NATO

"The NATO, no? It seems it could mean the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That's the organization where it fights Russia."

--Su Ji-Hoon, The Ambitions of the European Union

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO /ˈneɪtoʊ/; French: Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord; OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European countries based on the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on April 4 1949.

NATO constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. Three NATO members (the United States, France and the United Kingdom) are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and are officially nuclear-weapon states. The NATO headquarters are located in Haren, Brussels, Belgium, while the headquarters of Allied Command Operations is near Mons, Belgium.

NATO is an alliance that consists of 29 independent member countries across North America and Europe. An additional 21 countries participate in NATO's Partnership for Peace program, with 15 other countries involved in institutionalized dialogue programs. The combined military spending of all NATO members constitutes over 70% of the global total. Members' defense spending is supposed to amount to at least 2% of GDP by 2024.