extent it wants to participate. 

The twenty-one associated countries are the following:

- Former countries of the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan.

- Military neutral countries that had a capitalist system during the Cold War: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Malta, Sweden, Switzerland.

- Military neutral countries that had a socialist economy during the Cold War: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia.

Cyprus finds great opposition to its admission to the Association for Peace by Turkey because of the conflict between the two countries. For this reason, Cyprus does not participate in the European Security and Defense Policy.

The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), established on May 29, 1997, consists of a forum for coordination, consultation and dialogue among the participants in the Partnership for Peace program. the member countries of NATO. 

Being a NATO global partner does not mean being a member of the organization, but it has privileges of cooperation, on the part of the member countries of the alliance, in the area of equipment, training and research towards the countries that make up this group as if they were members .

In this category of "global partner" are Afghanistan, Australia, Iraq, Japan, Colombia, South Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand and Pakistan.

A major non-NATO ally (in English, Major non-NATO ally, or its acronym MNNA) is a designation given by the United States government to a group of allied countries that maintain joint work with the Armed Forces of the United States. United but not members of the organization. Being elevated to the status of MNNA does not automatically include a collective defense pact with the United States, but it provides military and financial advantages, on the part of the North American country, that could not obtain countries that are not members of NATO.