The Danger of NATO Expansion

...Chrétien opined that Clinton's motive was not any "raison d'état" but "short-term political reasons, to win the next election," because "the politicians sell their votes...

...But this repeats the error of hinging Russia policy exclusively on one individual...

...Moreover, it is bound to promote insecurity, not security...

...His hard bargaining earned him the admiration of NATO Secretary General Javier Solana—and attacks at home from reformists no less than nationalists...

...Such arguments heighten Russian security concerns and exacerbate nationalistic resentments...

...The open letter of the 46 may be right in saying the European Union—an entity that suffices for Sweden, Finland and Austria—would be a more logical vehicle for linking the Eastern Europeans to the West...

...His latest book, Russia's Transformation: Snapshots of a Crumbling System—much of "which first appeared in The New Leader—will be published this fall...

...The following day a group of 46 former Senators, Cabinet officers, ambassadors, arms control officials, and academic foreign policy experts lined up by Susan Eisenhower (currently president of the Washington Center for Political and Strategic Studies) issued an open letter to President Clinton calling NATO expansion "a policy error of historic proportions...

...By whom...

...To the Russians, the contention that enlarging NATO will end the division of Europe is highly disingenuous...

...Implications for our major Cold War adversary have not drawn serious attention...

...Attack today...

...There is no logical stopping point until the Baltic states and the Ukraine are part of the alliance...

...According to his former National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake, the bee was put in Clinton's bonnet by Poland's ex-President Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic's President Vaclav Havel at the opening of the Holocaust Museum in April 1993...

...The fate in store for Russia," writes the eminent Russian political scientist A. M. Migranyan, "is to drain to the dregs the bitter cup of defeat and humiliation...

...The most compelling case for approving NATO expansion is that since the decision has already been taken and promises have been made, it would be a grave embarrassment to U.S...

...An intelligence agent by profession and a Middle-Easternist by specialty, Primakov has managed to serve both Gorbachev and Yeltsin...

...None of its potential effects on Russia seem to have been given any weight when President Clinton offhandedly floated his new NATO policy four years ago...

...The doubts about widening NATO's net that are finally being expressed revolve mainly around its implications for the American commitment to Europe—its cost, its effectiveness, its obligation to defend faraway countries many Americans couldnot locate on a map...

...But this should hardly be the reason for blind confirmation of the White House's dubious undertaking...

...But once it became apparent that President Bill Clinton would probably prevail at NATO's July 8 Madrid Summit, and that the U.S...

...Indeed, the Russian military is already considering a first-use doctrine, an extreme that even the Soviets never openly embraced, and the Duma is now unlikely to ratify the pending Start II treaty, let alone agree to future arms control steps...

...security guarantees...

...The freewheeling Luzhkov rails about the sellout of national interests and presses at every opportunity for the revival of Russian influence in the former Soviet security zone...

...world leadership if the Senate were to say no to the plan...

...Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser and a principal architect of NATO expansion, makes no bones about this...

...Regardless of party, they regard the Organization's eastward march as a betrayal of assurances given to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1990 when he acceded to the unification of Germany...

...They stress that it does not in any way restrict Russia's freedom of action, that it guarantees neither nuclear weapons nor NATO troops will be deployed in the new member countries...

...Certainly the arguments advanced for what has nevertheless become an obsessive Administration objective are contradictory...

...As long as Yeltsin stays in charge, Moscow's reactions may remain restrained —especially if he feels he is getting a quid pro quo in the form of acceptance into international economic organizations and financial support for his ongoing conflict with the Duma...

...That logic, though, has a whiff of blackmail...

...The open letter of the 46 asserts: "Russia does not now pose a threat to its Western neighbors, and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are not in danger...

...How far east would NATO have to extend to allay the fears of formerly Communist and Soviet countries...

...Robert V. Daniels is Professor Emeritus of History at the University· of Vermont...

...Incredibly, the Clinton Administration's NATO démarche amounts to a total disconnect from its years of unconditional support for the Yeltsin government...

...No one at present considers Russia a military menace, any more than NATO, expanded or not, is a threat to Russia...

...On June 25,20 Senators from both parties, in a letter to the President, said: "The decision to extend U.S...

...Pro-Yeltsin Russian leaders and media lean heavily on these assertions, even though they clearly go beyond the Founding Act's intent...

...Receiving Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Moscow in April to conclude a "Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Formation of a New International Order," Yeltsin averred, "We are determining the fate of the 21 st century...

...It also seems to support the view of those who hold that the United States has a permanent need for a hegemonic role and a cold war enemy of whatever political coloration...

...Yet his leaving unmentioned the exclusion of Russia from the "common future of freedom and security" verged on the Orwellian...

...Surely security guarantees to these countries, along the lines of the discarded Partnership for Peace, should be sufficient...

...That Russia is no longer Communist does not seem to matter to them...

...Aileen McCabe of Canada's Southam Newspapers, reporting from Madrid, wrote that "Charges of U.S...

...it is less a military alliance and more an expression of the community of democratic nations...

...By expanding eastward" the Senators wrote, "are we not creating an incentive for Moscow to withhold its support for further strategic arms reductions and perhaps even develop an early first-use nuclear policy...

...need answers...

...The two likeliest presidential aspirants, General Aleksandr I. Lebed and Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, are already competing to play the anti-Western card...

...One hears undertones of isolationism here, suggestions that the whole NATO concept of American guarantees to Western Europe has outlived its usefulness in the postCold War world...

...deserves far more debate and circumspection than it has thus far received, regardless of whether one supports NATO expansion or not...

...Russian aspirations and objections," he says, "are motivated by residual interests that no longer have a place in Europe...

...If so, why the military structure...

