KUALA LUMPUR: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was born at a tumultuous and uncertain period shortly after the Second World War. By then, erstwhile allies and victors the United States and the Soviet Union were increasingly not seeing eye to eye with each other, not just ideologically but also geopolitically. The Soviets not only laid an oppressive Iron Curtain — as Winston Churchill so famously quipped — over much of Eastern Europe, but was intent on expanding further westward to wrap up the whole of Western Europe, in addition to exporting its revolutionary doctrine — and practice — to the whole wide world.

The US and its mostly European allies were thus keenly alerted to the potential domino effect of creeping Soviet aggression across the European continent, if one after the other European nations were to fall into Soviet hands. The Soviet modus operandi of taking over a country was typically to instigate the communist insurgents in the country into launching often violent riots or other troubles — including some that would nowadays be classified as terrorist acts — that would soon sweep across the whole or much of the country. If these insurgents or guerrillas, in conjunction with their often idealistic sympathizers, could somehow take over the country's rule largely on their own, as in the case of Cuba, in the gruesome revolutionary process, that would be the best in Soviet eyes, as the all-encompassing iron claws of the Soviets would simply be invited into the country concerned, in the name of international communist or socialist solidarity, to take real charge of the country. Otherwise Soviet tanks would simply roll in to reinforce the insurgents in their takeovers. In any case, new Soviet client or satellite states would be born, further spreading the often murderous red terror.