The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s collective defense principle wouldn’t necessarily trigger an immediate armed response in the event of a “small attack” by Russia against a member like Estonia, Admiral Rob Bauer, former Chair of the NATO Military Committee, told the newspaper Die Welt in a June 23 interview. Bauer explained that a small Russian operation that does not threaten a member’s “overall territorial integrity” would leave “time for consultations” to weigh the question: “Do we want to start a war or not?”
Bauer also argued that “Putin doesn’t see NATO as an immediate threat,” pointing to Russia’s muted response to Finland joining the alliance and the largely rhetorical nature of the Kremlin’s nuclear threats.
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I mean this was always the case, right? Just the headline is making people think the alliance is falling apart.
Article 5 only says all parties will take “…such actions as deemed necessary…to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
Nato doctrine was even that the attacked country doesn’t have to be defended but the attacker could be attacked elsewhere.
EU article 42 is much stronger. It’s strange that it is rarely mentioned.
Not only that, some of the defensive plans during the Cold War were pretty destructive for the defended countries. One big part of the planned response to an all-out Warsaw Pact assault on Western Germany, for example, would have been to detonate several truckloads (in total 141) of nuclear mines on choke points along strategically advantageous routes in order to slow down the attack.
There were prepared shafts for deploying those mines on important choke points near the East German border along the most likely avenues of attack.