NATO: Can This Marriage Be Saved? : The U.S. role seems more uncertain as Bosnia totters

Why has the apparently imminent collapse of Bosnia-Herzegovina precipitated a crisis in the life of NATO? NATO was not brought into existence to settle disputes in the Balkans. Poorly as NATO may have functioned in attempting to restore peace there, any question about the continuing utility of the alliance would seem to require a broader frame.

Yet local events do sometimes force more-than-local questions. When the Soviet Union began the Berlin blockade in 1948, many in the United States did not believe that rescuing a recent enemy’s ruined capital was in the American interest. But the blockade and the ensuing Berlin Airlift helped force a larger question: NATO was founded in the following year.

THE NEW ‘BERLIN’: The Balkans war is the Berlin blockade of the post-Cold War era. It has been clear since the failed Russian coup of 1991 that with the Soviet threat gone, NATO would need a new rationale. But what should it be?

A security insurance policy? Russia and Ukraine could conceivably reunite and, if an expansionistic faction came to power, threaten Western Europe. Were that to happen, American assistance might again be required. A Soviet Union redux would, however, almost certainly turn its aggressive sights first to its lost empire in Central Asia rather than to Eastern, much less Western, Europe. The likelihood of any sudden march to the Atlantic is so remote that even if NATO were completely dismantled, a semblance of it could be mustered in time to meet a worst-case return of Stalinism.

European security will be threatened in the years ahead far less by neo-Stalinism than by smaller disputes across state borders and among national groups within states. Hungary is angry about the treatment of Hungarians in Romania and Serbia. Slovakia has quarrels with Hungary. Ethnic Germans in Poland are not as submissive as they once were. And the threat of illegal immigration has created new concerns everywhere.

How will the Western European leadership respond to this set of threats, and as it responds will it require or wish any American assistance? If collective security in Western Europe is defined to the virtual exclusion of Eastern Europe, if only the internal security problems of Western Europe are on the table, there would seem to be no call whatever for American participation. If, however, Western Europe intends to assume a measure of responsibility for security in Eastern Europe, then a role for the United States is more easily imagined. But what kind of role? When the question of NATO is posed in this way, the legitimacy of the Balkans war as a forcing of the question is obvious.

American isolationists cry that Western Europe can do whatever must be done in Eastern Europe without American help. American internationalists maintain that, given the burdens that the United States must bear alone in Korea and the Middle East, Western Europe should at least pay most of the cost of Eastern European security. Most important, perhaps, Americans of every political view have begun to wonder what Western Europe really wants.

A SCATTERED EUROPE: France has seemed eager to create a purely European alternative to NATO. Germany lies low but may believe that it will emerge strongest should NATO be phased out. Britain, strengthened hitherto by its special relationship with the United States, would seem to have most to lose, but even London has lately seemed irritably ambivalent about the proper role of the United States in Europe.

As NATO meets in Brussels this week and as the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe meets in Budapest starting today, these are questions that can no longer be avoided. Whether and how they are addressed may well determine whether the breakup of Bosnia will prove to be the prelude to a larger transatlantic divorce.