Joining NATO obliges countries to defend one another – but this obligation just isn’t set in stone

The end result of the upcoming US presidential election can have a major impact on relations between the US and its allies. While President Joe Biden is a firm believer Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a supporter of the transatlantic alliance and has railed for years against US participation in NATO, the military alliance commonly known as NATO.

In February 2024, for instance, Trump said that if he were re-elected as president, he would call on Russia to “whatever they need” against NATO members who’re “delinquent” because they’ve not invested enough in their very own military capabilities. Foreign policy commentators saw this as an invite for Russia to attack these NATO countries.

In September 2022, six months after Russia’s large-scale invasion, Ukraine applied to affix NATO. Now Ukraine’s potential membership is some of the necessary issues that representatives of the The 32 member states of NATO in North America and Europe might be considered at their meeting in Washington in July 2024.

Debates about policy towards alliances corresponding to NATO are based on the idea that NATO requires its members to intervene and help defend itself if one other alliance member is attacked.

As Political scientist who study Given the role of international organizations corresponding to NATO, we consider it’s important to grasp that alliance arrangements are literally more flexible than people think.

In practice, it is feasible for the United States and other Western countries to remain out of a conflict involving a NATO country without having to interrupt their alliance obligations. The text of the NATO treaty accommodates loopholes that allow member countries to remain out of other members' wars in certain situations.

What does Article 5 really mean?

A central a part of the NATO treaty, which countries sign once they join the alliance, known as Article 5It states that an “armed attack” against a NATO member in Europe or North America “shall be regarded as an attack against all NATO members.”

In the event of such an attack, NATO states undertake to help the country in need, including through “the use of armed force to restore and maintain security in the North Atlantic area”.

However, the treaty doesn’t contain a transparent definition of what an “armed attack” actually is.

This was necessary in February 2020 when Türkiye calls for NATO meeting It also called on NATO to intervene with military force within the Syrian civil war in response to attacks by Russian and Syrian forces on its territory. 33 Turkish soldiers were killed within the attacks. The NATO allies have decided against it Turkey should be defended with military force, on the grounds that the size of the violence against Turkey just isn’t large enough to talk of an “armed attack”.

Further exceptions to the rule

Even if NATO members resolve that Article 5 should apply to a specific situation, each country can still resolve individually methods to act. That is, while NATO have administrative staff based in BrusselsThere isn’t any central NATO authority that tells each country what to do.

Instead, each country tells NATO what it’s willing to do – and what it just isn’t.

NATO members have only officially invoked Article 5 once – after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington.

At that point, 13 NATO countries sent fighter jets to assist the USA They patrol the skies from mid-October 2001 to mid-May 2002.

But most NATO allies decided to not send troops to Afghanistan to support the US within the fight against the Taliban. This inaction by some NATO allies was not seen as a breach of contract and didn’t trigger any major debate – and the countries that selected not to affix the fight were neither sanctioned nor expelled from the alliance.

The NATO treaty also provides for some geographical exceptions. When Argentina went to war with Britain (a NATO member) over the Falkland Islands in 1982, the United States and other NATO members were in a position to benefit from the indisputable fact that The alliance only covers the North Atlantic area as a reason to remain out of the conflict.

Would public opinion force the president to act?

Some political scientists argue that voters will demand of their leaders to take the country to war to defend an ally. This implies that what really binds the members of an alliance together just isn’t the legal text of a global treaty itself, since no international court has the facility to implement the contractbut quite the general public's expectations about what it means to be an ally.

As a part of our research To learn the way the American public feels about international legal obligations, we decided to conduct an experiment to check whether presidents can use the language of alliance loopholes as a justification for keeping the United States out of a war involving an ally.

In 2022 and 2023, we conducted two survey-based experiments during which we asked nearly 5,000 American adults to assume a hypothetical scenario during which a U.S. ally is attacked by a strong neighbor.

Some respondents were told that the language of the alliance treaty would allow the U.S. government to forego sending troops to defend the attacked ally, while others weren’t given this information. Although no specific alliance was mentioned within the survey, we described the terms of the alliance in a way that was consistent with language utilized in treaties corresponding to NATO. We then asked respondents to inform us their views on sending U.S. troops to defend the attacked ally.

Our results showed a giant difference between individuals who were told about the pliability of the alliance treaty and people who weren’t. While respondents from each groups were generally inclined to return to assistance from an ally, their willingness to accomplish that was significantly lower once they were told that the alliance treaty doesn’t necessarily require the United States to send troops.

This suggests that, under certain circumstances, political leaders can reach convincing a big portion of the general public that it’s okay to desert an ally in times of need.

So when debates arise about U.S. policy toward its allies—and whether it should admit latest members like Ukraine—it’s important for each side to acknowledge that alliance commitments are neither legally nor politically binding as popular perceptions suggest.