In fact, you don`t apply for membership in NATO at all; NATO has to invite you to join. And at the moment they are not about to invite anyone else to join, let alone former members of the Warsaw Pact. They have their own excellent reasons for this; one of them is that they know only too well how the alliance is still viewed by many former Soviet officials, and what reactions it might cause if NATO started moving closer to the former Soviet borders. From a purely military and strategic point of view, there is logic in the Soviet thinking: no country likes to see itself surrounded by a powerful alliance to which it has no access.
Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1992. Havel var Tjeckoslovakiens president 1989–1992 och Tjeckiens president 1993–2003. Han var en av de ledande personerna i medborgarrättsrörelsen Charta 77. Tjeckien blev medlem av Nato 1999 och Slovakien 2004.