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NATO Article 4 Declaration Puts Poland 'Closest to Open Conflict Since WWII'
The decision by Prime Minister Donald Tusk came after the Polish military shot down several Russian drones that entered its airspace, marking the first time a NATO member has fired shots in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Sep 10, 2025
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk invoked Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty on Wednesday after 19 Russian drones flew into Polish territory late Tuesday night and into the early morning hours.
Speaking to Poland's parliament on Wednesday, Tusk said that it is "the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II," though he still said there was "no reason to believe we're on the brink of war."
The Polish military, along with NATO forces, shot down several of the drones, marking the first time a NATO-aligned country has fired a shot since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022.
According to Polish officials, the drones entered the nation's airspace amid a series of airstrikes directed at Western Ukraine. Though some damage to at least one home has been reported due to falling drone debris, there are no immediate reports of casualties, according to the New York Times.
Following what he called a "large-scale provocation" by Russia, Tusk took the significant step of invoking Article 4 of the NATO treaty for just the eighth time since the alliance's founding in 1949.
Short of the more drastic Article 5, which obligates NATO allies to defend one another militarily at a time of attack, Article 4 allows any member to call on the rest of the alliance to consult with them if they feel their territory, independence, or security is threatened.
Russia, for its part, said it had "no intentions to engage any targets on the territory of Poland." However, as German defense minister Boris Pistorius said in a quote to AFP, the drones were "clearly set on this course" and "did not have to fly this route to reach Ukraine."
In comments to The Guardian, Dr. Marion Messmer, senior research fellow at the foreign policy think tank Chatham House, agreed it was "unlikely that this was an accident" and said that Russia was likely "trying to test where NATO's red lines are."
European leaders issued statements of solidarity following the attack.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it an "egregious and unprecedented violation of Polish and NATO airspace" and pledged to "ramp up the pressure on [Russian President] Putin until there is a just and lasting peace." The UK's secretary of state for defense, John Healey, said he would ask British armed forces "to look at options to bolster NATO's air defense over Poland."
French President Emmanuel Macron called it a "reckless escalation," adding that France will "not compromise on the security of the Allies."
Tusk asserted that "words are not enough" and has requested more material support from Poland's allies, which could point to the risk of further escalation.
While the invocation of Article 4 does not always presage a hot war, Yasraj Sharma writes for Al Jazeera that it "would serve as a political precursor to Article 5 deliberations."
Following the attack, the US ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, said in a post on X that the United States "will defend every inch of NATO territory," suggesting a possible willingness for the US to become more directly involved in the hostilities after providing over $128 billion in military and other aid to Ukraine since Russia first attacked in 2022.
The US has roughly 10,000 troops stationed in Poland as part of a permanent military presence in the country.
US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, wrote in an uncharacteristically brief post on Truth Social: "What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones? Here we go!"
Trump plans to speak with Poland's president, Karol Nawrocki, on Wednesday, according to Reuters.
The drone attack came shortly after Trump threatened to impose harsher sanctions on Russia following its ramp-up of attacks on Kyiv over the weekend, yet another policy shift by the US president after he appeared interested in cutting a deal favorable to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit last month.
In the New York Times, Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski writes that with Russia's entry into Polish airspace, along with its more aggressive attacks on Ukraine, "Putin is signaling that he will not compromise on his core demands even as he claims that Russia is still ready to make a deal."
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The Choice Between Peace and Escalation After Trump-Putin Talks
Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. Failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster.
Aug 18, 2025
Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.
After emerging from the meeting, Putin correctly framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.”
Trump said he will follow up by talking to NATO leaders and Zelenskyy, as if the US is simply an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.
Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin, not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies, and because the war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a global conflict between the United States, Russia and China.
In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which we have now updated and revised to cover three years of war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022.
The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.
We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history. Are his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States, just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?
At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18th, senior US and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore US-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet now was a recognition that they must address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine.
The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly and seizing a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed before its invasion in February 2022.
The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of its 700-mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often manning several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government.
How would the US and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries.
Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Summit:
“We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.”
Meanwhile, more US and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the US military base in Wiesbaden in Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence, and target missile and drone strikes. If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles already target bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?
The US and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as Joe Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022. But every time the US and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they leave Ukraine in a weaker position, not a stronger one. The neutrality agreement that the US and UK rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.
NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they were looking for, and General Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize. No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the reality that it has been downhill since then, and 69% of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.
So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self-determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.
The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.
As negotiations progress, US officials must be honest about the American role in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war, and in the wider Cold War it is part of.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of a new edition of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, just published by OR Books.
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NATO’s Contribution to the Climate Crisis Cannot Be Ignored
The alliance and its member states must be transparent about the scale of their emissions and must make serious commitments to reduce their carbon footprint.
