Sold on NATO: The Case for Expansion

...The excluded countries would hardly have been willing to assist its military operations with free passage and logistical help...

...But neither body has the military heft or the prestige to deter or repress serious strife...

...Given the EU's apparent reluctance to expand, that might have pushed back NATO membership, with its enhancing effect on stability, well into the future...

...Extreme political movements would flourish...

...There is no point in seeking to appease such opponents...

...is a guarantee that they will be restrained rather than unleashed...

...their recent history makes them more resistant than either Germany or France to Russian overtures favoring a "Common European Home" (without the U.S...

...would not yield a naval leadership position in the Mediterranean to a European...

...The East Europeans, of course, want that enlargement precisely as a protection against Russia...

...And finally, "Will Americans die for Danzig...

...Sound familiar...

...They have been persuaded to make their economies freer, to entrench democratic practices, to extend constitutional protections for minorities and human rights, and in particular to settle their border and ethnic disputes...

...just recently, France decided not to re-establish full participation in the military structures of NATO precisely because the U.S...

...There are those who want Russia to be treated as a "Great Power," best illustrated by the Russian general who on being asked whether his country would object if NATO intervened in Yugoslavia, replied: "You can drop an atom bomb on Belgrade if you like—as long as you consult us first...

...NATO would then expand eastwards anyway—not into countries made more 25 stable and prosperous by NATO membership, but into nations made backward and unstable by the effects of exclusion...

...If the other countries of the region were to be a permanent no-man's-land between the NATO powers and Russia—which is what exclusion from NATO would have meant—they would continue to be prey to economic backwardness, political instability, and ethnic-cumnational rivalries...

...and there are a number of potential wars and civil wars lurking in such regions as the Tyrol, the Basque country, Northern Ireland (not yet finally settled), Corsica, Belgium, Kosovo, and Eastern Europe and the Balkans generally where, it is said, "every England has its Ireland, and every Ireland its Ulster...

...old foreign policy liberals, including Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, nervous of alienating Russia's fledgling democracy...

...and libertarians, such as the boys down at the Cato Institute, who have tumbled to the fact that the U.S...

...It is only too likely that a NATO divided institutionally between "Europe" and the U.S...

...Americans are isolationist in the abstract or when an intervention has plainly failed...

...Otherwise, attitudes in the Russian elite do not correspond to the simple "Russian humiliation" thesis, but fall instead into three broad schools...

...to believe that the EU should handle the defense not just of NATO's new members, but of Europe as a whole...

...in the Third World...

...But the most important argument against making EU membership a prerequisite of admission to NATO was that this would have led to a divided Atlantic alliance...

...But then so is America...

...Integrating the East Europeans into the EU but not NATO would have been to integrate them into only half the alliance...

...That is how the world works...

...That would seem to be the worst scenario of all...

...A less divided NATO would permanently entrench the Atlantic alliance...

...Expansion opponents made some plausible arguments, appealing to isolationist instincts that are said to be rooted in American history...

...The net result would have been the strengthening of those forces seeking a European entity militarily and economically independent of the U.S...

...An expanded NATO would be a less divided NATO...

...So it is remarkable, especially when isolationism is said to be growing, that such widespread and substantial opposition has been decisively defeated...

...By contrast the second course would amount to the actual creation of a standing Atlantic alliance, and economic interdependence would give it a permanence that the present politico-military arrangements do not guarantee...

...What the West cannot do is close off the eventual possibility of Russian membership...

...This option probably had to wait until NATO enlargement had been agreed upon...

...after 1945...

...The first is that NATO would gradually cease to be a unipolar alliance in standing Atlantic alliance" to be IN A WORLD IN WHICH CHINA POSED THE MAIN CHALLENGE TO THE WEST, RUSSIA ITSELF MIGHT JOIN NATO WITHOUT OBJECTION FROM THE EAST EUROPEANS...

...The dangers in question are future and hypothetical...

...The U.S...

...Yet the concept of a "Twin Pillars" NATO is largely motivated by resentment of American leadership...

...and Western interests in fifty years time...

