The Lajes Agreement Everyone Cites Was Signed 75 Years Ago and Repealed in 1995, and the Text That Replaced It Opens a Narrower Door Than Most People Assume

Seventy-five years ago this weekend, on 6 September 1951, Portugal and the United States signed a defence agreement in Lisbon that let American aircraft use the airfield at Lajes, on the island of Terceira in the Azores. That agreement is the one everybody cites. It has not been in force since 1995.

What replaced it is the Acordo de Cooperação e Defesa (Agreement on Cooperation and Defence), signed in Lisbon on 1 June 1995 by the Portuguese foreign minister José Manuel Durão Barroso and the American Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and approved for ratification by the Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic) on 21 June 1995 through Resolução da Assembleia da República n.º 38/95. Its article XI repeals the 1951 agreement by name, along with four other instruments: two 1983 exchanges of notes, the 1984 technical agreement that implemented the 1951 text, and the old accord on the employment of Portuguese citizens by American forces in the Azores.

The anniversary is worth marking for a reason beyond arithmetic. Portugal's foreign minister Paulo Rangel said in June that the accord would have to be revised and then deferred the question. If it is reopened, the text on the table will be the 1995 one, and the 1995 one says things about who can use Lajes for what that do not match the way the base is usually described.

The three agreements, and which one does the work

The 1995 instrument is not a single document. It is a framework agreement plus two annexed agreements that its article IV declares to be integral parts of it: the Acordo Técnico (Technical Agreement), which governs the facilities and the American presence, and the Acordo Laboral (Labour Agreement), which governs the employment of Portuguese workers by what the text calls USFORAZORES, the United States forces in the Azores.

The framework agreement itself is mostly diplomatic architecture. Article II commits both sides to annual high-level talks, including at foreign minister and Secretary of State level where agreed, and to annual consultations at senior official level on political-military matters. Article III creates a permanent bilateral commission, headed on the Portuguese side by a representative of the foreign ministry and on the American side by a State Department representative, which is required to meet twice a year, alternating between the two capitals. Article V makes that commission the body that identifies areas of military cooperation and assesses American support to the Portuguese armed forces, including transfers of equipment and joint training programmes.

Article VI is the one the Azores care about. It commits the parties to recognising that reinforcing economic and social development, "with special emphasis" on the Autonomous Region of the Azores, helps achieve the objectives of the agreement, and instructs the commission to identify programmes to promote it, across technical, scientific, educational, cultural and commercial fields. It is a commitment to identify programmes, not a commitment to fund them, and the distinction has been the substance of Azorean complaint about Lajes for thirty years.

What the Technical Agreement actually authorises

Article I of the Technical Agreement is the operative grant, and it is structured as a narrow permission with a residual catch-all, which is the opposite of how the arrangement tends to be described in public argument.

Portugal grants the United States authorisation for two things without further process. The first, under article I(1)(a), is the use of the facilities listed in annex A as necessary for conducting military operations arising from the application of the provisions of the North Atlantic Treaty or from decisions taken within NATO, "there being no objection from Portugal". The second, under article I(1)(b), is the transit of American military aircraft through Air Base No. 4 at Lajes or through Azorean airspace on missions not covered by the first limb but still carried out within the North Atlantic Treaty framework. Article I(2) requires prior notice of those transits to the competent Portuguese authorities.

Then the text steps outside NATO. Article I(3) says Portugal "will look favourably upon" any request to use Lajes for military operations flowing from decisions taken within other international organisations of which both parties are members, provided those decisions have been supported by Portugal. That is a soft commitment with two hard conditions attached: the organisation has to include both countries, and Lisbon has to have backed the decision.

Article I(4) is the residual clause and the shortest provision in the article: any use by the United States of the listed facilities that does not fall within the preceding paragraphs "must be the subject of prior authorisation". Everything that is not NATO business, and not something Portugal has already voted for elsewhere, requires Lisbon to say yes first.

That structure is the legal backdrop to the arguments that ran through Portuguese politics earlier this year, when Lajes was used during American operations against Iran. Whether a given mission sits in article I(1)(a), article I(3) or article I(4) determines whether Portugal was informed, consulted or asked, and the answer is not the same in each case. The distinction is the reason the timing of a request matters so much politically, as it did when Rangel had to correct the American account of when the request arrived, and it is why the opposition pressed for a parliamentary inquiry that the Assembleia da República declined to open in June.

Who commands the base

The Technical Agreement is unusually explicit about hierarchy, and the provisions are worth quoting because they cut against the common description of Lajes as an American base.

