From Europe to East Asia, US allies face a hard question: how far would Washington go to defend them? NATO’s Article 5 offers a revealing place to start.
There are few myths as captivating and durable as that of Article 5 of the 1949 Washington Treaty. Proponents of the myth are convinced that, thanks to this provision, NATO is like Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers, in which an attack against one is an attack against all, and the US would automatically come in full force to the rescue of any of the allies under attack.
It’s debatable and essentially unknowable to what extent that would have worked in the situation of the Cold War, when the US genuinely feared the Soviet/Communist threat, because the bloc was never tested to that extent. But it certainly is utterly false under present conditions and likely future circumstances, and America’s allies and partners need to pay attention and be careful.
The wording of the article itself is deliberately ambiguous. Clearly, there’s no automaticity there in the use of force, and such careful formulation was a condition for the treaty’s ratification by the US Senate because American policymakers at the time abhorred entering into entangling alliances.
So much for the automatic use of US military force.
Later, after the Soviet Union developed intercontinental ballistic missiles in the mid-to-late 1950s, American military strategy sought to avoid a direct nuclear exchange. Nuclear war, if it were to be fought, was to stay limited, confined to Europe, east and west.
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