...If not, the Russians would face the considerable humiliation of non-local Western forces re-imposing order in what was recently their sphere of interest—and at a heightened moment of crisis...

...And if a European collective defense body, within or without NATO, is intended to be capable of action independent of the U.S.—as self-respect and the statements of its partisans suggest—then it would require increases in defense spending far vaster than even the highest estimates of NATO expansion eastwards...

...Beedham, and the Economist therefore reach exactly the same policy conclusion: The U.S...

...But in a saner world, that would indeed be American (and British) policy, and the Clinton administration would now be pushing strongly for an Atlantic free trade policy flexible enough to admit Eastern Europe and Turkey, despite their differences in economic structure...

...Two world wars began because European powers made the miscalculation that America would not intervene...

...The many aspects of this ambitious concept come down to a choice between two courses of action: Should the European Union develop a "defense identity...

...Such fears are (alas) almost certainly exaggerated...

...As a French general admitted in the Gulf War: "The Americans are our eyes and ears...

...their experience of socialist economics makes them suspicious of Brussels and its regulatory excesses...

...For the sake of a European "defense identity," it would have forced aspiring NATO members to pursue their security interests through European channels first...

...These are major changes in Western and U.S...

...Standing pat"—or military readiness to respond to an attack on an existing NATO member no one else—has turned out to be similarly unrealistic...

...And what of Russia in these circumstances...

...If the first course were adopted, a new series of developments would be set in motion...

...The decision to enlarge NATO would then seem—in the retrospect of the future—to have been a large step toward such an expanded pan-Western bloc...

...That is not what NATO's new members want, and it is not in the American interest...

...the growth of a powerful China whose foreign policy will reach much further into the world than that of today's China...

...Finally, there are the democratic reformers (a.k.a...

...The American Spectator • June 19 9 8 which the U.S...

...While in Washington to argue for NATO enlargement, the foreign ministers of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic endorsed U.S...

...Eventually, the West would split as the European superpower—with its separate economy, independent military capability, and different diplomatic interests—inevitably became a rival to the U.S...

...they are rational and prudent interventionists when the matter is put to the test...

...A final drawback to a distinct European defense identity is its potential for damaging alliance cohesion...

...and, partly because of that, a prolonged and dangerous multi-power contest for influence over a large segment of Asia," mainly because of its oil reserves...

...Beedham's " achieved...

...ow is Mr...

...As the latter has described it, the geopolitical picture in the next century will contain no fewer than six superpowers, namely China, Russia, Japan, an Islamic bloc, "Europe," and the U.S...

...they are unappeasable...

...It is hardly surprising that they have aroused opposition from a heterogeneous yet influential coalition—America Firsters, notably Pat Buchanan himself, suspicious of foreign entanglements...

...In other words, 2095 might look like 194 played on a somewhat larger stage...

...a major conflict has just been fought in the very Balkans which sparked the First World War...

...As such, it would divert NATO's attention and resources from real problems in order to solve an imaginary one...

...But the larger and long-term argument is that NATO expansion is an important step toward consolidating the West under American leadership...

...Westernizers") who opposed NATO expansion because it would not include Russia...

...The OSCE is a collective security organization, and as Henry Kissinger said of a similar body: "When all participants agree, there is no need for it...

...Second, there are the chauvinists and anti-Americans nostalgic for the Soviet empire, who would like to detach America from Europe altogether (the "Common European Home" strategy), or failing that, to construct a kind of "Jihad Central" in Moscow which would make trouble for the U.S...

...As advocates of expansion such as Poland's deputy foreign minister Radek Sikorski have argued, the new NATO members are more enthusiastic supporters of the Atlantic relationship than some of the chancelleries of Western Europe...

...26 June 1998 • The American Spectator an unstable world in which there are more than half-a-dozen "great powers," all with their own clients, all vulnerable if they stand alone, all capable of increasing their power and influence if they form the right kind of alliance, and all engaged willy-nilly in perpetual diplomatic maneuvers to ensure that their relative positions might improve rather than deteriorate...

...policy, and they represent serious American military and diplomatic commitments...

...is "first among equals," and become a bi-polar one in which the U.S...

