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NATO's Role
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When the Cold War ended, it was fashionable to express doubts about the future relevance and longevity of the North Atlantic Alliance. What would its function be, skeptics asked, in a totally new era without an obvious common threat? Would not other institutions -- the European Union (EU), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), or some totally new arrangement -- be more suitable? The American eagerness for novelty is sometimes an advantage -- it makes the country comfortable with change and confident of its ability to master it. At other times, however, it exaggerates a propensity to jump to ahistorical conclusions. As shown many times in the past, after the dust settles what matters most may well be that important matters have not changed.
Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), reportedly observed that the purpose of the Alliance was to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Such a reference to Germany is invidious and a distortion of the reality of the contribution made by German democracy to the Western community since the end of the war. Nevertheless, Lord Ismay was not wrong to associate the three central elements of NATO's geopolitical purpose: to ensure the American military presence in Europe as a counterweight to Russian power and as the guarantor of the framework for Germany's reintegration into the European system. The Russian threat has obviously receded, but the structural problem of European security has turned out to be a major intellectual and political challenge nonetheless. Not in 50 years, in fact, has there been so much fluidity and uncertainty about security arrangements in Europe as there is now, five years after the end of the Cold War. In such an environment, the stabilizing functions of the Alliance turn out to be still valuable: indeed, there is no adequate substitute to NATO currently available, especially with respect to both post-Communist Russia and newly unified Germany. The Russian EnigmaChurchill's description of Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" is well-known. Many years earlier, Bismarck once offered up a more pointed version of the same idea: Russia, he is said to have observed, is never as strong or as weak as it appears. This ambiguity remains the better part of wisdom today. With Russia a permanent factor in European politics, it would be imprudent to imagine that difficulties associated with its integration into the European system have disappeared.Now that the Red Army is out of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, and now that U.S. forces in Europe have been reduced by two-thirds, the current East-West balance of military power on the Continent appears to be -- and is -- quite benign. After the preceding four decades of dangerous confrontation, the new balance stands as an extraordinary improvement: few would pretend otherwise. Nevertheless, the principle of equilibrium must still be observed. Russia's domestic evolution remains uncertain, to say the least. It remains a huge concentration of power on the Eurasian landmass: even in its reduced state it disposes of some 2 million men under arms and around 25,000 nuclear warheads. These military capabilities dwarf those of any other nation in Europe. In addition, Russia's identity as a clumsy and troublesome factor in European politics is rooted in its history -- and predates the arrival of the Bolsheviks and the advent of thermonuclear weapons. As the century ends, trouble -- meaning, substantive differences -- looms over issues inherited from the Cold War, including Bosnia and some arms control problems, and over some issues that have emerged since the end of the Cold War, including Russia's claim of a special "responsibility" to keep order in its immediate neighbohood, which happens to be the sphere of the former USSR. In short, given Russia's disproportionate power on the Continent, there is no counterweight without an American military presence in Western Europe, and even the most positive future relationship between Russia and the West depends on this. It is this latent problem of Russia that raises anew the question of the status of Central Europe. The history of the 20th century suggests that ambiguity about the security status of Central Europe can be decidedly unhealthy. As will be argued below, it is because the states of Central Europe have come to the same conclusion that they have sought the protection of the Atlantic Alliance. The German QuestionThat Germany has been a faithful democratic ally for over forty years, and especially since it joined NATO in 1955, is beyond doubt. It is also the dominant economic power in Europe. Unification in 1990 only raised in more acute form the question of Germany's political role in the newly fluid environment of Europe as a whole. To be sure, Germany (like Japan) is currently absorbed in its internal economic problems, but this preoccupation is likely to be temporary only. Germany is a dynamic democracy with a power and self-assurance made evident since 1990 in the assertive conduct of its government on a variety of European issues, including the Yugoslav crisis and monetary policy. Like Japan, too, the Federal Republic of Germany is beginning to shed some of its postwar legal (and political) inhibitions about sending military forces overseas.History teaches that sooner or later economic strength translates into military strength. Post-World War II Germany (and Japan) have been rare exceptions. But what has divorced German (and Japanese) economic power from any security implication has been these countries' tight security link with the United States. Germany's military power is firmly embedded in the NATO integrated command, just as Japan is tightly bound to the United States