A Plea for a New Global Strategy
LIND, MICHAEL
LOOKING PAST NATO A Plea for a New Global Strategy By Mchaeil Lind I often wonder how many American foreign policy makers were confused for life by those elementary school maps—the ones...
...Michael Lind, a previous NEW LEADER contributor, is author of Up from Conservatism and The Next American Nation...
...All of these are developments which should be welcomed by us as providential...
...From an American perspective, the ideal Pax Atlantica (a) would not alienate post-imperial Russia and (b) would unite the U. S. and Canadian economies with the European market...
...A friendly Russia might provide a substitute...
...And in the unlikely event that Russia does become a threat to its western neighbors, then an anti-Russian alliance will quickly coalesce, no doubt with an acronym of its own...
...erred in neglecting to condition its Marshall Plan aid and military protection of Europe on the formation of an integrated Atlantic common market...
...With the exception of Israel, the same is true of America's allies in the Middle East...
...A "social TAFTA" would give Jesse Helms conniptions—think of Republican hearings on a common Atlantic Social Charter!— but the project might invigorate the American labor movement...
...it was an ideocratic regime that had to continually incorporate new countries into its bloc or lose its legitimacy...
...trade and investment with Europe, unlike the U.S.Asian pattern, is already quite balanced and offers few causes for complaint...
...There might be additional benefits of an American military relationship with Russia...
...On the other hand, it might not have made sense...
...All this is speculative, of course...
...France, supported by Germany, wants a European to command the NATO Mediterranean fleet...
...It goes without saying that for a TAFTA to be feasible, NAFTA would have to be revised or repealed...
...But who would have thought in 1950 that West Germany would become America's most reliable Cold War ally...
...a case can be made that the U.S...
...it will be difficult enough to get the European Union to form a common market with the United States and Canada, without a merger between high-wage Europe and impoverished Mexico being part of the bargain...
...Translation: In our European (or rather Western Eurasian) policy we should propose not what our interests counsel, but what we predict our former European Cold War allies will conclude it is in their interests for us to be permitted to do...
...America's Cold War allies in Asia without exception were despotisms (even if some, like South Korea and Taiwan, have become fledgling democracies since the end of the Cold War...
...If the U. S. is making a mistake in shutting Russia out of a pan-European security framework, it is also making a mistake in not pressing for inclusion in the institutions that govern the European economy...
...As long as the Soviet bloc menaced Western Europe, Britain, Germany and France had little choice but to be allies with one another, NATO or no NATO...
...The chances that this Administration will reassess the premises of its grand strategy, in Europe or elsewhere, are not promising...
...This bodes ill for American policy in the Middle East...
...If the containment of Russia is obsolete as a rationale for Clinton's NATO enlargement policy, the idea that adding new members to the organization will preserve European peace is simply a fallacy...
...In April, the Chinese government declared in public for the first time that the U.S...
...to support the formation of a neo-Carolingian economic empire...
...The real pattern of world politics is better symbolized by a Northern Hemisphere polar projection (sorry, the Southern Hemisphere is the object, not the subject, of history...
...When we look at the world from the appropriate perspective, it seems safe to predict that in the foreseeable future there will be much graver military and economic crises affecting U.S...
...hegemony in Europe through the refurbishment of NATO...
...Today's Russia not only lacks an animating revisionist ideology, but, shorn of territories and nations, is only slightly more populous than Japan...
...The logic of collective inaction, demonstrated by the Western Europeans during the Gulf and Balkan wars, will ensure that NATO, whatever its final dimensions, will be a paper alliance...
...The pattern of U.S...
...The only two countries that, as a result of geography, are both Asian and European powers are the United States and Russia...
...The United States cannot...
...Critics of this idea claim that it would turn NATO into a loose collective security organization like the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe or the Organization of American States...
...If this were really the case, then the logical policy would be the incorporation into an anti-Russian NATO of every European state, including Ukraine and the Baltic republics, if not Belarus...
...Shakespeare mistakenly gave Hungary a coastline in a play...
