(1 Apr 2019) As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) marks its 70th anniversary this week, a former U.S. ambassador to the military alliance recalls how the coalition rallied to America's aid after one of its darkest days.  
The United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom signed the initial treaty on April 4, 1949.
NATO, grew largely out of Cold War fears of Soviet aggression and expansionism following a communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet blockade of Berlin and other incidents.
Ambassador Nicholas Burns was at the start of his four year term as American Ambassador to NATO on September 11, 2001 when terror attacks hit New York's Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
"We were six hours ahead of the East Coast in time and in the mid to late afternoon I couldn't reach anybody at the State Department, the Defense Department and the White House because they'd been evacuated, " Burns said in an Associated Press interview.
A key provision of the treaty, the so-called Article 5, states that if one member of the alliance is attacked in Europe or North America, it is to be considered an attack on all of them.
"The treaty says in Article 5, 'an attack on one of us will be considered an attack on all of us.' And this was the guarantee that if Stalin or Khrushchev had attacked in the darkest days of the Cold War the United States would come again across the Atlantic to protect Europe, " Burns said.
"And the great irony is we only invoked Article 5 once in the history of those 70 years of NATO and that was September 12, 2001."  
In its response, the alliance activated AWACS reconnaissance flights over the U.S. for months, operations that included 830 crew members from 13 NATO countries.
It also launched maritime operations in the Mediterranean, and participated in U.S.-led efforts in Afghanistan, where it has led the mission since 2003.

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