by their bilateral Security Treaty. This implicit bargain has been honorable: Germany and Japan could develop their economies without causing their neighbors to fear renewed attempts at regional dominance. Europe and Asia have gained a vital reassurance. The security link to the United States has been these emerging powers' anchor to the international system. In geopolitical terms, it has been a successful arrangement benefiting all sides. Interestingly enough, this also explains Germany's eager support for the enlarge-ment of NATO into Central Europe, where Germans are wise enough to know that their activism carries different implications if it is part of a collective presence than if Germany is acting unilaterally. At its current stage of institutional development, the European Union cannot perform this security function, notwithstanding some earlier illusions on this score among those in Paris and Brussels who had hoped to end Europe's dependence on the United States. Germany's dynamism and geopolitical weight are too great to be contained by France alone, or to be constrained in the context of monetary union, or to be muted by an elusive European army. Former French President Franois Mitterrand's illusions in this regard accomplished little more than to strangle France's economy by monetary stringency and (try to) dilute Germany's commitment to NATO with an ill-conceived "Franco-German Corps." Indeed, the main problems faced by Europe since the Maastricht treaty was signed in 1987 result from one core issue: the countries of Western European have become increasingly ambivalent about moving toward fuller political and monetary union because they can no longer be sure whether a stronger EU is the answer to the problem of German domination or is a surrender to German domination. The U.S. security presence in Western Europe renders this question less consequential than it would be otherwise. In other words, it is not only the small states of Central Europe that would feel vulnerable without the Americans: Western Europe, too, would become unhinged without the American security presence. Nor should this be a surprise. In 1949, one of the original arguments for the Atlantic Alliance was to provide a protective shelter for the already-launched movement for Western European integration. Whether fuller political or monetary union in Europe is attainable or desirable can be argued either way, but these questions are for Europeans, and not for Americans, to decide. The crucial implication for the United States is that the U.S. presence in Europe will be indispensable whatever scenario is envisioned: If Europe is to remain a "Europe des patries," the management of Western cohesion will clearly require American leadership. If closer union is ever to be achieved, it presupposes an American presence that assures an equilibrium in Western Europe. None of the preceding is meant as an ethnic slur on the moral qualities of Russians or Germans. Rather, it is designed to point to, and define, a structural problem. Stability and peace of mind are easier to achieve when disproportionate power is counterbalanced; an underlying equilibrium is the surest basis for benign relations. The American presence in Europe -- embodied in the Alliance -- has performed this constructive geopolitical role for a half century. Any analysis of the present situation suggests that the need has not disappeared. Enlarging NATOExperts in the West like to argue that economic issues, or "new age" issues like the environment and migration, have supplanted traditional security concerns as the dominant international issues of the post-Cold War era. This is not the perspective of the newly liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics, barely emerged from a 60 year nightmare: still still situated between Germany and Russia, they are not yet persuaded that saving the ozone layer is the most urgent national security problem they face. Burnt into them with searing clarity is the recognition that their national survival is not automatic; even if they face no immediate threat, historical memory (not that far back, after all) tells them that their independence is not guaranteed. Viewing themselves as part of the West -- politically, culturally, and morally -- they seek the reassurance of an institutional security guarantee from the West.Anything less is deeply unnerving. Vaclav Havel -- a former NATO-basher in his earlier days as a trendy intellectual -- visited NATO headquarters in March 1991. By then in his more responsible role as democratic President of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, he pleaded with the Atlantic powers to establish links with the Central European states, laying stress on the considerable uncertainties (even then) of the Soviet domestic evolution. It is striking how slowly the West has responded to these calls. Delays have been bipartisan. In the Bush Administration, too, the rhetoric of the U.S. Govern- ment stressed America's commitment to democracy and prosperity in Central and Eastern Europe. One had to search with great effort to find similarly forthright endorsements of the region's independence or security. While on the staff of the National Security Council, as early as the spring of 1990 this author wrote memoranda arguing that the Central Europeans' concerns were historically justified. At a truly formative moment in the evolution of a new European order, U.S. policies had not articulated a theory of how the safety of the new democracies was to be assured. How could a future Russian reintervention be deterred, however hypothetical it might still seem to be? Where did the Central Europeans fit in the new European balance of power? What relationship did the United States foresee between Central Europe's security and NATO's? The view within the Bush administration, however, was that it was premature to raise these issues, especially since Mikhail Gorbachev stood at a delicate stage in his reform process. Unlike Havel, policy analysts in Washington concluded that the uncertainties of the Soviet internal evolution argued for caution rather than action. Only gradually did the "s-word" (security) and the "i-word" (independence) creep into the Western vocabulary. In March 1991 (indeed while Havel was paying his visit to NATO), Poland's President Lech Walesa came to Washington and made the same plea to the Bush Administration. But Walesa's overtures for a "friendship treaty" were rebuffed, and the Americans steered the discussions toward debt relief. However, Walesa's persistence produced an interesting joint declaration, signed by Bush and Walesa on March 20, 1991, which included the following paragraph:
