The US Senate has introduced a resolution which proposes that the actions of Russia, Belarus “or proxy of Russia” be considered as an attack on NATO, if their actions lead to radioactive contamination of the allies’ territory.
I’m engaged
… and next in the news, a story on the popularity of cocaine among celebrities …
In all seriousness, Article Five can be activated in a broad variety of contexts. We did not need to specify that flying a domestic airliner into a skyscraper counted as an attack before we invoked it ourselves 20 some odd years ago.
Clarification of intentions and telegraphing what we would do in certain circumstances is useful.
It avoids debates if Russia if, for example, Russia is reckless and then there’s an accident that results in another Chernobyl-ish incident. Impact on the rest of Europe of Chernobyl was modest; and if it is an “accident”, it could be tough to respond.
Signaling that we intend to hold Russia responsible is important for two reasons:
- It makes us more able to respond ourselves.
- It makes it so that Russia is less likely to guess wrong what we would do and inadvertently push us into escalation.
sorry bot, but i’ll have to block you, i don’t think you should be auto posting news articles. you are in my feed too often with no engagement.
i really like the TLDR bots that summarize articles at the top of posts though
