How to fix NATO’s fatal flaw

For longer than I can remember, pleading with NATO to address what has been and is now a more obvious fatal flaw has not yielded a single action. That flaw is that its bedrock Article Five commitment that “an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against them all,” presumes the attack will be a military assault by the Soviet Union on one or more members of the alliance.

But what if the attack is not military? The only precedent is when Article Five was invoked 25 years ago after al Qaeda’s strike on New York’s Twin Towers — when the alliance went to war in Afghanistan.

Vladimir Putin is using what Lenin termed “active measures” and what the West calls “hybrid warfare” in attacking NATO and Western countries. Russia is using active measures, including spreading as much chaos as possible short of an armed attack, in its plan to divide and fracture the alliance. And much like Lenin, who recruited useful idiots to his service, Putin has done the same with President Trump. Trump has gone out of his way to strain America’s links with NATO by demanding that NATO Europe take more responsibility for its defense — but “more” means “all” in Trump talk.

From 2003 to 2016 I served on the advisory board for a series of NATO’s Supreme allied commanders in Europe. During the years since, trying to get NATO to respond and react to these active measures has proved to be Sisyphean. NATO, to its credit, has created 30 wide-ranging........

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