EUROPE- Decline of NATO

Marx published the Communist Manifesto the Communist tide was running so strongly that it threatened to flow over much of Western Europe. It had engulfed Czechoslovakia and seemed on the point of overwhelming France and Italy when, in 1948, a dozen Western powers hurriedly undertook to build a wall to hold back the advancing tide of Russian Communism. A year later, in the spring of 1949, they signed the North Atlantic Treaty, thus providing themselves with a system of collective defence. An armed attack against any one of them would be regarded as an attack on all, a consideration which it was hoped, would deter the Russians.