NATO expansion: dividing the house of Europe?

Christian Century, June 4, 1997 by Alan Geyer

The Clinton administration's aggressive promotion of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe carries enormous risks, including the undermining of democratic prospects in Russia, the wrecking of nuclear arms accords, the resumption of divisive bloc alignments in Europe, the crippling of the most promising institutions for European security and cooperation, and the swelling of the military budgets of the U.S. and economically fragile new NATO members.

The Helsinki summit in March, hailed by the White House as a diplomatic triumph, papered over serious U.S.-Russian tensions on this issue by promising to "minimize the potential consequences of this disagreement." In May Russia reluctantly agreed to the NATO expansion, negotiating an agreement on establishing a joint NATO-Russian council on security issues and a pledge that NATO would not deploy nuclear weapons on the new members' territory. On July 7-8 a NATO summit in Madrid is set to extend invitations to a first wave of new members: the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and perhaps others.

Two weeks prior to the Madrid summit, a church summit will be held June 23-29 in Graz, Austria: the Second European Ecumenical Assembly, which will be clouded by concern over the imminence of NATO expansion. As an ecumenical delegate to the first such assembly in Basel in 1989, I was and remain profoundly affected by that assembly's vision of "a common European house." Church leaders in the U.S., whose policies are most fateful for Europe, have yet to address the problematics of NATO expansion.

Whence comes this dubious policy that, by insider accounts, has become the new litmus test of political loyalty within the Clinton administration?

Political, ethnic and bureaucratic factors seem to account for it, rather than any thorough policy analysis in the councils of diplomacy, some of whose personnel seem as troubled about the policy as any outsiders. While some of the impetus came from Germans anxious to extend NATO's front lines beyond their country's eastern borders, the German public is far from united on this policy. Nor is there any evidence of heavy pressure from other NATO governments or from their publics.

With the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the very rationale for NATO was undone. Some strategists, for whom NATO had defined their careers, set about to imagine a new mission for NATO: expansion to former Warsaw Pact satellites. To some Americans with ethnic roots in Eastern European nations, NATO expansion seemed to promise vindication, if not vengeance. Some slowly recovering cold warriors in the U.S. saw such a policy as an opportunity to stick it to the Russians. In the campaign shenanigans of 1996, with some Republicans scolding Bill Clinton for seeming to stall on NATO expansion, Clinton preempted Bob Dole by announcing a commitment to early action. And in selecting Madeleine Albright--a Czech by birth and political sensitivities--Clinton elevated a true believer in pushing NATO frontiers to the East.

While the Clinton administration insistently tries to sever the linkage between NATO "enlargement" and nuclear issues, many Russians understandably insist on the connection. At Helsinki, Yeltsin promised both to support ratification (at last) of the START II (Strategic Arms Reduction) Treaty he and President Bush signed in Moscow back in January 1993, and to accept the proposed outline of a new START III accord. These two agreements would steeply reduce strategic nuclear weapons in each country by two thirds of the numbers permitted by the START I Treaty of 1992--or down to 2,000-2,500.

But approval in the Russian parliament, or Duma, is now much more in doubt on account of NATO "enlargement." Moreover, the impoverishment and disarray of Russia's conventional forces have increased the reluctance of the Duma and the military to dismantle nuclear weapons, the sole remaining emblems of superpower status. This reluctance is made more perilous by implicit nuclear threats by extremists and by the instability of Russian command and control over nuclear arms. The perception by the Republican Senate (and Jesse Helms in particular) of these Russian difficulties will surely make Senate consent to further arms reductions extremely difficult.

The drive for NATO expansion risks frustrating the dream of what George Bush called "a Europe whole and free" and Mikhail Gorbachev termed "a common European home." The nations bordering directly on Russia (especially Ukraine and the Baltics) cannot be admitted to NATO without dangerously inflaming Russian insecurities. On the other hand, exclusion of those and some other Eastern European nations would freshly divide Europe between NATO "haves" and "have-nots."

An alternative European security policy is available: instead of perpetuating a cold-war institution like NATO, the U.S. and its allies could strengthen the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), headquartered in Vienna. It is an underdeveloped institution with universal European membership premised on the end of the cold war. The OSCE--reinforced by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 that eliminated all such U.S. and Soviet weapons from Europe, and by the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty of 1990 that set limits on five classes of ground and air weapons--offers perhaps the most auspicious framework for promoting both common security and democratization in Europe.