NATO Plan: Hard Questions Can No Longer Be Avoided

Led by the United States, the 16 members of NATO have agreed to enlarge their membership by three, a move that will shift the boundary of the military alliance hundreds of miles to the east and impose on it significant new responsibilities for European defense. For President Clinton, the decision reached in Madrid on Tuesday marked “a very great day” for the cause of freedom. For critics of enlarging NATO, including the 50 retired ambassadors, senators, generals and arms control experts who recently asked the president to reconsider the planned expansion, NATO and the United States may be about to make “a policy error of historic proportions.” A boon to security in Europe or a potential political catastrophe? It is within these parameters that the wisdom of creating a bigger NATO will be debated.

NATO today has become that rare if not unique thing in history, a defensive alliance without an identified enemy. The Soviet Union has disappeared and the military coalition it organized and controlled, the Warsaw Pact, has been dissolved. As a result of the invitation that went out this week, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland--all former members of that pact--will be formally welcomed into NATO’s ranks in 1999, the alliance’s 50th-anniversary year. Also at that time, strong hints from some alliance members suggest, invitations could be issued to other states.

Seven years ago the Soviet Union, then approaching its final days, agreed that Germany should be reunited. Western foreign ministers in turn assured Moscow that there was no intention to move NATO eastward, no plan to admit former Warsaw Pact states. The reality today is that a NATO that is soon to include Poland will find itself smack up against a Russian border, the little enclave of Kaliningrad, which lies between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. The West may have forgotten its assurances in 1990 about not moving NATO closer to the old Soviet Union; Russian defense officials and nationalists have not.

Is it important what Russians think about NATO’s expansion? It is, if for no other reason than that the West generally and the United States especially have compelling interests in a number of vital areas that require Moscow’s friendly cooperation. These in- clude implementing cuts in strategic weapons and confronting what have become the major threats to global security: international terrorism, illicit trafficking in unconventional weapons and the drug trade.

In a letter to Clinton, a score of senators have asked some of the basic questions about NATO’s expansion that the administration, for all its rhetorical oom-pah-pah, has yet to answer. Just what military threat is NATO expansion responding to? How will stability in Europe be strengthened by drawing a new line that brings some new countries within the NATO fold while continuing to exclude others? Through extension of the pledge that an attack on one NATO state will be treated as an attack on all, will the United States be at risk of being in the middle of ethnic or religious conflicts? To these questions must be added two others: What will be the real cost to Americans of upgrading the military capabilities of the new members? And is an enlarged NATO worth having at the potential risk of a more antagonistic and uncooperative Russia?

The task of the administration is to respond fully and credibly to these concerns. It has yet to make much of a start.