...Perhaps the next rival economic powerhouse we co-opt will be Costa Rica...
...The point of this excursus on cartography...
...When France, under the senile and deluded Charles de Gaulle, removed itself from NATO in 1964, the result was not Franco-German war...
...As a European named Bismarck once observed, God looks after fools, drunks and the United States of America...
...Today's European leaders know that America's Europhile foreign policy establishment cannot bring themselves to propose U.S...
...now Clinton wants to make Hungary a North Atlantic country in a treaty...
...Unfortunately, an American commitment to defend Bratislava is not going to keep the French and Germans from building up Chinese military power through trade and technological licensing agreements, nor will making the Bug River America's security perimeter persuade Europe's leaders to defer to U.S...
...Nor should the security dimension be forgotten...
...interests in Asia than in Europe...
...And the likely collapse of the project of European monetary union may push back the advent of European federalism, if it does not discredit the idea altogether...
...In the next century Russia will be dwarfed in everything but acreage by giant nations like the United States, China and India...
...withdrawal to force concessions from the Europeans, who then needed us to protect them...
...In fact, there are powerful arguments that it is not in America's selfish interest for Europe to achieve its goal of a single market...
...Our European policy ought to be subordinated to a coherent Eurasian policy whose goal is to prevent, among other bad things, a Sino-Russian revisionist alliance directed against the U.S...
...Nevertheless, we are told, we must protect the 400 million rich inhabitants of Western Europe against 140 million bankrupt Russians...
...Finally, a Europe, united or divided, that serves as the military and technological arsenal of China (a country with which Europeans have few or no natural tensions based on geography) will surely rank high among the nightmares of American strategists in the generation ahead...
...and though it is still militarily weak, its ambitions can be expected to grow with its economic and military capabilities...
...The danger is that Europe, as the world's largest single market, might be able to set the standards for world trade and industry in its own interest...
...Exactly...
...What does "consolidating democracy" mean, anyway...
...Is this NATO, or is it the Warsaw Pact reborn...
...Lacking any plausible military rationale, NATO is bound to wither as a genuine alliance, and by admitting every European and quasi-European country at once we can bring about NATO'S euthanasia in a way that will not drive offended Russians into an entente with China or other anti-American regimes...
...Be that as it may, with the end of the Cold War there is no longer any geostrategic rationale for the U.S...
...In fact, pre-1917 Russia was usually a status quo power when it came to the European order, limiting its expansion to its southern and eastern marches...
...Instead, the United States backs the immediate incorporation of only three new members—Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary...
...or better yet, by one of the late R. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic maps that show the Americas as what they are: lesser islands off the coastline of the EURASIAN WORLD-ISLAND (as Bucky might have put it...
...The expansion of NATO to which the Clinton Administration has committed American prestige rests on two rationales, one obsolete and the other false...
...The Clinton Administration, which has put little energy into promoting a TAFTA, may pour its political capital instead into enlarging NAFTA to include—Chile...
...and Canada as well as the major European countries had seats...
...Are "democratic" forces in Hungary to be given the right to summon in troops from "fraternal" NATO countries to help put down "undemocratic" forces...
...The goal of our European policy should therefore be a post-Cold War settlement in the Euro-Atlantic world that consolidates peace and prosperity in Europe and permits the United States to concentrate on the military and economic challenges of the Asia-Pacific world...
...A new generation of European leaders, including nationalist and populist politicians on both the Left and the Right who are less committed than their elders to the Eurofederalist ideal, will eventually come to power...
...A trans-Atlantic labor charter, if not likely, is at least possible, unlike the ignis fatuus of a global labor-law regime...
...The NATO mascot is, of course, the cod...
...Whoops...
...Our European allies have not objected to Clinton's push for NATO enlargement as much as they might have, because the project diverts attention from their own lack of plans for admitting the states of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (including Russia) to the European Union...
...disengagement from Europe even as a negotiating tactic...
...We are told that NATO expansion will "consolidate" democracy in the favored countries...
