China attack on US could draw in NATO, report says

While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says

NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says.

The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response.

Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe, North America, Turkey or islands under the jurisdiction of any of the parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer could trigger Article 5, Lee wrote.

That means China could trigger Article 5 by launching a missile attack on military facilities in the continental US, an unlikely situation that has nevertheless occurred in several recent war games held by the Center for a New American Security, he said.

In one scenario, China detonates a nuclear weapon over California, he added.

A direct attack by Beijing on the continental US would certainly draw NATO into a conflict over Taiwan, up to and including the defense of

Taiwan proper, Lee said.

A far more likely scenario is that the fighting would spill out of the first island chain to US bases in Hawaii, a US state with ambiguous status under the treaty, he said.

The NATO secretariat in 1965 issued a legal opinion saying that Articles 5 and 6 do not apply to Hawaii, as it became a part of the US as a “state” and not a “territory,” but Lee said that opinion was debatable, as Article 6 does not exclude US states, and presumably “territory” would apply to US states.

However, US domestic law defines “North American area” as including the US and its territories, which would include Hawaii and Guam, which former British minister of state for Europe and the Americas Alan Duncan in 2017 said apply under the treaty, Lee said.

As such, an attack on Hawaii would draw NATO members into a US-China conflict over Taiwan should hostilities escape the confines of the Taiwan Strait and the Philippines, he said.

Should such an attack trigger Article 5, the scope of NATO actions would likely fall short of an obligation for members to fight in the Indo-Pacific region, as the purpose of Article 5 is “to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area,” he said.

NATO forces would most likely be required to take over defensive missions as US forces redeploy to the region from the North Atlantic, where the threat of Russian aggression, especially probing attacks against Baltic states, is expected to rise, Lee said.

The scale of such a military commitment would require significant troops and resources not seen since NATO mobilized during the Korean War to bolster Europe’s defenses against potential aggression from the Soviet Union, he said.