Rarely does the small Balkan coastal state of Montenegro make the headlines.
The article pledges members to respond to an attack on any one state as an attack on all. Although invoked only once since Nato’s founding in 1949, following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the principle of collective defence among European and North American democracies has served as a foundation stone of the post-World War 2 European political order.
In a development largely unnoticed outside the defence policy community, Montenegro joined Nato in 2017. Its 2,000-person army obviously offers little to enhance Nato’s combat effectiveness. Instead, its inclusion in the organisation was a recognition of the fact that Montenegrin leaders in Podgorica, since separating from Serbia in 2006, have consciously avoided engagement in the zero-sum politics that have characterised much of the post-war Balkans.
Montenegro is an outpost of relative stability in a turbulent neighbourhood and Nato’s political leadership recognised that the country’s membership in the organisation only serves to enhance that role. Montenegro’s increasing alignment with the West has propelled the country into the centre of the tit-for-tat brinksmanship that now characterises so much of the West’s engagement with a revanchist Russia. Moscow has made very clear its displeasure with Montenegro’s turn to the West, to the point of being implicated in a 2016 coup plot against Podgorica’s pro-Western government.
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