In 73 years has there really been only one occasion where NATO's article 5 applies?

Question

The September 11, 2001 attack on the US remains the only time NATOs article 5 has been invoked. But during the existence of article 5 has any NATO country suffered a significant qualifying attack (see article 6) without it being invoked?

Politics can certainly muddy the water here and fiddle with the meaning of what constitutes an attack so I'll ask that two categories be considered when defining "an attack":

1. The actual language in the treaty
2. The attacked NATO country requested that article 5 be invoked

This means answers may include both requests for invocation that failed and qualifying attacks that didn't produce a request.

But essentially what I want to know is, after all this time, what explains article 5 only being invoked once: a failure to honor the treaty or 73 years of peace?

Answer 1

As it was generally understood, the 'armed attack' in Article 5 refers to inter-state warfare. But it does not say so, and it got used after 9/11 as a political signal. There were many terrorist incidents involving NATO members:

• The IRA attacked the UK (NATO member) from bases in the Republic of Ireland (not a member). It was not in the interest of the UK government to invade the ROI over this.
• The domestic Red Army Faction attacked West Germany (NATO member) with support from Communist intelligence agencies (not NATO members). Again, it was not in the interest of the West German government to invade the GDR government over this.
• Palestinian groups based in the Middle East attacked the Olympic Games in Germany (NATO member). Again, it was not in the interest of the West German government to declare a war. (They were busy explaining their inept counterterrorist operations ...)

Another category would be border incidents. From the long list:

• The Soviets shot Turkish border guards (Turkey is a NATO member).
• In 1950, the Soviets destroyed a US aircraft over the Baltic. According to the US, not in Soviet airspace.
• Syrian fighting spilled into Turkey.

Again, it was not in the interest of NATO to turn those incidents into a war. Perhaps because there were spy overflights by the US and UK which did deliberately violate Soviet airspace.

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My conclusion: Article 5 successfully deterred major interstate war. That was not "luck," it was the knowledge that a fight between the Cold War blocks could quickly spiral out of control. I don't know how old you are, but I grew up in the knowledge that if "the war" came, a large part of mankind would die. Both sides were interested in keeping a sense of perspective, rather than fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus as an emperor said four centuries earlier.

Answer 2

As mentioned in o.m. answers conclusion: The Noth Atlantic Treaty seems to have successfully deterred major warfare in the last 73 years. The only occurrence where another country openly attacked a NATO member was during the Falkland war, though the treaty only covers the region north of the Tropical of Cancer (Art.6), so Article 5 couldn't be invoked back then.

Little "fun fact": Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor would not be covered be the treaty, since Hawaii is also excluded by Article 6.

Answer 3

Invoking article 5 is a major step. Given that the main conflict during most of the 20th C and which would take roughly half of the 73 years is the cold war between the USSR and the USA, strenuous attempts would have been made by diplomats to not invoke article 5 to avoid being drawn into a wider conflict. NATO is, after all, a defensive alliance.

Notably, no terrorist attacks on member countries - apart from 9-11 - led to article 5 being invoked. It would have been like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

It's only the scale of the tragedy of 9-11 that led to article 5 being invoked. In my personal view, this was a mistake, although probably understandable in the early aftermath. In fact, as a high German official stated, the USA was considering using nuclear weapons as "all options were on the table."

Europe itself, the theatre for two European wars in the early to mid 20C, simply wasn't interested in war any longer. It wanted to build peace and this led to the building of the EU as a bulwark against any future belligerant nationalistic fervour breaking out into war.

NATO had served its purpose when the old Soviet Empire collapsed, and like Jack Matlock said, the more or less last US ambassador to the USSR, a new security architecture emcompassing the West and East Europe would have been in the best long-term interests of both parties. This was not to be as we now see in the tragic sitiation in Ukraine.

Answer 4

NATO has taken collective defense measures several times at Turkey's request. For example, it was the deployment of the Patriot air defense system during the Gulf War in 1991, a set of defensive measures and the conduct of Operation Display Deterrence during the crisis in Iraq in 2003 and the deployment of the Patriot air defense system in response to the situation in Syria in 2012. However, this was not considered an application of the fifth article.

Answer 5

The wording of the question is so ambiguous that it in fact asks 2 different questions.

has there really been only one occasion where NATO's article 5 applies?

Could mean either

• "has there been other occasions when article 5 was invoked?", or
• "has there been other occasions when the circumstances allowed for article 5 to be invoked even though the attacked country elected not to invoke it?"

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The answer to the 1st question is "no, not so far" according to "Foreign Policy Research Institute."

And while there have been many times when military assistance was supplied to buttress allies' defenses, no other formal invocation has ever taken place.

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The answer to the 2nd question is definitely a "Yes."

For example, the USSR shooting down of the US spy plane over Cuba could have lead to article 5 invocation because, in a private conversation, the US referred to it as "drawing the 1st blood":

Ellsberg said that Robert Kennedy (RFK) told him in 1964 that after the U-2 was shot down and the pilot killed, he (RFK) told Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, "You have drawn first blood ... . [T]he president had decided against advice ... not to respond militarily to that attack, but he [Dobrynin] should know that if another plane was shot at, ... we would take out all the SAMs and antiaircraft ... . And that would almost surely be followed by an invasion."

So it was deemed to be an act of war.

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A question was raised in comments of whether Cuba would qualify under article 6.

The legal analysis in the this article states that the question of a limited area of the action of the treaty was considered.

And while the area of effect was specified by the article 6 to end at the Tropic of Cancer (a latitudinal line which passes just North of Havana), it was not meant to be a hard limit or a boundary, but rather a description of the general area where the treaty would be in effect.

the word area is to be understood to cover the general region rather than merely the North Atlantic Ocean in a narrow sense. This is also confirmed in the 1949 Executive Report on the North Atlantic Treaty produced by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In it, the U.S. Senate stressed that “[i]n view of the purpose of the treaty to deter armed attack, the area covered by the treaty was deliberately described in general terms rather than defined by the lines of a map.

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Lastly, since the retaliation described by RFK would have clearly been a massive military action, it would have been to the benefit of the European NATO allies to be prepared for a European escalation by the USSR. So invocation of the article 5 would have been in line with the gravity of what would be about to happen.