Article III(1) states that Air Base No. 4 and its support facilities are under the command of the Portuguese armed forces, exercised by the commander of Air Base No. 4 or a specifically named subordinate. Article III(3) then adds a rule about rank: the United States shall not appoint as commander of its forces an officer senior in rank to the commander of Air Base No. 4, and where both hold the same rank, the Portuguese commander is treated as the more senior. Article III(5) gives the Portuguese commander access to all the granted facilities, with an exception for cryptographic areas and classified information equipment, and requires the American commander to keep the Portuguese commander informed of where those areas are.

Article III(8) makes the Portuguese commander responsible for the defence and security of the base and for the maintenance of order there. Article III(7) puts the airfield and its air traffic control facilities under joint operation. Article I(8) lets the United States store conventional munitions and explosives at specifically designated facilities, on safety criteria at least as strict as those of the Portuguese armed forces, and requires the American commander to keep the Portuguese commander informed of the type and quantity held.

Article II is almost ceremonial and tells you something about how the text was negotiated: American forces are authorised, "as a courtesy", to fly the United States flag alongside the Portuguese flag in front of their command building, and open-air military honours are rendered by the Portuguese armed forces, though they may be rendered jointly or, in special cases, by American forces where both commanders think it appropriate.

Who pays for what

Article V of the Technical Agreement allocates costs. The United States is responsible for building, equipping and maintaining facilities for its own exclusive use, and bears all the costs of doing so. Facilities in common use are a joint or individual responsibility, with costs shared by mutual agreement of the two governments. Portugal is responsible for leasing, expropriating or acquiring the land used for the purposes of the agreement, and for building housing for Portuguese families displaced by the construction of the granted facilities, with those costs also shared by agreement.

One provision keeps a Portuguese minister in the loop on construction: article V(7) requires prior authorisation from Portugal's defence minister, or a delegate, for new construction and major repairs, defined to include work on electricity, signals, water and sewage networks, the volume of existing structures, facades or interior walls, and structural elements.

How the agreement ends, and how it changes

This is where the anniversary framing becomes misleading in a second way. The 1995 agreement is not a treaty with a term running to some future expiry date. Article X gives it an initial five-year term, after which it continues in force for successive one-year periods unless one party notifies the other in writing, twelve months before the date on which it expires, of an intention to terminate. It has been rolling over annually since 2000. If a termination notice were served, article X(2) then gives the United States twelve months from the end of the agreement to withdraw personnel, equipment and materials, under the same terms and conditions.

Revision is separate and simpler. Article IX says either party may propose a revision, and that any revisions agreed enter into force once both parties have notified each other that their constitutionally required procedures are complete. On the Portuguese side that means the Assembleia da República, since the original was approved for ratification under what were then articles 164(j) and 169(5) of the Constitution.

So there is no cliff edge to force a renegotiation and no deadline to concentrate minds. A revision happens when one government decides to ask for one and the other agrees, which is exactly why "the accord will have to be revised" has been a sentence Portuguese ministers can say repeatedly without anything following it.

What this means for readers in Portugal

• The document you want is not the famous one. If you are following the Lajes debate, the 1951 agreement is of historical interest only. The operative text is Resolução da Assembleia da República n.º 38/95, which carries the framework agreement, the Technical Agreement and the Labour Agreement in both Portuguese and English, both versions equally authentic.
• Sovereignty language is in the text, not just in the speeches. Both article IV of the framework agreement and article I of the Technical Agreement open by preserving Portugal's full sovereignty and control over its territory, territorial sea and airspace. That phrasing has legal work to do when article I(4) is engaged.
• The Azores clause is a process commitment. Article VI directs the bilateral commission to identify development programmes for the region. It does not promise money, and reading it as if it did is the source of a good deal of recurring disappointment on Terceira.
• Employment at the base runs on its own agreement. The Labour Agreement and its associated Work Regulation govern the employment relationship between USFORAZORES and its Portuguese workers, with internal American regulations required to be submitted to the commander of Air Base No. 4 for review and comment before release. Any revision of the accord would reopen that too.
• Terceira's economy is downstream of all of it. The scale of the American presence at Lajes has been shrinking since the 2015 drawdown, and the questions that flow from that, from environmental liability to the region's dependence on the base, keep returning. One of them, a university study into contamination around the base, reached parliament in July.

The Azores marked fifty years of their own autonomous government this week, an anniversary whose unfinished argument is about money. The Lajes anniversary raises a narrower question and one with a clearer answer available: the agreement that governs the base is thirty-one years old, it renews itself every year unless somebody objects, and either government can ask to reopen it whenever it wants. Nothing in the text is stopping anyone.