SEEN ON FREE HAWAI`I TV YESTERDAY
CNN.com - March 30, 2024
Sweden became the newest member of NATO earlier this month, joining 31 nations in the security alliance, including the United States. Well, make that 49 of the 50 United States.
Because in a quirk of geography and history, Hawai`i is not technically covered by the NATO pact.
If a foreign power attacked Hawai`i – say the US Navy’s base at Pearl Harbor or the headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command northwest of Honolulu – the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would not be obligated to rise to the Aloha State’s defense.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” says David Santoro, president of the Pacific Forum think tank in Honolulu, who added that even most Hawai`i residents have no idea their state is technically adrift of the alliance.
“People tend to assume Hawai`i is part of the US and therefore it’s covered by NATO,” he says.
But, he concedes, the tip-off is in the alliance’s name – North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Hawai`i is, of course, in the Pacific, and unlike California, Colorado or Alaska, the 50th state is not part of the continental US that reaches the North Atlantic Ocean on its eastern shores.
“The argument for not including Hawai`i is simply that it’s not part of North America,” Santoro says.
The exception is spelled out in the Washington Treaty, the document that established NATO in 1949, a decade before Hawai`i became a state.
While Article 5 of the treaty provides for collective self-defense in the event of a military attack on any member state, Article 6 limits the geographic scope of that.
“An armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America,” Article 6 says. It also says any island territories must be in the North Atlantic, north of the Tropic of Cancer….
