Indirect Aggression and the North Atlantic Treaty

Western diplomats and policymakers involved in the negotiations of the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT) in the late 1940s believed that the Soviet Union would not take the risk of launching an armed attack against the western bloc in the near future. Instead, the NAT negotiators were deeply worried about Soviet ‘indirect aggression’ in the form of political infiltration, interference, and subversion, that is, hybrid operations. The question arises of why the notion of indirect aggression was eventually dropped during the NAT negotiations, whereas Article 5 on armed attack became the core provision of the treaty. The article shows that there might have been sound reasons for not explicitly mentioning the notion of indirect aggression in the treaty at the time. With hindsight, however, the failure to come to an agreement on the need to counter indirect aggression has had repercussions on the development of NATO cooperation and intelligence sharing ever since. It partly explains the difficulties that still exist in strengthening genuine intelligence and security collaboration for the purpose of preventing and countering hybrid warfare.