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Hey, Escalation listeners, Benjamin Witt is here, executive producer of the podcast.

We've got another bonus episode for you.

This time it's an extended cut of our conversation with Mary Sorati, a historian and NATO expert.

We talked to Mary about NATO's origins, its strange relationship with Russia and Ukraine's

murky status in the alliance. Here it is.

What is NATO who's in it and what's the purpose of NATO?

NATO is an acronym. It stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The narrow

answer to your question is that it's an alliance that came into being

on April 4th, 1949. It's an alliance, as the name suggests, across the Atlantic Ocean.

Now, there obviously has been a long time saying about NATO that what it was really for

was to keep the Americans in, the Soviets out, and the Germans

down. That's the unofficial description. Basically, you had, after World War II, a broken and

shattered Europe hoping for the end of conflict. But instead, rising tensions between an American-led

bloc and a Soviet-led bloc in, increasingly, the division of Europe.

And it became apparent that rather than a post-World War II peace conference, there was now going to be an era of new hostility.

And even worse, this was going to be atomic hostility between the superpowers.

So gradually, as countries in the West realized

that they were going to face new hostility from the Soviet Union, the big question was

...