Curated playlist
20th-century military alliances
- Anglo-Soviet AgreementOn the 12th of July 1941, two men sat down in Moscow to sign a document that would reshape the war in Europe. Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain's Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet People's Commissar of Foreign…
- Anglo-Polish allianceThe Anglo-Polish alliance was born on the 31st of March 1939, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stood in Parliament and pledged that if Poland's independence was threatened, His Majesty's Government would lend the Polish…
- Franco-Polish allianceThe Franco-Polish Alliance was born in Paris in February 1921, signed by a Polish count and a French foreign minister against the backdrop of a war that had barely ended. What brought these two countries together was something older than…
- Pact of SteelThe Pact of Steel was signed on the 22nd of May 1939, binding Germany and Italy to go to war together. Foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano put their names to a document that obliged each country to aid the other…
- Warsaw PactThe Warsaw Pact was born on the 14th of May 1955, eight days after West Germany joined NATO. Its founding declaration accused a remilitarized Western Germany of increasing "the danger of another war" and posing a threat to "the national…
- ANZUSANZUS is a collective security treaty signed on the 1st of September 1951 in San Francisco, binding Australia, New Zealand, and the United States to a shared defence framework in the Pacific. It entered into force on the 29th of April…
- Allies of World War IThe Allies of World War I were an international military coalition that, by the war's end in 1918, represented roughly 70% of the world's population, 61% of its land, and 64% of its economic output. They called themselves the Entente, a…
- Anti-Comintern PactOn the 25th of November 1936, in the offices of a semi-official diplomatic bureau that operated outside Germany's formal foreign ministry, two ambassadors put their signatures to a document that would reshape the alignment of the world's…
- Axis powersThe Axis powers launched the deadliest conflict in human history, and they did it with far less unity than their opponents ever imagined. Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Empire of Japan stood at the center of the coalition, yet…
- Central PowersThe Central Powers were the military coalition that fought against the Allied nations in World War I, a conflict that ran from 1914 to 1918. Four empires and kingdoms formed its core: the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire,…
- Tripartite PactThe Tripartite Pact was signed in Berlin on the 27th of September 1940. Adolf Hitler stood by as Joachim von Ribbentrop, Galeazzo Ciano, and Saburō Kurusu each placed their signature on the document, representing Germany, Italy, and Japan.…
- Triple EntenteThe Triple Entente was not a treaty, not a binding pact, and not a formal alliance. It was, as British Foreign Office official Eyre Crowe put it, "nothing more than a frame of mind." Yet this loosely woven arrangement between the Russian…
- Allies of World War IIThe Allies of World War II were an international military coalition that formed in opposition to the Axis powers during the war that ran from 1939 to 1945. On the 1st of January 1942, representatives of 26 countries gathered their…
- Southeast Asia Treaty OrganizationThe Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was born on the 19th of February 1955, in Bangkok, and dissolved on the 30th of June 1977, also in Bangkok. Twenty-two years. Eight member nations. And almost nothing to show for it militarily. SEATO…