NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg advanced a justification for attacking Russia, even if Russia had not physically attacked NATO.
Claiming that NATO allegations of Russian cyber attacks could trigger an invocation of Article 5 of the NATO treaty to justify war, he said: “If there’s a magnitude [reached in Russian cyber attacks] … then we can trigger Article 5 and respond in cyber, but also in other domains to protect the NATO allies,” The Economist reports.
This statement is staggering. Cyber attacks are extremely difficult to trace, and a cyber attack could easily be launched from computers based in Russia by someone outside Russia; however, this would nonetheless still serve, by Stoltenberg’s reasoning, as a justification for NATO military action against Russia.
In an act of utter and monumental recklessness, he is providing a rationale for military aggression against a major nuclear-armed power.
