If the six above-mentioned nations continue to host nuclear arms, what would new NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - the first and third currently governed by former US citizens, president Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Valdas Adamkus, respectively - deny the Pentagon?
In the interim between the accession of the three Baltic states and former Soviet republics into NATO and now, the Alliance as a whole and the US in particular have expanded their permanent military presence within all three nations: Estonia and Latvia which both border the main body of Russia and Lithuania which abuts the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
All three nations have been tapped for expeditionary deployments in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, where their complete NATO integration is effected through combat zone training and, as is the case with Estonian forces recently, direct participation in active combat operations in Afghanistan.
Along with the agreement reached by the US to station interceptor missiles in Poland - on the Baltic coast, only 200 kilometers from the Russian border - NATO's absorption of three nations directly bordering Russia and within a short striking distance of both St. Petersburg and Moscow itself has belied the US's promise in 1990 not to expand NATO "one inch eastward" and created a situation for Russia that, were it reversed, the US and its NATO allies would consider intolerable and a veritable casus belli.
After a series of computer attacks in Estonia in early 2007, which the authorities in Tallinn blamed on hackers in Russia and then the Russian government itself, the accusations dutifully taken up by Western officials and media through open assertion or repeated insinuation, NATO announced that it was establishing a so-called Cyber Defense Center in the nation's capital.
The operation, now called the Cyber Defence Center of Excellence, was accredited in November of 2008 and "activated as an International Military Organisation by a decision of the North Atlantic Council." (1)
One person's defense is another's aggression - wars after all are declared and waged by what call themselves departments and ministries of defense - and what in fact NATO has initiated is a cyber warfare center with the means for conducting intelligence gathering, sophisticated surveillance and when the needs arises the immobilizing of the enemy's communications, command and control systems.
Shortly after the cyber attacks in Estonia in May of 2007, US Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne first invoked what will be the main theme of this article in asserting: "The Russians have denied that this was their action, contrary to all the evidence. However, the good news is the attacks didn't shut down this small country. But it did start a series of debates within NATO and the EU about the definition of clear military action and it may be the first test of the applicability of Article V of the NATO charter regarding collective self-defense in the non-kinetic realm.
(Air Force Link, June 1, 2007)
Six months earlier ranking Senator Richard Lugar, at the time chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued this demarche to Russia:
"Article 5 of the NATO charter identified an attack on one member as an attack on all. It was also designed to prevent coercion of a NATO member by a non-member state....[A]n attack using energy as a weapon can devastate a nation's economy and yield hundreds or even thousands of casualties, the alliance must avow that defending against such attacks is an Article 5 commitment."
(International Herald Tribune, November 28, 2006)
The main paragraph of NATO's 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 onsequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised 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.
The only time in NATO's sixty year history the article has been invoked and acted upon is after the attacks in New York City and Washington, DC on September 11, 2009.
Article 5 was the pretext NATO used to justify its role in the invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001, NATO's first ground war and its first war in Asia.
A war now in its ninth calendar year and set to escalate further as the tenth approaches and one which has served as the pretext for NATO also launching attacks inside Pakistan and stationing its military in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, with Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to follow.
Notwithstanding attempts by NATO and assorted Western government officials to portray it otherwise, for example as a vague pledge for mutual support in the event of natural catastrophes, Article 5, as the language above demonstrates, is an obligation to take collective military action by all twenty six member states - including that which accounts for half the entire world's military spending and those with five of the world's eight largest military budgets, NATO states collectively having spent $1,049 trillion of the $1,470 trillion allotted for arms worldwide last year - against any state deemed to pose a threat to any member.
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