Polanski NATO position could spell trouble

Green leader Zack Polanski says a Green government would sign up to NATO’s Article 5 and go to war if necessary. A Sky News interviewer challenged Polanski in an attempted gotcha rather reminiscent of the Corbyn-era.

Polanski told interviewer Trevor Phillips that he took national security very seriously:

That’s the first job of a prime ministers, and its the first job of a party leader.

The Greens are committed to NATO membership. Yet Phillips asked if Polanski would respond to Article 5 being invoked. Article 5 is a commitment to go to war if another NATO member is attacked.

The Green’s manifesto says:

The Green Party recognises that NATO has an important role in ensuring the ability of its member states to respond to threats to their security. We would work within NATO to achieve:

• A greater focus on global peacebuilding.

• A commitment to a ‘No First Use’ of nuclear weapons.

Article 5’s first point states:

that an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against all members, and triggers an obligation for each member to come to its assistance.

Pro-NATO Greens under Polanski?

Phillips claimed Starmer had stated the Greens would not sign up to Article 5. Polanski denied this:

Well, we’ve already signed up for that. But the very obvious thing to point out is that Donald Trump – our so-called ally – who is behaving increasingly dangerously and unpredictably. Is threatening to annex Greenland – an attack on one is an attack on all.

Polanski accused Starmer of attacking him while also echoing his views:

And it just feels Keir Starmer’s speech yesterday, which by the way is not a hundred miles away from what I’ve been saying for months now. which is that we need a closer relationship with Europe. So it’s quite bizarre to hear him repeating a lot of the thing I’ve been saying and making and making an attack on me at the same time.

Asked again if he would commit to defending a NATO country against Russia, Polanski said:

Oh, I absolutely would commit to that if we’re in NATO, as we are, then it is clear we need to sign up to the articles – and Article 5 says an attack on one is an attack on all.

NATO criticism

Yet Polanski’s position on the Atlantic alliance isn’t simply unqualified support. In May 2025, he said:

Clearly NATO has got a lot more complex since Donald Trump has become President, and I don’t think anyone should consider him a reliable ally…

I think the age of NATO is now fully over.

He also said NATO was unreformable:

Donald Trump has so much domination within Nato that I don’t believe it’s possible to reform Nato from within.

While Polanski has been critical of NATO, the party position is to work with the alliance. Zarah Sultana – who takes a much firmer anti-NATO position – criticized the Greens over theirs in 2025.

Another factor is that the Green Party’s liberal base stridently supports Ukraine, as do a number of its leading lights. And the Young Greens passed a Ukraine solidarity motion by 128 to 8 on 7 February.

Russia’s 2022 assault on Ukraine re-energised the fading alliance. As the journal of the US Army war College said in 2023:

The alliance lost its original purpose from the post-Cold War era, but the second Russian invasion of Ukraine (like the Balkans crises of the 1990s) stimulated NATO into a semi-unified response.

Polanski’s position might need clarifying – and soon. Membership is popular with general UK voters according to a YouGov poll from May 2025. But NATO is a contentious issue between liberals and socialists.

One suspects many of those who have joined the Greens due to the extremely slow-motion implosion of the vocally anti-imperialist Your Party are firmly against NATO. But a large section of the party’s existing base is avidly pro-NATO. How that question is resolved – or isn’t – may become more important as the 2029 election gets closer.

Featured image via the Canary