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There is literally zero mechanisms for removing countries from NATO. They have to leave on their own accord (which they obviously won't do, since membership pro

There is literally zero mechanisms for removing countries from NATO. They have to leave on their own accord (which they obviously won't do, since membership provides immense benefits).

skissane 4y ago
You absolutely can expel a country from NATO - just get all the other member states to agree on it, it will happen. People will say that “there is no provision in the NATO Charter to expel a member”-but that doesn’t actually matter. If all the other member states agree on it, the secretary-general will implement the decision. If the expelled state wants to claim that is illegal-there is no court with jurisdiction to hear their claim. To give an extreme hypothetical, if Turkey commenced an invasion of Greece, they’d be expelled from NATO within hours. Nobody would care about the legal niceties-they’d leave that to international law professors to debate for decades to come.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > If the expelled state wants to claim that is illegal-there is no court with jurisdiction to hear their claim. The ICJ has jurisdiction to hear treaty violation cases between states, but no one to rely on to enforce their decisions.
  - skissane 4y ago
    The ICJ only has jurisdiction to hear cases where either (1) the treaty in question explicitly grants it jurisdiction; (2) a state has lodged a declaration with the ICJ accepting its jurisdiction in general; or (3) the states agree to the ICJ resolving this particular dispute. For NATO, (1) is not applicable-there is no clause in the North Atlantic Treaty granting the ICJ jurisdiction. (3) is very unlikely-if NATO member states decided to expel a member, why would they voluntarily agree to let the expellee challenge the decision in court? For (2), several NATO states - the US is one - have withdrawn their general acceptance of ICJ jurisdiction (or never accepted it to begin with). Even for those who do accept it, the ICJ’s case law says that it cannot hear a case unless all involved states are either subject to, or voluntarily accept, its jurisdiction. It would consider all NATO member states to be involved states, so it could only hear the case if they all consented to it-not happening.
- enraged_camel 4y ago
  >> You absolutely can expel a country from NATO - just get all the other member states to agree on it, it will happen. No, this isn’t a thing, because it would destroy NATO.
  - skissane 4y ago
    Why would it? If one of the NATO member states did something which was radically inconsistent with NATO’s values - such as invade a fellow NATO member, commit genocide, wantonly proliferate nuclear weapons, etc - to fail to expel them would destroy NATO.

There is literally zero mechanisms for removing countries from NATO. They have to leave on their own accord (which they obviously won't do, since membership provides immense benefits).

skissane 4y ago

You absolutely can expel a country from NATO - just get all the other member states to agree on it, it will happen. People will say that “there is no provision in the NATO Charter to expel a member”-but that doesn’t actually matter. If all the other member states agree on it, the secretary-general will implement the decision. If the expelled state wants to claim that is illegal-there is no court with jurisdiction to hear their claim. To give an extreme hypothetical, if Turkey commenced an invasion of Greece, they’d be expelled from NATO within hours. Nobody would care about the legal niceties-they’d leave that to international law professors to debate for decades to come.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> If the expelled state wants to claim that is illegal-there is no court with jurisdiction to hear their claim. The ICJ has jurisdiction to hear treaty violation cases between states, but no one to rely on to enforce their decisions.
- skissane 4y ago
  The ICJ only has jurisdiction to hear cases where either (1) the treaty in question explicitly grants it jurisdiction; (2) a state has lodged a declaration with the ICJ accepting its jurisdiction in general; or (3) the states agree to the ICJ resolving this particular dispute. For NATO, (1) is not applicable-there is no clause in the North Atlantic Treaty granting the ICJ jurisdiction. (3) is very unlikely-if NATO member states decided to expel a member, why would they voluntarily agree to let the expellee challenge the decision in court? For (2), several NATO states - the US is one - have withdrawn their general acceptance of ICJ jurisdiction (or never accepted it to begin with). Even for those who do accept it, the ICJ’s case law says that it cannot hear a case unless all involved states are either subject to, or voluntarily accept, its jurisdiction. It would consider all NATO member states to be involved states, so it could only hear the case if they all consented to it-not happening.
enraged_camel 4y ago
>> You absolutely can expel a country from NATO - just get all the other member states to agree on it, it will happen. No, this isn’t a thing, because it would destroy NATO.
- skissane 4y ago
  Why would it? If one of the NATO member states did something which was radically inconsistent with NATO’s values - such as invade a fellow NATO member, commit genocide, wantonly proliferate nuclear weapons, etc - to fail to expel them would destroy NATO.