...JOHN O'SULLIVAN is editor-at-large of National Review and founder and co-chairman of the New Atlantic Initiative...

...it is entirely a political project designed to advance European federalism...

...For it is far from fanciful to imagine that in a world in which China, either alone or in combination with Japan or other powers, poses the main challenge to the West, Russia itself would eventually join an enlarged NATO without objection from the East Europeans...

...This was a foretaste of how NATO expansion might work to strengthen the Atlantic elements in NATO: diplomatic support in return for military protection...

...This circle cannot be squared—for the moment...

...Lady Thatcher, Mr...

...was a more reliable friend of "captive nations" than Western Europe, has led them to place a special value on American participation...

...hard-headed "realists," such as Owen Harries of the National Interest, made dyspeptic by anything that smacks of over-extended Wilsonianism...

...Nor should it...

...Forecasting the crises that might occur in this hypothetical world is plainly a hazardous enterprise...

...No nation or would-be nation wants to take NATO on...

...They have been bought off (at too high a price) by the Founding Act relationship Russia now enjoys with NATO...

...The wider world would then become Lady Thatcher's "194 played out on a somewhat larger stage...

...And on this occasion, they were confronted by a powerful short-term case for NATO expansion: namely, that it would extend the zone of prosperity and political stability in Europe...

...They would then be interjected into the full Western alliance from the first...

...But only one of them is "historic," if that means likely to shape the long future...

...But at the recent Congress of Istanbul held by the New Atlantic Initiative, Brian Beedham, in a brilliant exercise of the geopolitical imagination, suggested that the Atlantic democracies would face "in rising order of probability, a challenge to their present degree of military superiority...

...People are going to start asking what it was all for, if we say we're incapable of knocking a few drunken Serbs off a hillside...

...This suggests that fifty years experience of the Cold War shaped an American opinion that, however reluctantly, is prepared to shoulder the burdens of world and alliance leadership...

...NATO enlargement will deter such miscalculations in the future, and because the alliance disposes of such overwhelming military force, it will deter them very effectively...

...Not only has NATO enlargment been endorsed by an overwhelming eighty senators, but it has continued to receive majority support in polls of both public and elite opinion...

...policy towards Iraq at a time when West European reactions ranged from indifference to outright sabotage...

...They are wedded to NATO structures and dependent on NATO, especially American, technology...

...Western investors would be less keen to direct capital to them...

...And in the second volume of her memoirs, Lady Thatcher added up a slightly different hypothetical list—the USA, Japan, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and possibly Russia—to produce the following nightmare scenario: AMERICANS ARE ISOLATIONIST IN THE ABSTRACT OR WHEN INTERVENTION FAILS, BUT ARE RATIONAL AND PRUDENT INTERVENTIONISTS WHEN THE MATTER IS PUT TO THE TEST...

...Maybe we should even count it twice...

...when they split, it is useless...

...That was always the underlying bargain in NATO, but Western Europe, in the grip of short-termism, now sees less need for protection...

...and the new structure embodying a "European defense identity" would share equal influence...

...Except for the American forces, Western armies can no longer play an independent military role...

...to the international trading system, that it does now...

...ther ideas for reforming NATO were more realistic, and indeed some are still on the agenda...

...Such a superpower coalition would still be militarily head-and-shoulders above any potential rival or combination of rivals, and it would represent a share of world trade and productive capacity similar to that enjoyed by the U.S...

...These countries are now better markets for American goods and capital and lesser threats to the regional peace, offering smaller anxieties for American diplomacy and fewer entangling invitations to intervene...

...and "Europe" must remain united in the Atlantic alliance—indeed, that alliance must become a much deeper and more extensive relationship, what Mr...

...Both decisions were routinely described as "historic" by headline-writers and television anchor-persons...

...We sometimes understate the revolutionary character of that change...

...As Adrian Karatnycky of Freedom House points out, even the mere prospect of NATO membership has altered political behavior for the better in the applicant countries...

...And insofar as they harbor ambitions to restore a Russian sphere of interest in Central and Eastern Europe, it is such ambitions that are a threat to peace and stability down the line...

...For the logic of the French fears is wholly reasonable...

