Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The European counter-proposal to the original Trump “peace plan” for Ukraine has proposed changing point 5 from reading, super-vaguely, “US guarantee” to reading “US guarantee that mirrors Article 5.”
It is difficult to understand why NATO member states believe that the value of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty justifies the enormous costs of NATO membership, both financial (now 5% of GNP!) and in terms of being dragged into conflicts against countries disliked by Israel, and hence by the United States, which pose no conceivable threat to any NATO member state.
Indeed, it is difficult to understand how anyone (NATO member states, Ukraine or Russia) who has actually read Article 5 could believe that it “guarantees” anything.
The text of Article 5 reads:
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 recognized 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.
Had Ukraine been a NATO member state when Russia launched its “special military operation”, there is no legal or rational reason to believe that other NATO member states would have deemed it necessary to take any action other than those that they have taken without Ukraine being a NATO member state — providing essentially all the money, weapons and intelligence necessary to perpetuate their war against Russia.
Logically, none of the concerned parties (NATO member states, Ukraine or Russia) should permit the Article 5 illusion, one way or the other, to stand in the way of ending this war.
More generally, while nothing can truly be guaranteed in international relations, the best “guarantee” against a potential attack by a perceived adversary is depriving the perceived adversary of any conceivable incentive to attack you.
In this context, when, in 1992, an international arbitration on the border dispute between Oman and Yemen issued an award 100% in favor of Oman, the exceptionally wise Sultan Qaboos of Oman gratuitously granted a portion of the contested territory to Yemen, reasoning that a continuing grievance on the part of his adversary was likely to provoke further fighting rather than ensuring peace.
In the same context, the perceived threat to the United States posed by the North Korean nuclear weapons arsenal does not derive from North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons but, rather, from its having any incentive to use them. Instead of delusionally insisting that North Korea relinquish the nuclear deterrent that it has devoted decades to developing and conducting annual military practices for an invasion of North Korea, the United States could and should defuse any threat posed to the United States by North Korea by establishing normal and cooperative diplomatic and economic relations with North Korea.
If decision-makers in any of the concerned parties involved in the Ukraine war prioritized the genuine interests of their own people over their personal political and career interests, they might find constructive inspiration in the principle of seeking to serve and secure one’s own people by depriving any perceived adversary of any incentive to prefer war to peace.
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