NATO’s Pending Expansion: Silence Is Not Golden

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is preparing for what may be its most fateful meeting since it was created 48 years ago, in the darkest days of the Cold War. In July, NATO’s 16 member states will decide whether to open their ranks to three Central European countries--Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic--that formerly were held in the Soviet orbit. No suspense attaches to this decision. Despite misgivings by some members and vigorous opposition from Russia, the three will be invited to apply for membership. But senior officials at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels concede they have no idea what the ultimate effects of this action will be.

The Clinton administration, spurred on by the Republican-led Congress, has been in the vanguard of those seeking a bigger NATO. Yet, remarkably, there has been only minimal official public discussion of the political and military implications of expansion. In place of a hard and questioning look at its possible risks and costs, soothing generalizations have been offered, along the lines that enlarging NATO will assure a more stable, cooperative and peaceful Europe.

Many Western Europeans, as this week’s three-part series on NATO in The Times reported, believe that domestic American political considerations have been the real driving force behind enlargement. That suspicion may be unfair. But the fact remains that a step of potentially enormous consequence looms and the American people have been given hardly a clue about what is involved.

The pending extension of U.S. security guarantees to three additional countries--the commitment that this country will fight in their defense if need be--may be warranted in terms of American security needs, but that is all the more reason why such a step deserves full and sober public debate. That has not happened.

The economic costs of expansion remain a matter of sharp disagreement. But American taxpayers should know they are potentially looking at billions of dollars in added spending to upgrade the infrastructure and armed forces of the new members. On this matter too Washington has been all but silent.

Eastern and Central European states want to join NATO for understandable reasons; former unwilling satellites of the Soviet Union, they fear their fate if Russian imperial ambitions revive. On its part, Moscow looks at the prospect of a bigger and, for now, better armed NATO drawing ever closer to the borders of the former Soviet Union and expresses angry concerns that, in the light of Russia’s long history, can’t simply be dismissed as groundless paranoia or self-serving propaganda.

Moscow, U.S. policymakers have repeatedly said, has no veto over NATO’s expansion. True, but Russia is not the constituency that policymakers for now should be most aware of. NATO is on the verge of becoming a different organization, and what that means--for Americans and for Europe--has been left virtually undiscussed. The United States is about to enter into a major new commitment about which its leaders have told Americans almost nothing.