As NATO leaders gather in Washington, D.C., for their 75th-anniversary summit this week, a bipartisan group of 12 U.S. senators is asking leaders to amend the North Atlantic Treaty, the military alliance’s founding document, to include Hawaii. Written a decade before Hawaii became a state, the 1949 treaty—which requires all members of the alliance to respond if any other member is attacked—only covers territories north of the Tropic of Cancer.
In a letter Wednesday to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the lawmakers—who include Hawaii’s U.S. Sens. Brian Schatz and Mazie Hirono—said “we write to you today about the importance of clarifying that members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ) would consider an armed attack against the State of Hawaii to be an attack against all NATO countries, because of the significant implications for U.S. national security interests and regional and global stability, as well as the imperative that Hawaii residents are treated in a respectful and just manner.”
Hawaii is the home of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the nerve center of all U.S. military operations in the Pacific region, which the Pentagon considers to be its most important area of operations as the U.S. competes with China for power and influence. Pearl Harbor is currently the site of the most expensive naval construction project in history as the Navy builds a new dry dock to maintain submarines in the…
