NATO Marks 25th Anniversary of 9/11 With Ceremony at Article 5 Memorial, Deputy SG Reaffirms Solidarity

NATO Headquarters in Brussels held a solemn ceremony on September 11, 2026 marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States — the only occasion in NATO's history on which Article 5, the collective-defense clause, has been invoked. Deputy Secretary General Radmila Shekerinska was joined by the Chargé d'Affaires of the United States Mission to NATO, Scott Oudkirk, and the US Military Representative to the NATO Military Committee, Lieutenant General William D. 'Hank' Taylor, at the 9/11 and Article 5 Memorial outside NATO HQ. Shekerinska told the gathering of Alliance ambassadors and staff, 'America was not alone. Your friends, your Allies, were with you then, and they are with you here today,' and the ceremony included a moment of silence at 14:46 CET, the exact minute of the first strike on the World Trade Center's North Tower 25 years earlier. The commemoration came amid a year of unusually sharp friction between Washington and the Alliance over burden-sharing and the ongoing Europe force-posture review, lending added weight to the ceremony's message of continuity in the collective-defense commitment that underpinned NATO's only Article 5 invocation.