Edgar Buckley — Author of Nato’s Article V on 9/11

The peak moment in transatlantic solidarity — 9/11 and the triggering of the famous Article V — was prompted by a little-known British official in Nato, who now worries that US appeasement of Russia risks wider war in Europe. 

The only time in Nato's history that allies invoked their treaty’s Article V mutual defence clause was after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the US in September 2001. 

And the little-known Nato official who authored the decision was Edgar Buckley, whose title at the time was assistant secretary general of Nato for defence planning and operations. 

Recalling that fateful Tuesday afternoon some 24 years ago, Buckley, who is now 78 and lives in the UK, says he was chairing a meeting at the Nato HQ in Brussels when a secretary passed him a note saying that a plane had hit a tower in New York. 

When news came some 20 minutes later that a second plane had hit a second New York tower, Nato in Belgium was on red alert, with all US and all non-essential staff ordered to evacuate the HQ building. “There were unconfirmed reports of suspicious planes also heading towards Brussels,” Buckley tells EUobserver. 

And it was amid this high drama, in an outer office of the Nato secretary general, and in a huddle between Buckley, the US ambassador to Nato (Nick Burns), and the Canadian ambassador (David Wright), that the Article V invocation idea struck Buckley, after Wright had mentioned the existence of the clause in passing. 

Buckley proposed the Article V move to two colleagues later that same evening, who helped him draft a formal statement, which he presented to Nato secretary general Lord George Robertson at 7.30AM the next morning. 

And from the moment it caught Robertson’s eye, the document took just 16 hours to fly up the US chain of command via ambassador Burns in Brussels, to secretary of state Colin Powell and president George W. Bush in Washington, then back to Brussels for a unanimous vote by Nato envoys, with hardly a word changed from Buckley’s original text. 

The move was badly needed to show Western solidarity, even though the US ultimately did not use formal Nato structures to attack Afghanistan in pursuit of the 9/11 mastermind, jihadist warlord Osama bin Laden.  

“It [9/11] was feared to be the greatest loss of US lives in a single day since the Battle of Antietam,” Buckley says, referring to a US Civil War-era battle which claimed 3,600 lives in one day.  

“He [Buckley] sold the idea [Article V activation] to secretary general Robertson, who sold it to Colin Powell, who sold it to George W Bush … but it was Buckley who had the idea in the first place and two years later Nato allies were in Afghanistan,” Jamie Shea, another former senior Nato official, tells EUobserver.

Looking back, Buckley says there were other high watermarks in Nato cooperation - such as its post-Cold War expansion into eastern Europe in the 1990s and its concerted action in the Western Balkans wars.

“If we had made clear then that we were truly ready to assist Ukraine to the extent we subsequently did, Putin would very likely not have invaded in 2022”

“Joining Nato is a huge economic boost, as well as a security guarantee. It’s almost certain to lead to EU membership and a country’s credit rating score goes up immediately,” he says.

Looking at Russia’s aggressive behaviour today, he says a strong deterrent was needed to stop Russian president Vladimir Putin waging war beyond Ukraine into Europe in future. 

“If we had reacted more strongly after Russia’s takeover of Crimea and shooting down of MH17, then we might not be where we are today,” Buckley warns, referring to the civilian flight bound for Malaysia shot down by Russian forces operating in eastern Ukraine in 2014. 

“If we had made clear then that we were truly ready to assist Ukraine to the extent we subsequently did, Putin would very likely not have invaded in 2022,” Buckley adds.

Russia is also waging covert hybrid warfare against Europe, with sabotage attacks at airports and on undersea cables. And the 9/11 moment carried insights for when so-called hybrid attacks cross the red line into Article V territory, Buckley says, because the “scale” of the New York assault was big enough to merit treaty activation — even though it was an act of sabotage by a nebulous non-state actor. 

"The West as we knew it no longer exists"

The 9/11 Article V decision also showed the political, rather than technical nature of the treaty threshold, Buckley adds. “An attack is only an Article V violation if Nato agrees to declare it as such,” he says.

But if Europeans declaring themselves ready to fight and die in the name of a US war in 2001 was a high point in transatlantic ties, then the current US president Donald Trump’s Russia-appeasement and his isolationism appear to mark a nadir in relations. "The West as we knew it no longer exists," said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in April, referring also to Trump’s anti-EU trade war.

Article V niceties aside, some in Nato fear that Trump might quit the alliance altogether and pull US forces and nuclear weapons out of Europe, leaving the door wide open to Russian imperialism. Buckley says the Ukraine war has shown that Russian conventional forces could not defeat combined European ones, even if the US did abandon its old allies. 

But even if Trump thought that by walking out of Europe, he was preventing World War III or the loss of US soldiers’ lives, then history might teach him a harsh lesson by dragging the US back in at a later and less advantageous stage, Buckley says. 

“Imagine a scenario in which an emboldened Putin fired a nuclear weapon on European territory in order to gain a battlefield advantage in what had, up till then, been a conventional conflict. What would Trump and the US do then? No one knows. Not even Trump knows what he’d do until it happens and history is full of great wars which started in this way,” the ex-Nato official ends. 

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