Rutte: NATO keeps Article 5 ambiguous to keep adversaries guessing VIDEO

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated that Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty was deliberately worded ambiguously to prevent adversaries from learning the exact conditions under which it could be invoked.

According to Rutte, NATO would never publicly disclose precisely when Article 5 was being activated, as the alliance did not want to provide its adversaries with additional information. He explained that the ambiguity leaves room for different interpretations of how the provision could be applied depending on the circumstances, Caliber.Az reports.

NATO's Rutte:

Article 5 is deliberately ambiguous, so we will never exactly tell anyone when Article 5 is exactly triggered or not.

Because we don't want to make our adversaries any wiser.

But when it comes to hybrid, let me assure you, we have all the response options we… pic.twitter.com/z8TH3pAH23

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 23, 2026

Rutte stressed that NATO had all the necessary response options to address hybrid threats, although some of them remained undisclosed. 

“Article 5, that is deliberately ambiguous, so we will never exactly tell anyone when Article 5 is exactly triggered or not. Because we don't want to make our adversaries any wiser. But when it comes to hybrid, let me assure you, we have all the response options we need. Some of them you will not see because they are simply not public,” he emphasised, adding that the responses would not always be “tit for tat” and could sometimes be either symmetric or asymmetric.

By Jeyhun Aghazada