NATO and American Leadership
nato and American Leadership The Senate will likely vote in the next couple of weeks on the enlargement of NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The votes are there, and NATO...
...Here are a few unambiguous reasons why we should all be comfortable, even enthusiastic, about NATO enlargement...
...Americans ought to be gratified that, despite the increasingly feckless leadership of the Clinton administration, these countries want to join our alliance...
...But the second course—the "European solution"—is a myth that, if seriously pursued, would also lead to tragic results...
...Lest we forget, in the Cold War these countries were enslaved to Soviet imperialism...
...Ronald Reagan called on Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" in Berlin...
...Many of the critics of NATO enlargement argue that peace in Central and Eastern Europe can be preserved through arms-control agreements, the strengthening of economic ties, the enhancing of communications, and the integration of peoples and societies across national boundaries...
...First, what's being expanded—and strengthened— is an American-led alliance that has successfully kept the peace in Europe for fifty years and can help keep it for another fifty...
...But let's pretend they really are undecided, ambivalent, and "uncomfortable...
...Some have argued that it is more important to get the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs into the European Union than to get them into NATO...
...Expanding NATO is only one vehicle for such leadership, but it is an important one and deserves enthusiastic support...
...They don't think membership in the European Union is a substitute, and they're right...
...or we place our faith in the Europeans' ability to maintain peace themselves through such institutions as the European Union...
...The more we delay, the more we cast doubt on the firmness of our moral and strategic commitments in Europe...
...There are two alternatives to extending the sphere of American leadership into Central and Eastern Europe: Either we permit a return to the bloody competition for that strategic corridor that has led to two world wars in this century...
...The second great virtue of NATO is that it remains, at heart, a security alliance...
...The preservation of peace, and the enjoyment of its benefits, depends ultimately on keeping predominant military power in our hands and the hands of our friends...
...Their enthusiasm and commitment will make the alliance—and America's role in the world— stronger...
...Perhaps the greatest virtue of the NATO alliance is precisely that it is a U.S.-led alliance and, therefore, not dependent on the realization of assorted Eurofantasies...
...They're wrong...
...Conservatives especially believed it was a proper American goal to try to free them and their peoples from that awful tyranny...
...Finally, enlarging NATO to include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic—and, in the coming years, other Central and Eastern European countries—is a moral as well as a self-interested act...
...Enlarging NATO means extending not only American military leadership—a worthy goal in itself—but also the power and influence of American principles into a part of Europe that in this century has known neither much peace nor much political freedom...
...What many Europeans—and, unfortunately, some American senators—fail to recognize is that the success of European integration, such as it is, has been possible only because of the protective umbrella of American security guarantees...
...NATO expansion is the logical and moral follow-on to Reagan's success...
...In Europe today, as in Asia and the Middle East, there is no alternative to American leadership...
...The Poles and others believe getting into NATO is essential not only to their security but also to their political and economic development...
...Whatever gains have been made along these lines in the past decade have been possible only because the world's underlying security structure has been safeguarded by the United States and its allies...
...Even the Russian government, which has complained about NATO enlargement, understands the value of a U.S.-led security system in Europe and would fear American withdrawal from the continent more than NATO enlargement...
...We need to take those commitments seriously—which means, incidentally (or not so incidentally)—increasing our defense budget so that our commitments are backed by real and not imaginary power...
...But let us not be deluded by phony alternatives...
...The votes are there, and NATO expansion will almost certainly be approved...
...American leadership is the central issue in the NATO enlargement debate...
...The cementing of new alliances shows the continuing vitality of American principles at a time when those principles remain under assault both at home and abroad...
...After a half-century of seeking the liberation of this part of Europe, do we now turn down their request for inclusion in our Western system of peace and freedom...
...Now they have been freed, thanks to American and NATO perseverance, and they ask to join us as a way of ensuring they cannot be enslaved or invaded again...
...In opposing NATO's enlargement, they ask us to share their dream of the inevitable peaceful consequences of "globalization...
...Take the United States out of the equation, and we're right back where we started, with European great powers jostling for pre-eminence on the continent and, eventually, resorting to the ultimate arbiter in such competitions: war...
...Although it has also been a vehicle for strengthening Western principles, it is fundamentally about the business of war and peace...
...Thanks, but we'll pass...
...Do we leave them to hang uncertainly and precariously in a no-man's-land that has always featured so much turmoil and destruction...
...To choose the first would be a tragic error, truly unforgivable in light of all we have learned over these past hundred years...
...The Senate should vote to ratify NATO enlargement now...
...It's a pretty transparent ploy: They know they don't have the votes to defeat enlargement, so delay is their only option...
...But a few senators are trying to postpone the vote for several months on the grounds that they are "uncomfortable voting when so many of the purposes and assumptions of NATO enlargement remain either ambiguous or contradictory...
...What the world needs today is not a New Age, magic-carpet ride to universal peace, but the strengthening of an old-fashioned security alliance with a proven record of preserving the peace and making possible the prosperity we now enjoy...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 26
