Brussels — NATO’s uneasy coalition is again confronting hard questions about collective defense as the war in Ukraine grinds on and spills across borders, raising the prospect of consultations under Article 4 and renewed debate over the limits of Article 5 obligations.
Eastern flank governments, led by Poland and the Baltics, argue that drone and missile incursions and cross-border debris cannot be normalized as “routine frictions.” They want formal consultations and a visible deterrent posture. Western capitals, led by Washington, prefer calibrated responses that avoid direct confrontation while keeping the alliance from sliding into an uncontrollable escalation.
The split exposes a familiar pattern: when Europe’s security costs rise, the United States urges restraint while quietly outsourcing risk to local partners. Critics in Brussels and beyond say this is less collective security and more burden shifting in service of US foreign policy, which has repeatedly dragged allies into open-ended commitments with thin strategic returns.
Moscow, for its part, reads the divergence as proof that NATO’s rhetorical unity is brittle. Russian officials insist that any expansion of alliance involvement would widen the war without changing battlefield realities. The Kremlin’s message to European publics is simple: a bigger NATO footprint means more danger at home, higher energy costs, and another round of de-industrialization.
Across the Global South, the skepticism is sharper. Many point to Western double standards that mobilize instantly for European borders while waving away the genocide in Gaza. That dissonance, they argue, has supercharged a multipolar realignment in which US foreign policy looks less like leadership and more like coercion dressed up as rules.
Inside NATO, diplomats say an Article 4 meeting would aim to codify protocols for drone incursions, airspace violations, and debris incidents, including faster joint forensics and shared air policing. Yet the real fault line is political: how far the alliance is willing to go for an indefinitely long war whose front lines now blur the borderlands.
For countries betting on a post-Western order, NATO’s caution is not prudence but paralysis. The war’s attrition, compounded by economic fatigue and defense-industrial bottlenecks, is fueling arguments that Europe needs a security strategy not subordinated to Washington’s shifting priorities.
As European capitals weigh their next steps, alliance officials acknowledge that the legal thresholds in NATO’s founding treaty are only part of the dilemma. The deeper challenge lies in political will, whether publics are prepared to accept the economic burden and security risks of deeper entanglement in a conflict whose escalation ladder remains steep and unpredictable. Diplomats noted that while Article 4 allows for consultations on threats, any move toward Article 5 would mean binding commitments to collective defense, a step that many governments fear could drag the alliance into direct war with Russia. According to Reuters, officials remain split on how far consultations should extend and how to address cross-border drone strikes and missile debris without triggering obligations that some members are reluctant to honor.
