NATO Treaty Excludes Hawaii, Puerto Rico From Common Defense

ANALYSIS – Wow. I didn’t know this. This is why we must always read the fine print. If China or Russia, or even North Korea, attacks Hawaii, America’s most powerful military alliance isn’t obligated to come to our defense under its Article 5 clause.

This omission also applies to other U.S. territories in the Pacific, including strategic islands Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific.

It also excludes Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. All are south of the Tropic of Cancer, the demarcation line established in 1949 when NATO was created.

Article 5 of the treaty states that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all (common defense), but Article 6 clarifies that such protections only apply to land, forces, vessels or aircraft north of the Tropic of Cancer. 

That horizontal line crosses the globe just below Florida and Texas. Anything south of the line is not covered.

This is understandable, if you consider the alliance is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, after all.

Also, Hawaii did not join the United States until 1959, a decade after the NATO Treaty was signed.

Still, Hawaii is now a state and home to more than 1.4 million people and various strategic U.S. military bases.

With that in mind, and the fact that the military alliance is increasingly focused on security threats from China (NATO just called China a “decisive enabler” of Putin’s war machine in Ukraine and other Asian nations, some lawmakers are now calling for that exclusion to be reevaluated.

The Washington Post reported:

A bipartisan group of senators — led by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) — made a renewed attempt this week to secure protections for Hawaii. They wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday that action was necessary to address “the deep concerns about deterring an adversary’s attack or treating residents as equals to those in the other 49 states.”

The senators added that “the gravity of the Indo-Pacific threat environment requires that we do more,” amid rising concerns about an increasingly aggressive China.

The threats related to the Asia-Pacific regent took center stage of discussions at the NATO Summit this week in Washington, which was attended by officials from the “Indo-Pacific 4” (INDOPAC-4) – Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan.

The Post added:

Hawaii is thought to be a likely target if North Korea were to strike the United States. An alert that was blasted to Hawaii residents erroneously in 2018, declaring a “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII,” caused widespread chaos throughout the state. “Is this the end of my life?” one resident later recalled thinking.

While the alliance is trying to not stray too far from its focus on Europe, it has recently also tried to address the increasingly serious security concerns in Asia.

When asked about the lawmakers’ concern, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was confident that “any attack on the United States or its territories, even if outside the geographic scope of Article 5” would provoke a response from NATO.

One Hawaii resident quoted by the Post noted that: “Should Hawaii come under attack, NATO allies would likely be drawn in anyway as the islands are ‘overrun’ by the U.S. military presence there.”

“We’re just so heavily militarized here that it’s almost redundant,” he added: “It just feels implied.”

Meanwhile, the Post noted that Blinken added that:

…any effort to amend the treaty to include Hawaii would be ‘unlikely to gain consensus’ because other allied nations also have territory outside the geographic scope of the agreement. (Martinique, an island in the Caribbean home to nearly 400,000 people, is a French ‘overseas department’ south of the Tropic of Cancer.) Such a discussion would ‘open something of a Pandora’s box,” Blinken said. ‘I’m not sure that we could get there.’

So, for now, we have to rely on hope that NATO will consider Hawaii part of the U.S. But what can we expect if China or North Korea attack Guam? Or Russia attacks Puerto Rico? That could cause some serious problems. Let’s hope we never need to find out.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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