Israel, Turkey, and NATO Article 5
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Israel, Turkey, and NATO Article 5 is a scenario John Kiriakou sets out as a live consequence of Israeli policy rather than a hypothetical.

The premise came from Israel itself: "the Israeli deputy defense minister about a month ago made a public statement in which he said that Israel's next big fight is against Turkey." Kiriakou's response is to state the treaty position, "Well, news flash, Turkey's a NATO country. And if the Turks are ever attacked, whether it's by Israel or anybody else, and they decide to invoke article five of the NATO charter, all NATO countries are compelled to come to Turkey's aid, this would actually pit the United States in a hot war against Israel."

He does not expect the obligation to be honoured: "Now, of course, that's never ever ever going to happen. What would happen then is the US and NATO would likely refuse to push the Israelis away from Turkey and that would lead to the dissolution of NATO." His summary of where that leaves the analysis: "we've entered the twilight zone on this issue."

The personal corollary he offers half-seriously, and says he offered in Cyprus a few days earlier: "damn it, I said, these Israelis, if they do this, they're going to force me to come down on the side of the Turks... This really puts me in a bad position."

He reads the same manoeuvre, cultivating a state's existing antagonism toward Muslim neighbours, as an Israeli pattern rather than an isolated case, running from Greece and Cyprus through to Serbia.

Put to a Senate committee chairman

The Cyprus telling is preserved in his 8 May 2026 fireside chat at the Cyprus Diaspora Forum, where he framed the scenario as a rhetorical question friends had been putting to him, and reported having raised it a week earlier with a Republican senator who chairs a committee. He set out the same chain, Turkish and Israeli rhetoric growing more belligerent, the Israeli deputy foreign minister naming Turkey as the next fight, Article 5 obliging the United States and the rest of NATO to attack Israel, and observed that honouring it "would be the death of NATO," even though "on paper, that's the way it's supposed to work out. An attack on one is an attack on all."

The senator's answer, as Kiriakou relates it, treated the alliance's decay as already priced in by others: "You don't seriously think that it was an accident that the president of Cyprus talked yesterday about a European Union military alliance." Kiriakou's own gloss was that NATO "is going to die and the Europeans have to protect themselves because they can't trust the United States to protect them."

See also

- Israeli property acquisition in Greece and Cyprus
- Israeli drone factories in Serbia
- Benjamin Netanyahu
