Defending Eastern Europe

National Review, May 27, 1991 by Peter W. Rodman

IN MID MARCH, while Poland's Lech Walesa was winding up a successful state visit to the U.S., his Czechoslovakian counterpart, Vaclav Havel, was paying a visting to NATO headquarters near Brussels, asking the Western Allies to strengthen their security ties with the new eastern European democracies.

Both events were milestones in what has been one of the most triumphant successes of Western policy in the postware period--the liberation of Eastern Europe. But the juxtaposition also points to a strange feature of the Bush Administration's diplomacy: its long reticence on the subject of Eastern European security.

It is strange because the Administration was, for so long, far ahead of the curve on Eastern Europe. Two years ago, in a landmark speech in Hamtramck, Michigan, President Bush called attention to the promising trend in the region and declared a forceful U.S. policy of promotion what later unfolded in dramatic fashion. Ever since Hamtramck--including in important presidential visits to Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague--the Administration has regularly and eloquently made clear its commitment to democracy and prosperity in the region. Yet hardly ever did one find a similar explicit endorsement of the security or national independence of the newly liberated nations.

History records with painful redundancy how pivotal the security of Eastern Europe has been to the stability of the whole European system in this benighted century. Yet at a truly formative moment in the evolution of a new European order we have not articulated a theory of how the safety of these new democracies is to be assured. How will Soviet reintervention be deterred? Where do the European order we have not articulated a theory of how the safety of these new democracies is to be assured. How will Soviet reintervention be deterred? Where do the Eastern Europeans really fit in the new European balance of power? What relationship do we see between their security and NATO's?

Building for the Future

IT WOULD be absurd to claim that their security is at this moment in danger, in view of the collapse of the Soviet position, militarily and politically, in Europe. But we are supposedly building for the long term, and it would be a mistake to evade such questions. The ominous uncertainties of the Soviet internal evolution speak for themselves (and figured prominently in Havel's plea to NATO in Brussels).

In fairness, the Administration can point to several factors for which it is wholly or partly responsible:

--First and foremost, the Eastern European democracies are primary beneficiaries of the overall balance of power in Europe that is assured by NATO's continued cohesion and the continued U.S. commitment to remain militarily and politically strong in Europe. This is true, and crucial. It is no accident that the new democracies in the East are strong advocates of an American military presence in Europe.

--The President's March 1990 Report on the National Security Strategy of the United States spoke (elliptically) of Eastern Europe's "self-determination and independence" and warned that "we expect the Soviet Union to continue to repudiate in deeds as well as words all right and pretext to intervene in the affairs of East European states." The President also offered expanded military-to-military contacts between the U.S. and the Eastern Europeans, as a way of "helping the military officers of these states establish a professional identify independent of their roles in the Warsaw Pact."

--The Declaration of the NATO Summit last July in London invited the Eastern Europeans to expand their diplomatic and military contacts with NATO. While the Soviets received the same offer, it was, in effect, another way to begin to wean the defense establishments of the Eastern European countries away from their Warsaw Pact connections and to assert, subtly, a collective Alliance interest in their defense endeavors.

--Soviet troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe are the subject of bilateral agreements with the relevant countries, and the Western powers have no particular standing to "enforce" them. However, the November 1990 multilateral treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) reinforces the Soviet retrenchment, first of all by the severe reductions imposed on Soviet military equipment in the region, especially battle tanks, other armored vehicles, and artillery. In addition, the CFE treaty's "sufficiency" rule imposes a ceiling on Soviet forces as a proportion of forces in the region, and its elaborate verification provisions make surprise attacks much more difficult.

--The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the 34-nation conclave that has promoted human rights and military "confidence-building measures," is now expanding its institutional role in such areas as mediation of disputes. The dangerous ethnic instabilities reappearing within and amount Eastern European countries might conceivably be eased by such an international mechanism--which at the very least can pre-empt any future claim by Moscow to assert a tutelary rule in the region's affairs.