The True Origin of NATO: What Historians get Wrong

That speech is not the story you've heard. The story you've heard starts more than a year later, on April 4th, 1949, with twelve foreign ministers gathered in Washington to sign the North Atlantic Treaty. It's a clean story. Stalin was threatening Europe, the free world needed a shield, America stepped up, and NATO was born as the great military bulwark against Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap. It's the story taught in most high school textbooks and repeated in most documentaries. And it's not exactly false. But it leaves out almost everything that actually explains why NATO exists, who really built it, what it was actually designed to do, and why the man most responsible for the strategy behind it spent the rest of his life insisting the alliance had become something he never intended. #NATO #ColdWarHistory #History