...Partial NATO expansion appears to be a fait accompli, unless the spirit of Henry Cabot Lodge animates enough Senators for the plan to be stopped and reconsidered —an embarrassing outcome that would not be in the national interest either...
...The obsolete rationale is the belief that the rump Russian state, currently weak and struggling to move toward democracy and a market economy, is a potential threat so dire that it must be contained by Western encirclement...
...Greece and Turkey did go to war with one another in the 1970s—but they were both members of NATO...
...If, as is arguably the case, the United States needs an intact and moderately strong Russian republic to serve as a potential counterweight to China, then it makes no sense to alienate Russia and drive it toward China by making Russia the unnamed enemy of the NATO alliance...
...position in the world...
...military should get out of Asia...
...While it seems unlikely that the United States would engage in direct military conflict with a federal Europe, the U.S...
...During the Cold War, it might have made sense for the United States to tolerate the formation of a separate European economic bloc as the price paid for trans-Atlantic security cooperation...
...Back in the days when that useful isolationist Mike Mansfield loomed large in the Senate, internationalist American presidents could use the threat of U.S...
...But since when was internal democracy a criterion for membership in NATO a geopolitical alliance...
...No, it didn't—the threat posed by the Soviet Union did...
...The conclusion is inescapable: Every European state, including Russia, should be admitted to NATO...
...It should be noted that we would find plenty of support in Eastern Europe and Russia for both TAFTA and super-NATO...
...LOOKING PAST NATO A Plea for a New Global Strategy By Mchaeil Lind I often wonder how many American foreign policy makers were confused for life by those elementary school maps—the ones that show the United States in the middle of everything, with "Europe" (including half of Russia) on the right and, on the left side, "Asia" (including the other half of Russia...
...If we are lucky, we may be saved from the folly of our European policies by the policies of the Europeans themselves...
...It will be objected that Germany and France have so far torpedoed proposals for a TAFTA, and that they would just as resolutely oppose admitting Russia to NATO...
...Sooner or later there is going to be a crisis in the distorted Pacific trading system, if only because the United States cannot function as the market of first resort for an export-oriented China, as it did for Japan and the Little Tigers (Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore...
...This is based on a misreading of history that sees Russian great-power imperialism, rather than Soviet ideology, as the source of Soviet expansionism...
...Our conflicts with our NATO allies over policy toward Nicaragua in the 1980s and over policy toward Cuba might turn out to have been auguries of much more serious disputes...
...NATO, we are often told, kept the peace in Europe for 40 years...
...The Soviet Empire was not Tsarist Russia in red, as unrealistic "realists" once argued...
...It can be argued that the secret logic of Clinton's European policy (the logic must be pretty secret indeed) is to prevent such Euro-American rivalries by preserving U.S...
...America's European policy ought to be a subordinate element of an American global strategy...
...Other Central and Eastern European states may be admitted to the NATO club in time, if they make sufficient progress toward "democracy...
...Will it destabilize democracy in the disfavored countries...
...Greece and Turkey were not expelled from NATO when they were ruled by generals and colonels...
...It follows that the two priorities of Washington in Europe should be the admission of Russia to NATO and the establishment of a TAFTA—a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area...
...Eastern Europeans who think that NATO membership is a stepping-stone to admission in the EU should ponder the example of Turkey...
...Turkey, too, might drift out of the American orbit in time...
...NATO membership is the booby prize offered to those who have been denied admission to the Western European economic club...
...It would be better if those informal rules were written by some transAtlantic body on which the U.S...
...interests in areas of common concern like the Middle East...
...The Europeans can afford to think of NATO expansion solely in terms of politics within their region...
...and Europe might find themselves arming and sponsoring opposing sides in the Middle East, Asia, even the Western hemisphere...
...The Germans and French are more worried about being invaded by Polish potatoes than by Russian soldiers...
...The Clinton Administration, having bombed Baghdad on behalf of the Emir of Kuwait and the Saudi monarchy, and having turned a blind eye to Turkish suppression of the Kurds, is in no position to lecture Eastern European republics on democracy and minority rights...
...China is just too big...
Vol. 80 • June 1997 • No. 11
