Les noms de pays: names of countries

Countries are nouns. In French, very few nouns can stand alone, most of them need to be introduced by an article. As in English, articles are characterized by definite (the) or indefinite (a, an). See table below.

Articles before names of countries are always definite articles.

Which article then? Masculine (LE), feminine (LA) or plural (LES)? It is straightforward. See the table below.