During consideration of the Iranian and Russian sanctions bill (S. 722), Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) introduced an amendment to “affirm that the United States remains fully committed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and will honor its obligations enshrined in Article 5.” Under Article 5, the member nations of the NATO military alliance “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all.”
The Senate adopted Graham’s amendment on June 15, 2017 by a unanimous vote of 100 to 0 (Roll Call 146). That not a single senator voted nay is appalling, since that is the constitutionally sound position. The reason: Not only should the United States stay clear of entangling alliances such as NATO, but the NATO provision that obligates the United States to go to war if any member of NATO is attacked undermines the provision in the U.S. Constitution that assigns to Congress the power to declare war. Moreover, the number of nations that the United States has pledged to defend under NATO has grown from 11 to 28 over the years, as the alliance itself has grown from 12 member nations (including the United States) when NATO was created in 1949 to 29 today. Although NATO was ostensibly formed to counter the threat from the Soviet bloc of nations, some of the nations the United States is now pledged to defend under NATO were once part of that bloc, including Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic (as part of Czechoslovakia), Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