Jul 26, 2025
According to new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute, or CCI, recent increases in Pentagon spending alone will produce an additional 26 megatons of planet-heating gases—on a par with the annual carbon equivalent emissions generated by 68 gas power plants or the entire country of Croatia.
With the Pentagon’s 2026 budget set to surge to $1 trillion (a 17% or $150 billion increase from 2023), its total greenhouse emissions will also increase to a staggering 178 megatons (Mt) of carbon equivalent emissions (CO2e). This will make the U.S. military and its industrial apparatus the 38th largest emitter in the world if it were its own nation. It will also result in an estimated $47 billion in economic damages globally, including impacts on agriculture, human health, and property from extreme weather, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s social cost of carbon calculator.
Yet the Pentagon’s true climate impact will almost certainly be much worse than estimated by the CCI, as the calculation does not include emissions generated from separate supplementary U.S. military funding, such as for arms transfers to Israel and Ukraine in recent years. It also does not include the emissions from armed conflict, which are considerable when it happens.
And the CCI study only covers U.S. military spending. Military spending in European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries is also surging. At the Hague Summit in June, the 32 NATO member states pledged to increase their military and security spending from 2% to 5% of GDP by 2035. As a result, NATO military spending in Europe and Canada could increase from around $500 million today to $1.1 trillion in 2035, when the combined defense budgets of the other 31 allies will essentially equal the Pentagon’s. Every dollar or euro of this military spending in preparation for NATO to fight hypothetical wars with China, Russia, or anyone else has a climate and opportunity cost.
This training and warfighting will have catastrophic climate consequences, including further water scarcity, sea-level rise, and desertification in vulnerable regions.
Meanwhile, U.S. military leaders want to spend more justified largely on threat inflation. During a recent meeting of military industrial leaders in Wiesbaden, Germany, for example, NATO’s recently appointed Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, restated the flawed case for increased military spending. He called on member states to prepare for the possibility that Russia and China could launch wars in Europe and the Pacific simultaneously, with 2027 being a potential, though highly speculative, flashpoint year.
Grynkewich, who is also head of the U.S. European Command, argued that the situation meant that allies have little time to prepare. “We’re going to need every bit of kit and equipment and munitions that we can in order to beat that,” he said.
His remarks were made during a U.S. Army Europe and Africa-hosted LandEuro symposium, designed to encourage military and industry leaders to find ways to significantly increase weapons production, especially in Europe. As always during such events, the two-day program served as an opportunity for companies to showcase various weapons systems at the symposium’s so-called “Warriors Corner.”
Grynkewich also repeated a key argument used by NATO leaders to justify increased military spending: the growing cooperation among adversaries.
“Each of these threats that are out there cannot be viewed, in my estimation, as discrete challenges. We’ve got to think about how all of them are aligning,” he said.
However, evidence of such an orientation among the so-called “Axis of Upheaval” (China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia) is patchy at best and primarily bilateral rather than as a fully-formed four-way alliance. This cooperation is also driven by shared frustrations with the U.S.-led international order and a desire to counter Western dominance. U.S. President Donald Trump’s systematic demolition of that “rules-based international order,” illegal military attacks on Iran, and constant anti-China rhetoric further shape this cooperation and risk it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At the same symposium, U.S. Army Europe and Africa Commander Gen. Christopher Donahue said that the U.S. Army and NATO have launched a new military initiative called the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line,” which aims to enhance NATO’s ground-based military capabilities and promote military-industrial interoperability across the alliance. Donahue also warned that NATO forces could capture Russia's heavily fortified Kaliningrad region “in a timeframe that is unheard of” if necessary. Therein lies another disconnect. On the one hand NATO pleads a poverty of resources, and on the other brags about already having the capability to stop Russia’s “mass and momentum problem" and to attack and take Russian territory.
It should also be remembered that the United States currently operates over 870 overseas military bases and installations—two and a half times more than the rest of the world combined—and that NATO members already collectively account for 55% of global military spending.
The main disconnect at Wiesbaden, however, was the failure to consider the link between military spending and climate emissions. There was no “Green Corner” to remind NATO generals that the climate crisis is an existential threat, meaning it poses a danger to the fundamental existence of humanity and the planet. This blinkered approach comes right from the top.
In March this year, Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, wrote on X: “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” This training and warfighting will have catastrophic climate consequences, including further water scarcity, sea-level rise, and desertification in vulnerable regions. In turn, this will inevitably lead to political instability and further forced migration.
NATO’s contribution to the climate crisis cannot be ignored. The alliance and its member states must be transparent about the scale of their emissions and must make serious commitments to reduce their carbon footprint.
Instead of ramping up tensions with adversaries, the top NATO generals should be calling for political leaders to invest in diplomatic and nonmilitary solutions to today’s political crises. Then, as the authors of the CCI analysis argue, these increases in U.S. military spending could be redirected toward demilitarized climate resilience measures, such as public transit, renewable energy, or green new social housing—a true investment in human security.
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