By Peter S. Rashish*
June 22, 2001
WASHINGTON -- -- President George Bush's inaugural visit to Europe last week had a certain "back to the future" quality about it. His insistence on sticking with his plan for a missile-defense system (now open to European and Russian participation) despite its technological uncertainties recalled President Reagan's commitment to his "Star Wars" missile shield plan. The well-intentioned, but broadly- worded joint U.S.-EU declaration supporting the launch of a new trade round at the World Trade Organization meeting in Qatar later this year could have been taken from the transatlantic dossier of Bush's immediate predecessor, Bill Clinton.
Most striking of all, the speech Bush gave at Warsaw University on Friday on NATO enlargement, while containing many noble goals, almost sounded like something his father could have said during his groundbreaking trip to Poland in 1989. Bush declared in Warsaw that "a new generation makes a new commitment: a Europe and an America bound in a great alliance of liberty...The bells of victory have rung. The Iron Curtain is no more. Now we plan and build the house of freedom, whose doors are open to all of Europe's peoples."
This sort of rallying cry to extend transatlantic institutions to the former Communist countries in Europe was crucial in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, or even before NATO had successfully admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999.
Now, however, these sweeping declarations raise many new concerns
which the U.S. Administration and its NATO allies will have to
answer in the coming months. First, the eventual membership in
NATO of the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia)
or Ukraine, while justifiable on moral, historical, and cultural
grounds, could transform the very
nature of NATO from a defensive alliance to a broader framework
for European cooperation.
Neither the Baltics nor Ukraine are defensible territory from attack in the way that the current members are. If indeed a transformation away from a defense alliance is underway, the question of Russian membership cannot be put off forever. President Bush, and his European allies, will have to articulate in much greater depth than emerged from this trip just what sort of alliance these new potential members will be joining.
The issue of NATO enlargement is intimately linked with the European Union's own expansion. Throwing aside the traditional caution that U.S. presidents have shown in expressing views on EU policy, Bush suggested that it would indeed be in the U.S. interest to see the EU extended to a number of former Communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
To its credit, at its summit meeting last weekend, the EU finally
committed itself to admitting some new members by 2004, in time
for the next round of elections to the increasingly powerful European
Parliament. If, as Bush and his European colleagues agree, the
main focus should be on securing democratic institutions and market
economies in Eastern Europe (and not principally defending them
against military attack) then the EU's enlargement becomes at
least as important as
NATO's own. It is membership in the EU, after all, not NATO, that
requires adherence to exacting political, economic, social, and
cultural standards, and that helped cement Western values in the
former dictatorships of Spain, Portugal, and Greece.
Much media coverage of the President's maiden voyage to Europe
focused on the fact that the basic differences of view between
the U.S. and the EU on missile defense were left unresolved. Two
big EU countries, France and Germany, remain opposed to scrapping
the ABM treaty in favor of a new, defensively oriented nuclear
weapons regime. Perhaps recalling the dismal failure of France's
defensive Maginot Line in World War I, President Chirac told President
Bush that "the sword always defeats the shield." Spain
and Italy, which are governed by center-right governments close
to the Bush approach
politics, are more sympathetic.
While real, transatlantic divergences on missile defense and global warming should not be exaggerated. In a conciliatory gesture, Bush dropped the "national" from the missile defense moniker to indicate his intentions to include both NATO allies and Russia in the new scheme. Most, if not all, of the European allies agree that there are new nuclear threats stemming from outlaw regimes, terrorists, and accidental launch that must be addressed in some fashion. The key concern in Europe is that the U.S. not drop the ABM treaty before a missile defense system has been shown to be fully operational. Bush's desire to have part of the system in place before the end of his term in 2004 is not reassuring to most allies across the Atlantic, who fear that this timetable is simply unrealistic.
It is perhaps in Russia that President Bush made his greatest mark. By inviting Russian President Putin to his Texas ranch, Bush's intended message was clear: despite differences on missile defense or NATO enlargement, the two leaders can build a warm personal relationship and do business together. Here again were echoes of the feel good, post-Cold War past, whether of Bush-Gorbachev or Clinton-Yeltsin vintage. But times have changed, and fundamental policy differences between the two great powers loom large.
Peter S. Rashish ia a Washington public affairs consultant and the the former Executive Vice President of The European Institute .