Article 5 is a war clause.
Not a defense against armed aggression but a mechanism for waging war under whichever rubric and for whichever ostensible reason the bloc or any individual member of it chooses.
As evidenced above, it is openly being discussed in reference to cyber attacks and energy concerns; NATO has also identified such disparate topics as food shortages, water wars, piracy, poaching, drug trafficking, terrorism, failed states and uranium smuggling as examples of alleged strategic mutual threats to Alliance members and the bloc as a whole.
The above catalogue of reasons for NATO activating its mutual military assistance article was enumerated prior to August 8, 2008 when Georgia unleashed its military, armed and trained and advised by the Pentagon and NATO, on South Ossetia and Russian peacekeepers based there, in a move calculated to coincide with the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing that same day.
Having failed in its blitzkrieg drive to the Roki Tunnel to head off Russian reinforcements preparatory to launching a parallel invasion of Abkhazia, the Saakashvili regime turned to the US and NATO to bail it out.
The first to arrive in the Georgian capital to pledge support to the aggressor were the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine on August 12 while the war was still raging.
The talk in the main Western capitals at the time was of the applicability of NATO's Article 5 to candidate in addition to full members of the Alliance.
Although the three Baltic states were overtly aiding and encouraging one of the belligerents, in fact the initiator of the war, and although the chief of the Georgian Defense Ministry International Relations Department Nino Bakradze acknowledged on August 14 that fifty Latvian mercenaries had enlisted in the Georgian army to fight Russia (2), Western government and media sources engaged in an hysterical campaign to convince the world that the Baltic states and Ukraine were only minutes away from Russian invasions, with Moscow's tanks on the outskirts of Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius and Kiev.
At this point and for months afterward the threat of employing NATO's Article was resounding broadcast in Western capitals.
Representative samples include:
In a joint column in the Wall Street Journal just two weeks after the war ended US Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham wrote:
"Contingency planning for the defense of all member states against conventional and unconventional attack, including cyber warfare, needs to be revived. The credibility of Article Five of the NATO Charter - that an attack against one really can and will be treated as an attack against all - needs to be bolstered."
(Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2008)
A month later US President Georgia Bush said, "It's important for the people of Lithuania to know that when the United States makes a commitment through, for example, Article 5 of the treaty, we mean it."
(Associated Press, September 29, 2008)
In New York City at the time, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski "said NATO must get back to the basics of exerting its role as a military organisation in light of the war," reminding his audience that "as the Atlantic alliance we have nukes too."
(Reuters, September 26, 2008)
In announcing that he and all twenty six NATO ambassadors would visit Georgia to demonstrate and provide support to Saakashvili, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer was joined by Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet, who added: "Members of NATO states are confident Article 5 works. In this context NATO's visibility in Estonia has importance. Today we see it in the form of the airspace guarding operation. There should be more such elements in the future."
(Trend News Agency, September 13, 2008)
US NATO ambassador Kurt Volker "said Nato was firmly committed to defending the Baltic states from attack because they were signatories to the alliance's Article 5, which commits countries to come to the defence of fellow members.'
(Financial Times, September 4, 2008)
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