With Russia’s attack on Ukraine, many people are wondering what NATO is. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is one of the world’s leading international institutions. It is a political and military alliance of 30 member countries from Europe and North America. With the end of the Second World War on 4 April 1949, the Atlantic Pact was signed. Nato countries map.
This treaty signed by the United States, Cananda and several countries of the current European Union created an alliance against a possible attack by the Soviet Union. But which nations are part of it today? How have the NATO countries evolved?
How many countries are in the NATO?
Let’s start by trying to answer a first question. How many countries in the world are members of NATO? NATO was initially founded in 1949 with 12 member countries. These included the United States and Canada, as well as many countries in what is now Europe. These included the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and so on.
The list of founding member countries of NATO:
- USA
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- France
- Italy
- Portugal
- Netherlands
- Belgium
- Luxemburg
- Denmark
- Island
- Norway
From the birth of NATO to 2022, geopolitics has completely changed. The Cold War has ended and so has the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the USSR, many Eastern European states became independent and in the course of time joined both the European Union and NATO. There are currently 30 NATO member states. Below you can see the names of the states as well as the date of entry into NATO. Not only that, you can see the population of the NATO states.
List of NATO Countries at 2022:
- Albania
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Canada
- Croatia
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Italy
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Montenegro
- Netherlands
- North Macedonia
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Turkey
- United Kingdom
- United States of America
The top five NATO states by population are the United States, Turkey, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The United States, the founding country of NATO, has over 334 million inhabitants. This is followed by Turkey with 82.5 million and Germany, France and the UK with between 80 and 67 million inhabitants.
Nato countries map
So what is the current map of NATO member nations? While we have said that there are 30 nations that are part of NATO, it is also true that over the years there have been various peace collaborations. As you can see in the video below, especially after the 1990s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many countries have collaborated with NATO. The Partnership for Peace programme, which was set up in 1994, enabled individual states to develop relations with NATO.
These relationships have allowed some nations to join NATO over time. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic participated in the peace programme in 1994 and became full members of NATO on 12 March 1999. So did other countries such as Romania, Lithuania, Estonia and Bulgaria, which joined NATO in March 2004. And later NATO enlargement saw the entry of Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.
Army of NATO countries
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has, as mentioned, 30 countries that make it up. But what are the armies of these nations? What is the potential strength of NATO?
If we only look at active military personnel, the United States alone has, for example, 1,395,350 military personnel. This is followed by Turkey with 355,200 active military personnel and France with 203,250. Out of 30 NATO nations, nine have an active military force of more than 100,000.
So how many active NATO troops are there? In total, there are about 3.5 million NATO soldiers. And this figure refers to active personnel. The figures grow much larger if we also consider the other two types: paramilitaries and military reserves.
What is NATO?
What is NATO? NATO is an alliance between the countries of Europe and North America. It represents a unique link between these two continents that can consult and collaborate on defence and security matters and conduct multinational crisis management operations together.
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