NATO's Article 5: collective security
The obligations among member states enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty are not watertight and mean nothing without personnel, resources and equipment
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI: AFP/Getty Images
Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States the first time on 29 January 2017, there has been a building anxiety with the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance about the continued commitment of America. The organisation has its roots in the Atlantic Charter, a statement of Allied war goals signed by President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August 1941, and partly for that reason the involvement of the United States in Western defence and security had long been taken as read.
The North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s foundational document, was negotiated and agreed in Washington in March and April 1949, its provisions drafted by a committee chaired by 43-year-old Theodore Achilles, an experienced diplomat at that point serving as Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs at the State Department; there was considerable detailed input from the Director of the Office of European Affairs, John Hickerson. So from the beginning, NATO was in part driven by American interests, a way of allowing the United States to reduce the size of its military forces—though the largest reductions had already been achieved between 1945 and 1947, when the armed forces had been cut by 90 per cent.
That said, even if the origin of the quotation is apocryphal, we should remember how NATO’s first Secretary General (1952-57), General Lord Ismay, supposedly summed up the organisation’s purpose: “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. So that tension, that reliance on the United States tempered by the lingering fear that its support one day might be withdrawn, has long been present.
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty
One focus of the fears over a reduction in America’s commitment to NATO in recent years has been Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which deals with collective security, and there have been assumptions made about what the article says, what it means, what it demands, and what it guarantees. It is worth reproducing Article 5 in full:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.
Unsurprisingly, given the fact that the treaty was signed more than 75 years ago, geopolitical circumstances have changed. Article 6 defines the geographical limits of the application of Article 5, and was amended by a protocol in October 1951 when Greece and Turkey were admitted to NATO. Additional protocols have accompanied every expansion of the alliance.
Article 6 in the treaty’s current form reads as follows:
For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack:
on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France, on the territory of Turkey or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer;
on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.
Although it remains formally part of the text of the treaty, the North Atlantic Council agreed on 16 January 1963, after a declaration from the French representative, that the phrase “on the Algerian Departments of France” had ceased to apply as of 3 July 1962; Algeria had been declared independent by France that day after an overwhelming referendum vote, and the provisional government headed by Benyoucef Benkhedda announced its independence on 5 July.
Article 5 invoked and discussed
Article 5 has only been invoked once. When the United States was attacked by al-Qa’eda on 11 September 2001, the Secretary General, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, contacted the United States government suggesting that it would be a valuable political statement of solidarity if NATO were to declare an Article 5 contingency. Secretary of State Colin Powell responded that the administration did not intend to seek such an action, but were the North Atlantic Council to make such a declaration on its own initiative, it would be welcomed in Washington.
The matter was considered on 12 September, and was not an open-and-shut case. Germany felt any reference to potential military action was premature, Belgium and the Netherlands sought to tone done the language of the proposed draft and Norway stepped back from the whole process. That evening, the North Atlantic Council issued a statement on the attacks on America, but it stated that Article 5 would only be engaged “if it is determined that this attack was directed from abroad against the United States”, and maintained a comfortably vague position in saying that the other member states “stand ready to provide the assistance that may be required as a consequence of these acts of barbarism”.
No immediate action flowed from the statement, and senior American leaders were sceptical or outright dismissive of its value. At that point there was no attempt to seek allies’ involvement in military action, and General Tommy Franks, Commander of United States Central Command, reportedly said “I don’t have the time to become an expert on the Danish Air Force”. A second statement by the NAC on 2 October, which affirmed that the 11 September attacks were indeed the work of al-Qa’eda led by Osama bin Laden, and that the group enjoyed the protection of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, made little difference. One US official remarked mordantly, “I think it’s safe to say that we won’t be asking SACEUR [Supreme Allied Commander, Europe] to put together a battle plan for Afghanistan”.
(Of course, NATO took the lead of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in August 2003 in May 2006, Lieutenant General Sir David Richards, Commander of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Force (ARRC), assumed control of ISAF, and during his tenure NATO expanded rapidly to control most military and peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan until ISAF’s mission ended and control was passed to the Afghan security forces in 2014.)
There have been at least four threats of invoking Article 5. Turkey raised the possibility in June and August 2012: on the first occasion when a McDonnell Douglas RF-4E Phantom II reconnaissance aircraft was shot down near the Turkey-Syria border by a surface-to-air missile fired by a Syrian Army unit; and on the latter, when the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) threatened the Tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire. In neither case was the matter pressed.
In August 2022, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant at Enerhodar on the River Dnieper, which had been occupied by Russian forces in March, was damaged by shellfire. Ukraine blamed Russia while Russia blamed Ukraine, but there was a danger of the facility malfunctioning and radioactive material being leaked. Tobias Ellwood, Chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, and Rep Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, both warned that if deliberate damage led to a radioactive leak which caused harm to populations in neighbouring NATO member states, this should be considered an act of aggression which triggered Article 5. All six of the reactors at Zaporizhzhia were placed in various stages of shutdown in September, and so far there has been no leak; though it must remain moot whether NATO would have agreed that a radioactive leak, even if proven to be caused by Russian military action, would have a powerful enough reason for the alliance to declare war on Russia.
Later that year, in October 2022, the Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, admitted that he had considered seeking the invocation of Article 5 that July, in response to a major cyber attack believed to have been coordinated by Iran which had intended to “destroy [Albania], paralyse public services and hack data and electronic communications from the government systems”. Iran denied responsibility, although, for example, the UK condemned Iran’s involvement through third-party groups, and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, believed that Iran was to blame. Ultimately, however, Rama chose not to pursue that course of escalation.
