The Clinton administration's legislative strategy for NATO expansion is apparently to assert that all issues have been settled, despite perfunctory recent hearings involving only the Secretaries of State and Defense, and then press for a quick ratification vote in the Senate. Its hope evidently is to push the measure through the Senate while the country is still distracted by Iraq, and before what is likely to be a vigorous and searching debate on U.S. policy and troops in Bosnia. Regardless of the merits, if any, of NATO expansion, the administration's rationale for speedy action is incorrect. The plan to expand the Atlantic Alliance to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic involves five major issues that neither the administration nor, thus far, the Congress, has addressed seriously, let alone thoroughly:
As the Administration and the Senate move toward a vote, policy makers, the press, and the public would do well to explore these five issues, and consider whether a rapid vote on expansion allows adequate time for full consideration of the implications of all of them.
The Baltic Charter On January 16 the Clinton administration signed a security charter with the three Baltic countries link Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, that raises important questions yet to be addressed: What is the United States committed to do with and for the Baltic states? Have the U.S. given them a security guarantee? If not, what is the purpose of the Charter and why was it signed by the President with such fanfare? Do the Balts believe that the United States is now committed to defending them under any and all circumstances? The administration asserts that the United States will work to secure NATO membership for the Baltic countries in the future. How? By when? Is this commitment binding on all future administrations? If Baltic membership in NATO is important, why are these countries not being admitted now? What qualifications do Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic possess that the Baltic countries lack? Why have the Western European members of NATO not signed the Baltic charter? If the Western Europeans reject Baltic membership in NATO, will the United States issue a unilateral security guarantee to these three countries? If not, how can the U.S. justify leaving them out of the Alliance and thereby redividing Europe? If the Balts do join NATO against Russian opposition, what are the Defense Department's plans for defending them? How much will this cost? Will American troops and nuclear weapons have to be deployed in these three countries? How many?
The Cost of Expansion The administration released a new estimate on February 23 that puts the total cost of bringing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic at $1.5 billion over ten years. The U.S., according to the administration, would pay 25 percent of the total. This stands in striking contrast to its estimate of last year, which was between $27 and $35 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office estimate, which was as high as $125 billion. How could the administration's estimate have dropped by 96 percent in only eight months? What are the political and military assumptions on which the new figure is based? What if other NATO members refuse to pay their share, as already stated by several NATO countries? If this is the estimate for three countries, what is the figure for the others - including the Baltic countries - that have been promised membership? What guarantee is there of avoiding a repetition of what has happened with Bosnia, where the Congress was given estimates far lower than what the costs have turned out to be? The figure of $1.5 billion first surfaced last December as the estimate at which a study was done by NATO itself arrived; but that study is classified. Will the administration make it public? The issue of the cost of adding Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO is part of a larger question, which is perhaps the central question for the post-Cold War American strategy: How can the United States simultaneously expand its military commitments and reduce its military budget? While the stay of the troops in Bosnia is being extended indefinitely and trouble is brewing in next-door Macedonia, and with the prospect of protracted, large-scale deployments in the Persian Gulf region to contain Saddam Hussein as well as potentially huge responsibilities in the Pacific because of the surging growth of China, the defense budget is the only federal program on steady deadline. The forecast for a balanced budget depends on the continuation of this trend. When the crunch comes, which will be discarded the domestic commitment to fiscal balance, or the international responsibilities to which the administration has committed the United States over the last five years? Or will taxes be raised and/or social programs reduced, to pay for both?
The European Union The original impetus for expanding NATO was the belief that the formerly Communist countries of Central Europe could not hope for membership in the European Union (EU), which all of them prize more highly than NATO membership. Enlargement of the EU is far more relevant than NATO to the goals of stability, democracy, and prosperity that the Clinton administration asserts NATO expansion is designed to achieve. Now the EU has committed itself to expansion to the east, and has begun accession talks with Portland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as well as with Estonia. In stark contrast to the strong opposition of all politically active Russians to the expansion of NATO, moreover, Russia supports the growth of the EU. In view of all this, three highly respected former officials, former Senators Howard Baker and Sam Nunn and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, published an article in The New York Times on February 4 that advocated admitting new countries to NATO in conjunction with their gaining membership in the European Union -- and warning against making the second an automatic guarantee of the first. Given the experience and stature of these three, and the logic underlying the proposal, it would seem appropriate for the Senate to hear from them directly, and to consider their proposal seriously, before acting on NATO expansion.
NATO's Changing Mission The Washington Post of February 22 reports a debate within NATO between United States and the European members over the Alliance's principal mission in the future. The Clinton administration is reported to be asserting that henceforth NATO's main business ought to be stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, in pursuit of which NATO's activities should extend far beyond Europe. The European attitude toward this proposal apparently ranges from skepticism to outright opposition. Before deciding to expand it, the Congress and the country surely ought to be clear about what NATO's post-Cold War mission actually is, a clarity that the is now lacking. In the worldwide battle against weapons proliferation, the country whose cooperation is perhaps most important, as the most recent crisis with Iraq demonstrates, is Russia. If global nonproliferation is to be NATO's post-Cold War mission, therefore, NATO expansion ought to be evaluated according to how effective it is likely to be enlisting Russian cooperation on this issue. Can the administration certify that the expansion it is promoting will make such a cooperation more likely? Here, as with cost of expansion, a larger issue arises: preventing proliferation is only one of several missions that the Clinton administration has, at various times, designated for NATO in the wake of the Cold War. Sometimes the Alliance's purpose is advertised as promoting Western-style political systems - "an HMO for democracy" in the words of a former Reagan Defense Department official Fred Ikle; at other times it is said to be a mechanism for containing, or preventing, Bosnia-style ethnic conflict. The Central European countries are clear that they wish to join because they believe that Alliance is aimed against Russia, something that the administration denies. Which of these is NATO's primary mission? Can it be all of them? If so, can a single organization, and one with a steadily shrinking budget and a dwindling complement of manpower, carry them all out?
What Comes Next? An Unhappy Parallel with the Iraq Crisis In this most recent Iraq crisis, relations between Congress and the
administration followed a distinctive pattern, which has implications for
NATO expansion. Initially, there was strong bipartisan support for confronting
Saddam Hussein. When administration officials came to Capitol Hill to explain
their plans, however, the Members discovered that they lacked plausible
answers to obvious questions, the most important of which was: after the
bombs have fallen, what comes next? NATO expansion has the same problem:
to the question of what comes after the inclusion of the three invited
countries, what comes next?, the administration has never offered plausible
answers, or even any real answers at all. Specifically, it has never said
how many other countries will be admitted, according to what schedule,
by what criteria, and at what cost. Nor has it said who will pay how much
if the costs turn out not be to as trivial as the administration maintains,
a particularly pertinent issue because the British, French and German governments
are all on record as saying that they will pay nothing for NATO
expansion. Nor, finally, has the administration presented a plan for addressing
the seemingly insoluble problem of Baltic membership -- or even suggested
that it has one. Return to Global Beat Home Page Nuclear Watch | East Asian Security | Economic & Monetary Union | NATO Expansion | Nuclear Weapons and Proliferation | U.S. Defense Policy | Publications | Events | |
