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Comment by bbotond | Hacker News Reader

How could Taiwan - a country the US doesn’t recognize - join NATO?

By just being accepted by NATO countries to do so?

Countries can do what they want. There isn't some magic spell, that forces countries to do thing, just because of some semantic game about whether a country is recongized or not.

Taiwan could simply join NATO anyway, if they get approved.

Well US could recognize it, then it could join NATO.

How could Taiwan - a country not in the North Atlantic - join NATO?

Presumably by agreeing to the terms of the treaty and by being accepted by existing members. It's the North Atlantic Treaty organization, not the North Atlantic Organization

Good point. When I think of Turkey, the first thing that comes to my mind is "North Atlantic", same as you apparently.

The Mediterranean is technically part of the North Atlantic. If Greece can be in NATO, why not Turkey?

But no, most of Europe isn't interested in spilling blood over Taiwan, just like it isn't interested in spilling blood over Ukraine.

It probably isn't so much the spilling of blood that it isn't interested in rather than the chances of wholesale evaporation but otherwise your point stands.

> The Mediterranean is technically part of the North Atlantic.

I'm not sure this is true. What actually happened is that NATO countries realized expanding NATO is in their interest so they ignored the "north atlantic" part of the treaty. While I doubt taiwan will be invited any time soon it wouldn't surprise me at all if Japan or even South Korea is.

Turkey is explicitly in the geographic area covered by NATO, though (I would assume North Atlantic, North America, Mediterranean, Europe, Turkey and Algerian Departments of France Treaty Organization or NANAMETADFTO was considered too long of a name).

Taiwan is thousands of miles outside of it.

Even worse, it would have had to be NANAMETADFTO OTFDATEMANAN to keep the French happy.

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