Yeltsin NATO Plan Attracts Interest From Clinton Aides, Central Europe

One of the biggest foreign-policy problems facing the next president will have to be worked out a few weeks after the November election. There won’t even be time to wait until President Clinton’s second inauguration or Bob Dole’s first.

December is decision time for the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--the point at which the United States and its European allies will have to decide whether, when and how to admit some Central European countries, notably Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, to the Western military alliance.

For two years, the United States and its European allies have postponed final commitments. But in December, at a regular meeting of NATO countries, the opportunities for delay will run out. The Western allies already have agreed to decide then whether to expand the alliance eastward.

The main obstacle has been intense opposition in Moscow. From President Boris N. Yeltsin on down, the Russians have been saying for two years that all hell will break loose if NATO is expanded to include countries that were once members of the former Soviet Union’s alliance, the Warsaw Pact.

Now, however, the Russians are quietly floating the idea of a possible deal on NATO, one that is attracting interest both in Central Europe and at top levels of the Clinton administration. It might be called Boris’ Bargain.

When Clinton and Yeltsin sit down to schmooze in Moscow, what they say to each other about this possible NATO compromise will be far more important than anything else on their agenda.

As it is being sketched out by Russian officials, Boris’ Bargain goes something like this:

Russia would go along with NATO membership for countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic--but with some sort of understanding that no nuclear weapons would be deployed on the territory of these new NATO members and no NATO “infrastructure” (such as troops and tanks) either.

The hints of new Russian flexibility are subtle but unmistakable. “We want to prevent NATO enlargement--and the most important thing is to prevent the NATO military infrastructure from approaching our territory,” said Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov in an interview with a Russian newspaper this month. That seemed to be a backhanded way of suggesting that Russia might be able to accept NATO expansion itself.

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Primakov has floated the same idea with Central European officials. When Hungarian Foreign Minister Laszlo Kovacs met with him in Moscow last month, Primakov said Russia was seeking a “compromise.” Russia’s aim, he said, is not to stop NATO expansion itself but to prevent NATO weaponry from being moved closer to Russian territory.

Both in Washington and in Central Europe, Primakov, the former intelligence chief long portrayed as a hard-liner, is viewed as the driving force behind the new Russian approach. Clinton administration officials now talk of Primakov in surprised, hopeful terms, comparing him to “Nixon in China”--code for a tough guy willing to make a deal that seems to run contrary to his past performance.

Primakov couldn’t be offering such a deal without Yeltsin’s support. And the Russian president has been talking about a new Russian flexibility toward NATO.

In Norway three weeks ago, Yeltsin suggested that Moscow might go along with “the French example” for NATO. New members in Central Europe could take part only in the alliance’s political structure and not the military alliance, just as France did from 1966 until last year, when it rejoined the alliance’s military structure.

What kind of a compromise would this be? Is the Boris Bargain something Clinton or Dole should accept?

The first point is that Russia has come a long way from when Moscow said it was opposed to the entire concept of NATO expansion. Two years ago, the mere idea of NATO expansion was causing Yeltsin to warn of a “new Cold War” in Europe.

Moreover, even when Russia talked about possible deals, they were a lot more limited than the one now being floated.

Over the last two years, Russia has suggested that the Central European countries could be kept out of NATO but given guarantees of security by both NATO and Russia. It also has tried out the idea of making NATO like an airplane with different classes of riders. New countries like Poland and Hungary would get the cheap seats in the back of the plane, with fewer rights than everyone else.

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The Boris Bargain is much better than these earlier proposals. Now, according to Clinton administration officials, eight of the 16 members of NATO have no nuclear weapons on their soil. And some, such as Norway, have no NATO troops either. Under the Boris Bargain, newly admitted NATO members in Central Europe would not be any worse off than these countries.

The proposed compromise would also get the United States out of an awkward problem left over from the end of the Cold War: The Russians insist that the Bush administration promised Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO’s military hardware would not be moved eastward if Moscow would go along with the reunification of Germany.

Clinton administration officials insist that these assurances were meant to apply only within the reunified Germany, not to other countries in Central Europe. But they acknowledge that some sort of assurances were given. “The text supports the Russians but the context supports the truth,” said one Clinton administration policymaker.

The Boris Bargain is not problem-free. The biggest obstacle is that Yeltsin’s talk about the “French example” goes further than Central European countries, or any American president, could accept. It would mean that the Poles, Hungarians and Czechs could not take part in any military planning at all within NATO. That’s simply second-class citizenship under another name. “We want full membership of NATO, not some sort of partial solution,” Hungary’s Kovacs said recently.

The Pentagon probably could live with an arrangement in which no NATO troops or tanks were stationed permanently in Central Europe. But it does not want to guarantee that troops could never go there in the future.

“Moving troops around is something on which we would want to preserve flexibility,” says one senior administration official. Moreover, Pentagon officials say that they will want to set up at least some kinds of “infrastructure”--such as communications facilities and logistics--in new NATO countries. Otherwise, they wouldn’t really be part of NATO.

The biggest problem of all is political: Even supposing that the United States and Russia can work out the details of some compromise on NATO, can it be approved in Moscow and Washington?

For Russia, that would mean finally tolerating an expanded NATO. Even though Yeltsin and Primakov are hinting at a deal, that does not mean that they can do it or make it stick.

If Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov wins the impending Russian presidential election, all bets are off. His victory would validate the argument that NATO should be expanded as a “hedge” in case Russia once again becomes a threatening power. In other words, it would strengthen the case for NATO expansion.

The domestic politics in this country are uncertain too. Clinton probably won’t talk much about Boris’ Bargain during the campaign this year. The idea of talking with Moscow about the future of Central Europe is too sensitive.

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Clinton knows Polish Americans are concentrated in Midwestern states such as Illinois and Ohio, which are vital to his chances for reelection. Former President Gerald R. Ford contributed to his defeat in the 1976 election when, in one of his debates with Jimmy Carter, he mangled a question about Poland.

We won’t know the fate of Boris’ Bargain until after the 1996 elections, both in Russia and in this country. Maybe in the end it won’t work. But the notion of a NATO compromise is one in which the Western allies, Central European countries and Russia could all give a little and gain a lot.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.