...This portends bitter wrangling in the future over what was or was not agreed to...

...NATO expansion is further touted as a measure to strengthen emerging democracies and market economies...

...Then why put off would-be members whose democracy and markets need the most support...

...Those jocular remarks by the two ministers reflect the international cynicism about America's NATO reform...

...It could very well foster a "Weimar psychology" and produce the same atmosphere that set the stage after World War I for the vicious revival of German nationalism under the Nazis...

...After all, NATO's history is replete with accommodating dictatorships and aggressors (Portugal under Antonio Salazar, Greece under the Colonels, Turkey when it invaded Cyprus...

...He rose to candidate member of the Politburo under the former, and he ran foreign intelligence for the latter until the promotion to his present post a year and a half ago...

...Skeptics, struck by the media's lack of interest in the subject, seemed to feel it would be futile to raise their voices...

...But it is the symbolism that seems to count most: In the minds of the East-Central European candidates for NATO inclusion, the alliance is still directed against Russia...

...And why not include Russia, as Michael Lind advocated in "A Plea for a New Global Strategy" (NL, June 30...

...The key figure in Moscow at this point is Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, one of the wiliest diplomats the world has seen since Talleyrand...

...The main difference is that President Boris N. Yeltsin's government has tried to put the best face possible on the inevitable by negotiating for whatever conditions it could get, while the Communists and other oppositionists denounce the effort as a surrender of Russia's national security...

...A common concern stressed in the letter of the 20 Senators to the President and in the open letter of the 46 is the impediment to arms control efforts if Russia is intimidated by our NATO game plan...

...But the Western Europeans are wary of subsidizing East European economies, and see NATO membership as a cheaper, if largely symbolic, alternative...

...His is a polite way of indicating the risk of pursuing apolicy that writes off Russia as a cooperative international player...

...They went on to list 10 specific questions they "believe...

...In the U.S., the concessions he won that will bring a Russian voice into NATO's counsels have prompted conservatives such as Henry Kissinger to reject the entire deal as an unacceptable dilution of the alliance...

...Yeltsin and Primakov have tried to get around the negativism by putting their own spin on the Paris "Founding Act...

...The signatories included exSenators Sam Nunn and Mark Hatfield, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze, former Ambassadors to Moscow Jack Matlock and Arthur Hartman, and former CIA Director Stansfield Turner...

...From their perspective, it merely moves the dividing line further east and implies that they do not belong in the picture...

...The Danger of NATO Expansion By Robert V. Daniels The Clinton Administration's determination to enlarge the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by taking in three former Soviet satellites—Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic—may be this country's most serious foreign policy miscalculation since the Vietnam War...

...The Administration clearly envisages this, regardless of its inflammatory impact on the political situation in Russia...

...American ethnic politics then fed the notion—a point inadvertently underscored at the close of the Madrid Summit during an exchange between Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Belgium's Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, who thought the microphones were turned off...

...Senate would have to vote on amending the treaty as well as paying the freight, reservations began surfacing...

...The President of Estonia, for example, says Russia is still the "evil empire...

...Sergei Rogov, Director of the USA Institute in Moscow, warns: "It is time for Washington to understand that a course toward the isolation of Moscow can lead to a long-term geopolitical conflict...

...NATO's expansion will "dismantle blocs of power" and "erase the artificial line drawn across Europe by Stalin after World War II," said President Clinton in Madrid...

...The end of Cold War I was achieved under Presidents George Bush and Gorbachev at their Malta Summit in 1989, and proven in the Gulf War...

...Prior to the May 27 NATO Summit in Paris and the June 20 G-7-plus-Russia meeting in Denver, there was little public debate in the United States about the pros and cons of expanding the military alliance...

...Similarly, the Administration maintains that NATO is no longer a threat to Russia because its nature has changed...

...He might have added that anticipation of Russian obstreperousness could become a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...A few American proponents of NATO enlargement speak candidly of taking advantage of Russia's momentary weakness to push as far east as possible, implying that the Cold War is only in remission...

...He went on to protest, "Someone is always dragging us toward a unipolar world and wanting to dictate unilaterally, but we want multipolarity...

...The Communist-leaning journal Pravda-5 spoke for a wide band on the Russian political spectrum as it hailed Primakov's "independence" and the restoration of old Soviet ties with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya: "Moscow has begun to show signs of an awareness of its natural national interests, and like it or not, its policy is becoming more 'Orientalized.' In other words, Russia is turning toward the East...

...The gruff Lebed, confident NATO will not dare go beyond the three countries invited to join, calls the Paris charter "a scrap of paper" tossed to Yeltsin "so that the country's current authorities can save face before the people of Russia...

...True, rejection of the NATO amendments would be an embarrassment to the Clinton Administration...

...Duhaene, referring to the large Eastern European population in the U.S., joked that if the Romanians really wanted to get into NATO they should send over more immigrants too...

...Some Russian responses are already evident...

...In Russia itself, though, the reaction of political leaders to NATO expansion has been universally negative...

...NATO is amilitary alliance whosemembers are all committed to defending any one of them against attack...

...arrogance were bubbling everywhere...

...Although polls show that the average Russian has more tangible worries, the NATO issue has pushed all political elements in a nationalistic direction...

...Shortly before that Moscow royally entertained the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, AH Akbar Nategh-Nouri, in the mistaken assumption that the hardliner would be the next president of his country...

...Yeltsin cannot succeed himself in the year 2000, and the state of his health, marked by a pattern of periodic depression and withdrawal—in evidence again after the Denver economic meeting, according to some sources—may throw the Russian leadership up for grabs long before then...

...Expanding NATO declares a Cold War II against a currently weak adversary...