I've questioned NATO's usefulness for years. The last few weeks haven't given me any reason to alter that opinion.
Let's run through the basics because apparently we still need to.
Twelve countries founded NATO in 1949, crawling out of the wreckage of World War II: The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal, and Italy. The alliance had odd quirks baked in from day one. Iceland has never maintained a standing military — just a coast guard and a crisis response unit. And Portugal? António Salazar was running an authoritarian government when they signed on, which made inclusion at best controversial — but NATO valued the Atlantic location enough to look the other way. (Shrug) Business as usual, I guess.
The alliance has grown considerably since. After the original twelve signed the charter in 1949, Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, West Germany in 1955 — with East German territory folding in automatically after reunification in 1990 — then Spain in 1982, followed by the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria and Estonia in 2004. Thirty-two members total.
Now the part that actually matters: NATO's Article 5.
Article 5 is NATO's collective defense clause. It states plainly that a non-member attacking any NATO country is attacking all of them — and every ally commits to taking whatever action it deems necessary, up to and including military force, to defend the attacked member. NATO has formally invoked it exactly once: after Sept. 11, 2001. Once. In 75 years. Keep that number in mind.
Here's why this matters right now. By March 30, 2026, NATO air defense systems had intercepted Iranian missiles entering Turkish airspace at least four times. One missile actually struck Dörtyol in Turkey's Hatay Province — Turkish soil, NATO soil. NATO condemned it as an "attack" on Turkey and still didn't invoke Article 5. Secretary General Mark Rutte said it "does not currently justify" the invocation. "Nobody's talking about Article 5," he said. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed him: no sense this triggers "anything like Article 5."
Turkey has, in this instance, asserted its right to self-defense. The foreign minister called the airspace violations "unacceptable." The Atlantic Council is now wrestling publicly with whether to act — and yet Turkey hasn't even invoked Article 4, the alliance's formal "we need to talk" mechanism and the standard first step toward Article 5. That's remarkable, because Turkey has invoked Article 4 four times since 2002, two of those involving Iran specifically. So why is everyone dragging their feet now?
Politics. It's always politics.
First, there's the question of intent. Iran keeps insisting it isn't deliberately targeting Turkey — that the missiles striking Turkish soil are just errant spillover from the broader regional conflict, not deliberate strikes on a NATO ally.
I find that argument transparently self-serving. First, are Iran's weapons really that lame? I doubt it. Then, too, Iran has showered the region with munitions. The UAE absorbed 537 ballistic missiles, 2,256 drone attacks, and 26 cruise missiles. Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Cyprus — where Iran struck the British military base — all took hits. Iran isn't being careful. It's being careful to remain within the realm of plausible deniability.
Turkey tolerates that fiction largely because it doesn't want to slam the door on diplomacy — diplomacy that has never once come close to stopping Iranian aggression. Ankara spent considerable effort trying to mediate U.S.-Iran talks before the war escalated, and it has worked hard to stay out of the fight. Invoking Article 5 would drag Turkey in completely, and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan knows it. So he won't ask.
But even if Turkey did ask, it wouldn't be enough. Invoking Article 5 requires consensus among all member states — and given the attitudes of the UK, France, Germany, and the problems I mentioned in yesterday's daily and others, good luck getting that. The single biggest obstacle, though, is Erdoğan himself. He has spent his presidency avoiding exactly this kind of entanglement, preferring bilateral leverage to collective commitments. Essentially, I believe he's trying to establish Turkey as the main power in the region, and thinks playing the peace broker at all costs to the remainder of the region will accomplish that. He did it in Syria. He did it in Idlib. He's doing it now, as well, and the rest of the region is suffering for it.
The whole situation — Turkey's paralysis, Iran's repeated provocations stretching back to 1979, missiles physically landing on NATO territory — casts a harsh light on the value the alliance actually holds. These are the gray-zone threats NATO has always failed to handle: too aggressive to ignore, not quite clean enough to trigger a response. And so the alliance watches, issues sternly worded press releases, and does nothing else.
Right now, Iran operates at the level of a persistent, bloody nuisance, in both senses of the word "bloody.”
Here's the problem I see: Every time NATO watches missiles land on a member state's soil and responds with no more than a press conference, it teaches Iran exactly how far it can push. Each time, the point of resistance retreats one step farther. The alliance may have deterred full-scale war, but it has absolutely failed to deter these lower-grade issues. Each unanswered provocation makes the next one more likely.
NATO isn't useless. But right now, it's doing a pretty convincing imitation of it.
