NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an international military alliance consisting of 31 member states from Europe and North America. The founding member countries of NATO were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Since then, 19 more countries have joined NATO through nine rounds of enlargement. The countries that joined NATO between 1952 and 1955 were Greece, Turkey, and Germany. Spain joined in 1982. After the end of the Cold War, NATO added 15 more members from 1999 to 2023, including Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, North Macedonia in 2020, and Finland in 2023.
Here is the complete list of NATO member countries as of October 2023:
- 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
It is worth noting that all members have militaries, except for Iceland, which does not have a typical army (but it does have a coast guard and a small unit of civilian specialists for NATO operations) .
