Vexler Is Right to Worry About the Article 5 Gray Zone and its Political Dimension
- john raymond
- Sep 9
- 4 min read
NATO Article 5 is not a tripwire; it is a political instrument that adversaries intend to blunt long before it is formally invoked. Russia’s contemporary strategy is to push NATO into a self-deterring crouch by salami-slicing the alliance’s cohesion with low-threshold violations and norm-eroding precedents.
The aim is balkanization by paralysis: make activation look impossibly costly, normalize hesitation as “prudence,” and harvest the political collapse that follows. Vexler’s point is not incidental—it is the primary problem facing the West as Russia’s industrial warfighting lags and its asymmetric repertoire expands.
On September 10, 2025 (local), Poland reported multiple drone incursions during a Russian strike on western Ukraine, temporarily closed major airports, and—crucially—announced it had engaged and shot down intruding drones after “repeated” airspace violations.
This was accompanied by rapid consultations with NATO leadership and emergency cabinet meetings in Warsaw. Initial Ukrainian reporting about drones threatening Zamość was later retracted, illustrating the tempo and ambiguity that gray-zone probes are designed to exploit.
The episode’s significance is twofold: it crossed a long-avoided enforcement threshold (neutralizing hostile objects over allied territory) and did so under conditions of deliberate uncertainty.
The same dynamic of “disinhibition” Vexler names surfaced hours earlier in Doha: Israel executed an airstrike targeting Hamas figures on Qatari soil; European leaders publicly condemned the action as a breach of sovereignty, while President Trump said he was “very unhappy” and his team asserted they had sought to warn Qatar.
Whatever one’s view of the target set, the norm effect is plain: calibrated breaches of the peace accustom the system to rule-bending, lowering the shock barrier for the next probe—whether Russian in Europe or otherwise.
Peeling Back the Curtain on Article 5
The treaty’s text makes clear that Article 5 is triggered by an “armed attack,” and its territorial scope is delimited by Article 6; invocation is inherently political, not automatic.
In practice it has been used once (after 9/11), which underscores the weight of the decision and the premium Moscow places on muddying thresholds beneath it. The European Parliament’s legal brief further notes that while the attack must occur on allied territory to trigger Article 5, responsive measures carry no such territorial limit—meaning that the law does not force paralysis, politics does.
The Kremlin’s play is in exploiting activation costs and inducing self-deterrence. Russia’s gray-zone repertoire—cheap drones, ambiguous airspace trespass, cyber and electronic warfare, information whiplash—targets NATO’s decision-making cycle, not its order of battle.
Each probe is an “inhibition attack”: raise our legal, diplomatic, and escalation costs for clarity while keeping their own risks bounded.
Authoritative allied works from over the last decade—RAND’s gray-zone analyses, NATO’s hybrid-threat doctrine, and Parliament’s inquiry into “defence in the grey zone”—map exactly this logic. The result is predictable: if the alliance treats every borderline violation as a bespoke political dilemma, the slowest mover defines deterrence—and Moscow wins by inches.
Raymond Method Application
Pillar One (Regime Security). The objective is not war with NATO but a political victory that proves NATO cannot protect its members without Washington’s choreography. The Polish incident produced precisely the imagery Moscow wants to amplify: closures, alerts, debates over proportionality, and information reversals. Only a disciplined, collective, and pre-declared response ladder denies the Kremlin its dividend here.
Pillar Two (Asymmetric Warfare). Low-cost, deniable systems let Russia weaponize our caution. Airports shut; parliaments argue; the attacker pays pennies to force a million-euro allied response while accreting a narrative of Western hesitation. That is textbook gray zone.
Pillar Three (Byzantine Traitor-General). Fractured U.S. signaling—statements of displeasure unmoored from coherent strategy—multiplies activation costs for Europe and invites more probes. Allies read discord; adversaries read opportunity. The dissonant handling of Doha is a case in point.
Counter-Strategy: Invert the Activation Costs
The alliance must make the gray zone boring.
First, codify an “Article 5-adjacent” ladder for unmanned violations of sovereign airspace: immediate kinetic neutralization within pre-declared geofenced boxes; instantaneous Article 4 consultation; synchronized release of radar tracks and debris forensics; and pre-announced, time-boxed economic countermeasures that do not require new political bargaining each time. Predictability deters; ad hoc theater invites escalation.
Second, institutionalize a deterministic air-defense posture across Poland–Baltics–Romania with shared sensor fusion and standing planning and assessment cycles keyed to Russian strike windows.
The legal threshold for Article 5 will remain high, but the operational threshold for denying airspace should be low, clear, and collective. Poland’s shoot-downs can be the template if followed by a repeatable alliance drill rather than a one-off “crisis.”
Third, impose information discipline. Treat first-report-then-retraction cycles as an adversary effect to be denied. A single allied fact pattern, corroborated rapidly and published with telemetry, removes the propaganda value of our contradictions—precisely the value Russia seeks from ambiguity.
Finally, reframe the risk debate. The long-run escalator is inaction that normalizes trespass. And understanding that the legal architecture itself does not require passivity from members; politics does.
Say that plainly—before the next probe—and commit to responses that are automatic enough to be uninteresting to Moscow and reassuring enough to allied publics.
What Can Be Learned
Vexler is correct: the center of gravity has shifted from battlefield “breakthroughs” to the political corrosion of our inhibitions.
Russia’s objective is the balkanization of the alliance by a thousand norm-nicks until Article 5 looks unusable and collective defense looks like a myth.
The remedy is not histrionics but pre-delegated, collective routine: make the gray zone dull, make our responses rote, and deprive Moscow of the only terrain where it still enjoys a decisive edge—our hesitation.
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