HONOLULU — In response to recent prodding by congressional lawmakers on whether NATO’s mutual defense treaty applies to Hawai‘i and whether it can be amended to explicitly include it, the U.S. State Department has responded with a partial answer.
A senior State Department official said the agency believes that U.S. allies likely would respond if Hawai‘i was attacked, but that any chance of explicitly amending the treaty to include it or other U.S. Pacific territories is not likely.
The 1949 North Atlantic Treaty was written a decade before Hawai‘i became a state. Article 5 of the treaty states that an attack on any one NATO member is considered an attack on all members. But the provision is limited by Article 6, which state that Article 5 applies to attacks on territories or forces in North America and Europe and the North Atlantic north of the Tropic of Cancer.
In May U.S. Rep. Ed Case wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken telling him, “This exclusion is a historical anachronism. There is a reasonable level of concern that at least some of our NATO allies might not consider Article 5 invoked if we are attacked in the Indo-Pacific.”
Last week as the NATO Summit began in Washington, D.C., a bipartisan group of 12 senators wrote that “Allies and adversaries alike must understand now, before potential hostilities erupt, that an attack against Hawai‘i will be seen as an attack on NATO,” the lawmakers wrote. “Silence on whether NATO allies would come to the defense of Hawai‘i undermines our strategy of deterring conflict in the Indo-Pacific.”
On Monday, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Legislative Affairs Philip Laidlaw responded to Case, telling the Hawai‘i congressman, “Let me assure you in the words of Secretary Blinken that any attack on the United States or its territories, even if outside of the geographic scope of Article 5, would almost certainly draw Allied reaction, including the consultation procedures under Article 4 of the Treaty. This includes Hawai‘i, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and any other U.S. Indo-Pacific locations.”
However, Laidlaw conceded that Article 6’s language explicitly defines NATO’s area as allied territory in North America and Europe, and islands under allied jurisdiction in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer and that “an amendment to the Treaty to cover Hawai‘i and/or U.S. territory outside of the North Atlantic area would be unlikely to gain agreement by consensus within the Alliance as the United States is not the only Ally with territory outside this defined Treaty area.”
Laidlaw’s response to Case noted that the so called “Indo-Pacific four” countries of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea — non-NATO members who are considered closely aligned with the alliance — participated in the NATO Summit last week.
Beyond NATO, in the Pacific the United States already has bilateral mutual defense treaties with the Philippines, South Korea, Japan and a multilateral defense pact with Australia and the New Zealand that would require them to assist America in the event of an attack — as well as for America to assist them. Lately, tensions have boiled between the Philippines and China in a bitter dispute over maritime territorial rights.
“It is encouraging to hear that the Department of State believes NATO allies would generally support our country if Hawai‘i was attacked,” Case said in a statement. “While I appreciate the Department of State’s response, it is clear more needs to be done on this issue. These assurances are helpful while we continue to pursue possible next steps, including communication directly with NATO and legislative action.”
Nevertheless, NATO already has shown increasing interest in the Pacific as tensions rise along key trade routes in places like the South China Sea and as China extends its influence in the Arctic and expands military cooperation with Russia. North Korea also has been tightening ties with Russia and has openly backed Russia’s war against Ukraine.
This year at the biennial Exercise Rim of the Pacific in Hawai‘i, three NATO members — Germany, Italy and the Netherlands — sent ships for the first time. Germany is exploring establishing a permanent military liaison office in Hawai‘i.
In a joint statement formed during the NATO Summit, the alliance’s leaders said, “The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values. The deepening strategic partnership between Russia and the PRC and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut and reshape the rules-based international order, are a cause for profound concern.”
China’s Foreign Ministry hit back, saying in a released statement “China urges NATO to … stop interfering in China’s internal politics and smearing China’s image and not create chaos in the Asia-Pacific after creating turmoil in Europe.” During the NATO Summit, China’s Defense Ministry also announced it was deploying elite Chinese paratroopers to Belarus for training with Belarusian forces outside the city of Brest near Poland’s border.
But despite tensions, China remains a global economic juggernaut and one of — if not the — largest trading partners of nearly every NATO country, including the United States.
In an article for Honolulu think tank Pacific Forum’s weekly publication PacNet, the organization’s president, David Santoro, and researcher John Hemmings wrote that it’s far from certain that every member of NATO would feel obligated to come to America’s aid if Hawai‘i were attacked, or that they would even stop trading with the attacker. They wrote that while a strike on Hawai‘i is “at the extreme end of the possible, it nevertheless illustrates a potential crisis-in-waiting for the alliance.”
This isn’t the first time Hawai‘i’s exclusion from the NATO treaty has been raised by lawmakers. Just six years after Hawai‘i became a state, then-U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye wrote to then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk asking whether Hawai‘i would be covered by the treaty’s Article 5. Rusk responded that “the absence of formal guarantees for Hawai‘i under the North Atlantic Treaty is obviously but a technicality.”