It was a significant statement, but Administration officials were at pains to spread the word that this joint declaration was not a treaty of any kind. In fairness to the Bush Administration, it did have a general vision of how Central Europe could be protected. First and foremost, the United States then planned to maintain a substantial military presence in Europe (at least 150,000 troops), which would help preserve an overall equilibrium. The Central Europeans, who were passionate advocates of this commitment, were among its main beneficiaries. Second, the President's National Security Strategy Report of March 1990 made an elliptical reference to Central Europe's "self-determination" 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 United States and the East Europeans in order to "help the military officers of these states establish a professional identity independent of their roles in the Warsaw Pact." In July 1990, the Declaration of the NATO Summit in London formally invited the East Europeans to expand their diplomatic and military contacts with NATO. Soviet troop withdrawals from Central and Eastern Europe were the subject of bilateral agreements with the relevant countries, and the Western powers had no particular standing to "enforce" them. A few months later, however, the November 1990 multilateral treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) reinforced the facts of Soviet retrenchment, including severe reductions on Soviet military equip-ment in the region, especially battle tanks, other armored vehicles, and artillery. In addition, the CFE Treaty's "sufficiency rule" imposed a ceiling on Soviet forces as a proportion of total forces in the region, and its elaborate verification provisions made a surprise attack much more difficult. In the "Charter of Paris" signed at the CSCE Summit in November 1990, in addition all CSCE member states affirmed that "Security is indivisible and the security of every participating State is inseparably linked to that of all the others." On June 6, 1991, a NATO ministerial communique added: "Our own security is inseparably linked to that of all other states in Europe. The consolidation and preservation throughout the continent of democratic societies and their freedom from any form of coercion or intimidation are therefore of direct and material concern to us." This declaration was coupled with additional measures to expand NATO's contacts with the new democracies' defense establishments. Thus, just as the Bush Administration seemed to be heading toward at least some kind of security "umbrella" over Central Europe the new Clinton Adminis- tration displayed hesitations of its own. In the interim, of course, the Soviet Union had disappeared and been replaced by democratic Russia, and Gorbachev by Boris Yeltsin. Yet the new administration's concerns for the delicacy of Yeltsin's domestic position echoed the Bush team's solicitude for the delicacy of Gorbachev's position. President Clinton, like President Bush, wanted to give some reassurance to the Central Europeans without provoking a Russian reaction that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. The Clinton Administration's answer to this conundrum was the "Partnership for Peace" (PFP). This proposal was designed as a cooperative relationship between NATO and all former Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet successor states (including Russia), involving military-to-military contacts, joint exercises and planning, commitments to transparency and other confidence-building measures, and more general commitments to peaceful relations. To judge from most Administration statements, shielding Central Europe via NATO membership, or even candidacy for NATO membership, was not an immediate part of the PFP initiative when it was first developed in the Fall of 1993. Rather, the stress was on the "thoroughly inclusive" nature of the initiative and the conviction that peace in Europe was "indivisible" -- meaning that Russia had to be included. But pressures soon mounted on the Administration to go further. By November 1993, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was vehemently criticizing the "vague new concept" of Partnership for Peace as inadequate and as a preemptive capitulation to Russian blackmail. Others were to join in this criticism, including Senator Richard Lugar (later a presidential candidate), former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and ultimately the entire Republican Party in Congress after it introduced legislation urging NATO membership for all four Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) by a date certain (January 10, 1999). These pressures mounted to the point that by the time of NATO's official adoption of the Partnership for Peace at an Alliance Summit in Brussels in January 1994, the Administration had shifted to a more positive line on the question of possible future NATO membership for the Partners. Immediately following the NATO Summit, President Clinton flew to Prague to reassure the leaders of the Visegrad countries: "The security of your states is important to the security of America.... Now the question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members, but when and how we will do so." At the NATO ministerial meeting in December 1994, it was decided to move ahead with a comprehensive study of the question of enlargement, with a view to developing detailed criteria and timetables for new candidates. The original intention was to complete this process by the end of 1995. But then, during 1995, the process slowed down. Again there was reason to think -- despite the repeated assertions that no outside nation had a veto -- that concerns over Russia's reaction were inducing caution on the Administration's part. As the President prepared to meet with Yeltsin in Moscow in conjunction with V-E Day celebrations in May 1995, Administration officials indicated that the president planned to assure Yeltsin that NATO expansion would "happen naturally" and would not be artificially accelerated. Indeed, the NATO ministerial communique of May 30, 1995, was oleaginous in its repeated assurances to the Russians that NATO enlargement would occur only "as part of an evolutionary process." It also promised that NATO enlargement would "enhance security for all countries in Europe, without creating dividing lines," as "part of a broad European security architecture based on genuine partnership and cooperation in the whole of Europe." Unless these words are totally unsincere, they imply that the process could not go forward over Russian objection. By early June, all talk of identifying candidates or defining timetables by the end of 1995 had been "quietly dropped", while the same timeframe of December 1995 was reportedly adopted as the deadline for completion of an agreement with Russia on the "political framework" for intensified cooperation between NATO and Russia. It was in this context that Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev formally signed onto the PFP, which Russia had held back from doing earlier. It was hard to escape the inference that Russia was using the PFP to gain leverage over the process of NATO enlargement. A "Study on NATO Enlargement" detailing overall principles and procedures was released by the Alliance in September 1995. But actual selection of candidates was put off again. Meanwhile, in the United States, a mini-campaign of counter-pressures had been developing to urge the Administration to go slower. The Administration, at this writing, is standing its ground on the principle of NATO enlargement, while its operational plans are, at best, ambiguous. Unfortunately, going slowly is not likely to make enlargement any easier. Some pain is bound to be felt in Moscow whenever it goes forward: most visibly, it will formally ratify the strategic consequences of the revolutions of 1989. Yet, what else could it be? Russia's acceptance of the new status quo of 1989 ought to be the sine qua non of any Russian relationship with the West. Western hesitations only encourage those nationalist forces in Russia who would like to derail NATO enlargement; conversely, Western determination to enforce such enlargement quickly will bolster those realistic forces in Russia who are better prepared to accommodate it. NATO enlargement should not be viewed as a provocative new step but as consolidation of the existing status quo. In short, the onus for any problem should not be on the United States and its NATO allies but on Russia and its former allies. As Vaclav Havel said at Harvard in June 1995:
Bosnia and the AllianceBosnia is a vast and agonizing subject, and this paper can do scant justice to it in a short space. But a few conclusions can be drawn nonetheless about its implications for the Alliance.Bosnia is, of course, an "out-of-area" issue: no NATO country is threatened by invasion from Yugoslavia. Rather, Bosnia grew as a NATO issue because it seemed eminently desirable that NATO be able to show its relevance to the new variety of ethnic problems which Europe might face or expect after the Cold War. In other words, it was seen as an opportunity more than as a threat. There is much irony in how NATO got involved. At first, it was the Europeans who plunged in. In the wake of Germany's unification, Britain and France, who sent their troops in the fall of 1991, relished the chance to show in Yugoslavia (as in Desert Storm) that they could act as military powers while Germany could not. A few weeks earlier that summer, the Europeans had also sent their negotiators to broker a peace that would demonstrate Europe's ability, in the post-Cold War era, to manage its own affairs without American help, thank you very much. "This is the hour of Europe," proclaimed Jacques Poos, Luxembourg's foreign minister, "not the hour of the Americans." And the President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, commented snidely: "We do not interfere in American affairs.... We hope they will have enough respect not to interfere in ours." By the end of 1991 -- fourteen EC-sponsored cease-fires later -- the EC mediation was a shambles and the British and French were pleading for NATO and U.S. support. As soon as NATO was seized with the Bosnia crisis, the Alliance was torn by the conflicting views held in the main capitals over the moral and political issues involved. To make matters worse, neither the United States nor France and Britain had a clear concept of a military strategy that would make their diplomatic efforts effective. At times, differences among the three governments reached bitter and passionate proportions. But even as each allied country was in the throes of an internal debate about what vital strategic interests were involved in Bosnia, the conflict had an increasingly corrosive effect on Alliance cohesion -- which in itself created a powerful strategic interest in finding some way to end the agony at the