...Indeed, NATO is already in Bosnia, and its operations there receive assistance from Hungary...

...here would Russia fit into this picture...

...It is true that there is no "clear and present danger" to justify expansion...

...It is the policy NATO actually pursued for the first few years of the Bosnian conflict...

...There is no military reason whatsoever for a European defense identity...

...And some localities, if not entire countries, would succumb to civil wars and irridentist struggles such as have already disfigured many of the former Soviet republics...

...AND THE WE REMAIN PRED•' he 80-19 vote by the U.S...

...Senate to endorse the admission t of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO took place in the same week as the European Union heads of government voted to launch Europe's single currency, the Euro...

...And if not NATO, what...

...Senate had rejected NATO enlargement...

...And as we shall see below, the consequences of such division for the West's position in the wider world might well be disastrous...

...Although the U.S...

...and they have a less parochial view of world politics than many West Europeans who have succumbed to a post-Maastricht gastrointestinal obsession with their own internal affairs...

...There are international bodies which could mediate some of the lesser conflicts: the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe is explicitly given that responsibility, and the European Union is always itching to show it can play a Big Power role...

...What makes such challenges more threatening is that the U.S...

...Some of those ideas—notably, dissolution and "standing pat" —were never likely to be implemented...

...their geographical vulnerability persuades them to place a higher value on alliance cohesion...

...By any standards, this is an increase in the defense spending of our NATO allies...

...For NATO would have been unlikely to leap over its next-door neighbors to intervene in Central Asia or North Africa or farther afield...

...But how will the West allay the latter concern...

...If none of these seems to threaten the European peace very urgently at present, that is in part because the existence of NATO makes any such threat futile and even counter-productive...

...Judged in the proper long perspective, the induction of countries like Poland into an alliance in which the dominant member is the U.S...

...In a sense, NATO today is Europe's defense...

...Yet they did last time, as National Review pointed out...

...Army is a federal agency...

...That in turn has made them more attractive venues for foreign investment...

...To be sure, it was eventually abandoned, partly because of the "CNN factor" (i.e., Western public opinion cannot tolerate innocent people being raped, tortured, and murdered in full view if it seems that something could be done about it...

...or an independent superpower is bound to develop independent interests...

...The most likely destinations for any NATO force are Eastern Europe and the Balkans...

...NATO expansion is a firm but implicit warning that this is unacceptable to the countries concerned and to the West...

...And, to be sure, both will have serious consequences in the short- and even medium-term...

...Other East European countries expect to be admitted over time as they meet the military and political criteria for entry...

...The East Europeans do not believe history has ended...

...If NATO were to dissolve—even if it were to be replaced by some European collective defense organization such as a beefed-up Western European Union—it would invite chaos as every irridentist faction sought to profit from the sudden absence of the main guarantor of European stability...

...is not even a member...

...And during the interim period, there would have been strong institutional pressures on the East Europeans to identify their economic and trading interests with "Europe" rather than with an Atlantic bloc...

...If the Russians were asked to join in an intervention, as in Bosnia, then the former Soviet satellites would be horrified, perhaps to the point of resistance...

...For the Euro points toward the chimera of a European superpower independent of (and perhaps rivaling) America, whereas NATO enlargement suggests that the future will continue to be a united Atlantic alliance under American leadership...

...All these important gains would have been put at risk if the U.S...

...It would have encouraged neo-isolationist opinion in the U.S...

...The case for a modest defense build-up is independent of NATO expansion—and may even be strenghtened by it, if our allies are thus induced to hike defense spending even modestly...

...Beedham calls "a standing alliance...

...sounds a powerful rhetorical question...

...but a nuclear-armed and potentially unstable Russia is still in the game...

...True, the Soviet threat is gone...

...will probably remain the single most powerful state, it will be less powerful than various possible anti-American combinations of two or more states—especially if one of those states is China which, in the Economist's view, will be only marginally less potent than Uncle Sam...

...That might humiliate a key group of friendly Russians, and it might not be consistent with U.S...

...The course of the Cold War, when the U.S...