Potential challenges of Article 5 contingency
These “might-have-beens” or near misses illustrate two important aspects of Article 5 in the modern world. The first is that it can no longer be assumed that an act of aggression which should legitimately engage Article 5 will come in the form of a conventional military strike by land, air or sea (even al-Qa’eda’s 11 September 2001 attacks did more or less fit this category: as I wrote last year, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were not the result of new technology or new actors but simply a new, and terrible, was of thinking). At the Brussels Summit in June 2021, NATO affirmed that hybrid warfare including cyber attacks “might in certain circumstances be considered an armed attack that could lead the North Atlantic Council to invoke Article 5… on a case-by-case basis”. However, instances like the potential leak of radioactive material from Zaporizhzhia would present a more challenging decision still.
The second factor is that it may not always be clear, at least initially but perhaps for an extended period of time, who has carried out an act of aggression that would otherwise easily clear the bar for engaging Article 5. Al-Qa’eda, although a non-state actor, was eager to claim responsibility for the 11 September 2001 attacks, but the example of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant would have been more difficult, as both Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for damage done to the facility; while Iran’s use of third parties to conduct cyber warfare against Albania was of a piece with its much broader sponsorship and use of proxy groups: Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, the al-Ashtar Brigades, the Badr Organization, Saraya al-Mukhtar and Liwa Fatemiyoun have all been supported to varying degrees by the Islamic Republic of Iran. An act of aggression by a proxy group—although Iran’s current status in its conflict with Israel suggests it has little capacity to support proxies now—would require very careful consideration of whether NATO should respond against the proxy or directly against the known or assumed sponsor.
It is reasonable to question whether the current US administration would fully and wholeheartedly live up to Article 5’s spirit of collective security, given Donald Trump’s deep-seated dislike of NATO, sense of injustice towards allies for failing to “pay their way” on defence and his strange, almost admiring amity towards President Vladimir Putin. In March, I wrote in The Spectator that if Russia acted against Poland, which would hardly be unprecedented (1654, 1715, 1733, 1772, 1792, 1795, 1830-31, 1863-64, 1918, 1939, 1945), I could not honestly say I was certain America would come to Poland’s aid in military terms, despite it being a clear breach of collective security. Others—and I agree with them—harbour similar doubts about the United States’s willingness to defend the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and a question mark must also hang over Finland.
What does is really commit member states to?
Alongside these doubts, however, we need to remind ourselves what Article 5 actually says. There is a common belief that it is a trigger for full-scale military action and an obligation on NATO member states to join a conflict alongside an ally which has been subject to aggression. That is an understandable and frequent reading of the generalities, but the commitment actually enshrined in Article 5 is that each member state:
will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
There is the real crux: “such action as it deems necessary”. Each NATO member is left to decide what “action”, which can include “the use of armed force” but is not synonymous with it, is “necessary” to “restore and maintain the security” of NATO’s area. In short, if America chose not to commit military forces to defend, for example, Poland against a Russian invasion, it would not be possible to say definitively that the United States was in breach of its obligations under Article 5, because each signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty determines what those obligations are. President Trump could, in this hypothetical situation, supply equipment to Poland or impose sanctions on Russia and determine that such action was “necessary”.
Article 5 is not the magic wand many people think it is. The difficulty arises from the fact that, for decades and certainly throughout the Cold War, the stakes between NATO and the Warsaw Pact were so high that everyone assumed a common understanding of the North Atlantic Treaty. An “armed attack against one or more” member states was regarded as being overwhelmingly likely to take the form of a full-scale military invasion of central and western Europe by Soviet and allied forces, and debating whether Article 5 applied would hardly be necessary.
(That being said, while intended as satire, the first episode of Sir Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s timeless Yes, Prime Minister, “The Grand Design”, brilliantly illustrated the way in which a Soviet incursion might begin rather more subtly than that.)
The real basis of collective security
NATO is still fundamentally an institution posited on the notion of collective security. This is why, if Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain, really has secured an opt-out from the NATO-wide target of five per cent of defence spending which was supposed to be rubber-stamped at this week’s summit in the Hague, it is an outrageous dereliction of duty by Spain. Collective security requires common purpose and common endeavour, and it is disgraceful that Spain should think it is acceptable for other member states to shoulder the burden on the grounds that, as Sánchez wrote to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte last week:
It is the legitimate right of every government to decide whether or not they are willing to make those sacrifices. As a sovereign ally, we choose not to.
Nevertheless, to be clear-sighted in our approach to NATO’s future and especially America’s role in it, we have to understand that it is not always the institutional framework, the letter of the law, which is most important. Because of the legislative hurdles—Section 1250A of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 states that the President cannot unilaterally withdraw the United States from NATO but requires either a two-thirds majority in the Senate or an Act of Congress—I think it is unlikely Trump would seek formally to leave the alliance. But he does not need to: a radical reduction of forces deployed to Europe, capabilities available to assist NATO allies and NATO missions, and a revision downwards of what “action” he deemed “necessary” in the event of an Article 5 trigger would do the job for him.
Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes, as Benjamin Franklin wrote. Donald Trump may not withdraw in all but name from NATO, his administration may see suddenly how much the security of continental Europe affects American interests, NATO members may knuckle down to find that five per cent of GDP to fulfil the first duty of any government, defence of the realm (though I said a few weeks ago that the UK will find it hard along with other countries). Vladimir Putin may rein in his imperialist ambitions, Ukraine may cause the Russian armed forces even more damage. But what we need to concentrate on, as commentators and the public, as well as politicians likewise, is how much NATO is spending, what is is getting for that expenditure and how long members are committed. If we overlook those things, even supposedly holy writ like Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty will prove of little importance. Follow the money.