earliest possible time, whatever one's view of its intrinsic merits. Ironically, NATO's travails in Yugoslavia have served to confirm the absence of any other institution able to do any better. The United Nations -- whose involvement in the command and control arrangements seemed to result initially from France's known aversion to NATO -- has been discredited. The UN has no capability for heavy-duty war fighting, which is what Bosnia demanded and NATO offered. Nor did the OSCE offer any particular advantages for mediation -- whose primary tool is the leverage available at NATO rather than the impartiality said to exist at OSCE. NATO, therefore, proved to be best equipped to affect both the military and the diplomatic course of events. The five-power Contact Group (United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia) replaced the EU and the UN as the most important diplomatic vehicle, and, at least for the four Western powers, the Alliance relationship ultimately supplanted the EU and UN. It behooves the allied powers, nevertheless, to think through at the earliest possible opportunity how the frustration and stumbling that characterized NATO's actions in Bosnia can be avoided in the future. In part, this is a procedural question: NATO needs more streamlined procedures for crisis management. At bottom, though, this is a substantive problem: If future crises should ever arise in Europe, the leading powers of the Alliance will need to have compatible visions of where and how intervention might be possible and where it would not be. Bosnia also raises important questions about the future of Western European defense cooperation. Just as the Western European powers intervened in Yugoslavia hoping to vindicate their political institutions, there continues to be hope of some day turning the Western European Union (WEU) into a European army. In case like Bosnia, moreover, there is no reason to assume that United States would necessarily oppose a Western European capability to handle military tasks in Europe without direct U.S. involvement, especially in ground combat. Provided it remains in the Alliance framework, its burden-sharing advantage would be real. The U.S. attitude toward the WEU in the Clinton era has been more favorable than ever, though the United States continues to expect that the Alliance would maintain a droit de regard if not a veto over independent European operations. It is striking that even the French have moved willingly in this direction. With good will, flexible compromises can be developed. After all, occasions when Western European and American security interests in Europe diverge fundamentally are likely to remain rare. The January 1994 NATO Summit endorsed the concept of "separable but not separate" military capabilities that could be employed by NATO or the WEU, as well as the concept of Combined Joint Task Forces as "a means to facilitate contingency operations, including operations with participating nations outside the Alliance." The American InterestThis paper has taken for granted that the stabilizing function of the Alliance is not only in Europe's interest but also in the American interest. The history of this century offers sufficient evidence that cataclysms in Europe inevitably involve the United States because the strategic position of the United States is directly affected by any significant geopolitical development in Europe. Two World Wars and a Cold War were spawned in Central European conflicts. The Clinton Administration's early assumptions that Asia had supplanted Europe as the focus of international affairs are premature: Geopolitically, Europe is still the center of gravity of world affairs, whatever trade figures may show about Trans-pacific economic activity. (This is not to deny that some significant geopolitical problems in the US-Japan-China-Russia relationship may emerge in the Far East in the next century, but only to affirm that Europe has not yet relinquished center stage.)The American people's hopes for a post-Cold War era of international tranquillity are understandable, and may even be fulfillable -- provided, inter alia, that a wise foreign policy works to maintain Europe's currently benign security situation. That situation however, cannot be taken for granted -- indeed it is looking rather precarious -- and it must be maintained by conscious policy and strategy. No new NATO procedure or institution will work in the absence of vigorous and wise American leadership. In this context, Bosnia sounded as a wake up call. To say that NATO's importance is now recognized is to say that the American role is once again understood to be crucial. The invigoration of the Western military and diplomatic role in Bosnia in September 1995, for example, was mainly the result of more assertive American policies. Whatever may lie ahead, the coherence and effectiveness of any NATO posture were shown once again to depend on the vigor of American leadership. There seems to be a healthy new awareness of this among Europeans as well as among Americans. The ominous implications of the disintegrative tendencies in the southeastern "underbelly" of the Continent may have, in the end, reminded everyone of several sobering realities. A new Golden Age of peace and harmony has not yet arrived in the wake of the Cold War, even in modern, sophisticated Europe. Nor can Europe so easily shake off its dependence on America in the face of the difficult security challenges that remain. While a total fiasco in Yugoslavia may yet discredit NATO utterly and poison Atlantic relations for a long period, any tolerable outcome short of that may have a healthier effect. We may then have grounds for hope that the damage suffered by the West in and over Bosnia will be reversible, and that the obituaries for the Alliance will have been premature.
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