The collapse of the Soviet bloc ended the Warsaw Pact’s direct threat to the western liberal democracies. [...] Reinforced by institutions like the Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), our economic bloc did as much as NATO’s political and military preparations to bolster the western nations against our rivals. [...] Keeping the Soviet bloc out of the western NATO’s Challenge: The Economic Dimension Page 1 by Ian Brodie September, 2017 NATO’s Challenge: The Economic Dimension international economy limited Soviet economic influence over the democracies and ensured the western economic sphere ran on liberal economic and political assumptions. [...] With the end of the Cold War, western democratic political leaders rightly moved quickly to extend the western international economy to the liberalizing and democratizing states of central and eastern Europe, southern and Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. [...] The European Union, the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other institutions of the western global economy were opened up to new members.