...But prudence—which is the virtue in foreign policy—suggests that we should prepare for eventualities we cannot entirely foresee...

...And the EU only made itself look ridiculous when it attempted to halt the Bosnian conflict in its relatively early stages when a decisive intervention might have succeeded...

...This approach would Nve turned Eastern Europe into a turbulent no-man's-land by forswearing any willingness to intervene if the region should erupt into war or civil war...

...The Kremlin, let alone the Duma, would presumably be more concerned at NATO going into Eastern Europe than at Eastern Europe going into NATO...

...ven if that list exhausted its gains, enlargement would still E be a prudent and beneficial policy...

...An organization in which one member occupies a position of undisputed leadership is naturally more harmonious than one in which leadership is a matter of doubt and thus a source of constant squabbling...

...The American Spectator • June 1998 As for dealing with a revived Russian threat, there is no military alliance in sight other than NATO that could do the job...

...That is why such moderate opponents of NATO expansion as Brent Scowcroft and Sam Nunn were wrong to argue that the applicant countries should join the European Union before joining NATO...

...And as Madeleine Albright pointed out at the time, it is not in America's interests to subordinate the critical security interests of NATO to the decisions of another institution of which the U.S...

...This objection also ignores the fact that not merely the increase in—but the entire-ty of—the military spending of the new NATO members will be devoted to fighting alongside American troops rather than against them...

...Which brings us to the policy of expanding NATO...

...That has led some French observers to fear the rise of an Anglo-Polish-American bloc that would resist a "Twin Pillars" NATO and lobby for an alliance built firmly around American leadership...

...Still, these are seductive arguments...

...In theory, NATO last month could have dissolved, expanded, or embarked on some other course entirely—and there are numerous ideas for "a new role for NATO" buzzing around in alliance bonnets and (covertly) in some anti-alliance bonnets...

...4% 28 June 1998 • The American Spectator...

...These opposing possibilities emerge in the extraordinary flux of post–Cold War politics in which NATO has lost its traditional role as the main defense against Communism...

...would be prey to an unending series of such controversies...

...but fortunately the "Westernizers" are prepared to accept the halfway-house of the Partnership for Peace and the Founding Act—for the moment...

...Or should NATO grow an economic identity in the form of a free-trading Atlantic economic community...

...Needless to say, no such spending hikes are on the agenda of any European politician...

...And a permanent Atlantic alliance would mean a safer world...

...They wish Russia to be one of the senior partners in a pan-Western alliance and feel rejected by the current limited NATO enlargement...

...And this is a vital consideration in an organization like NATO which may have to respond promptly and decisively to a military threat...

...The most canvassed item is that NATO should go "out of area" where, after all, most of the world's most dangerous conflicts now occur...

...Quite apart from the sociological law that says organizations never go out of business even if their main aim has been achieved (the only exception being a slightly ominous one, the Committee for the Free World, which Midge Decter closed down after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact), NATO's essential aim has not been permanently achieved...

...As one British soldier memorably told a National Review correspondent: "Our governments have spent billions of pounds giving us the best equipment and the best training...

...Just why the West needs to consolidate has been explained recently by such disparate voices as Margaret Thatcher and the Economist magazine...

...But there was another reason too: the recognition among soldiers and politicians that NATO would eventually atrophy if people thought it could or would do nothing about the kinds of conflict most likely to occur in post–Cold War Europe...

...to overcome much greater divisions and suspicions to forge NATO in the first place...

...It will certainly not wield the influence in international organizations and arrangements, ranging from the U.N...

...will no longer hold the position of unique unipolar dominance that it enjoys today...

...Senate has so far ratified only the admission of the first round of entrants...

...After all, it was a very similar threat from the Soviet Union that persuaded the West Europeans and the U.S...

...Such ideas are very fashionable at present in the European Union, notably in Paris and Brussels, but they have certain obvious drawbacks...

...Fears that NATO expansion will humiliate the Russians and drive them into a foreign policy of permanent opposition to American interests are wildly overstated...

...It is also true that our feckless European allies, far from increasing defense expenditure, are cutting it...

...We have it on the word of General Lebed (no softie) that NATO expansion causes him no nightmares...