Expansion Underlines Divisions in NATO

As the Atlantic alliance prepares to expand to the doorstep of the former Soviet Union, the looming enlargement only highlights NATO’s inability to agree on what it is supposed to be and do in the post-Cold War world.

“We’ve expanded, but we’ve put the cart before the horse,” one NATO official said this week as leaders of the 16 member countries meeting in Spain’s capital agreed after arduous talks to begin formal negotiations to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic--the largest single crop of recruits since the alliance was formed.

The trio, scheduled to join in 1999 on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, will swell the alliance’s European land area by 14% and stretch its borders with non-NATO members by a whopping 32%, according to one Western calculation.

Many hailed the decision, understandably, as historic. NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said it marked “the time when North America and Europe came together to shape the course of a new century.”

Much of that vision, however, still needs to be fleshed out. NATO lacks a coherent strategic plan to replace the order of battle drawn up to face the now-defunct Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The Madrid meeting also bared serious differences among NATO members about what might be the source of future threats to Europe’s peace and security.

Efforts to revamp and streamline the group’s integrated command structure, created at the beginning of the 1950s to counter a potential Kremlin invasion of Western Europe, also have been bedeviled by national jealousies, with countries squabbling for control of subcommands.

In the Mediterranean, for instance, the Turks and the Italians are vying for mastery of air and naval assets now based in Italy. In the Atlantic, Spain and Portugal are wrangling over who should control maritime access to the Spanish territory of the Canary Islands, an assignment now held by Portugal but claimed by Spain.

With the absence of yesteryear’s superpower adversary, rival strategic doctrines also confront NATO and divide its members, alliance sources said. Some see the major menace still coming from the former republics of the Soviet Union; others seek to extend the alliance toward the troubled Balkans and the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

Though NATO leaders in Berlin in June 1996 endorsed a larger and more visible European role in the alliance, the Madrid summit has demonstrated the continuing domination of the United States, which created NATO in 1949 to oppose Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s regime. The United States is still the alliance’s largest contributor and has about 100,000 soldiers in Europe.

On Tuesday, 10 NATO members argued for admitting Romania and Slovenia as part of the first wave of expansion, sources said, but a U.S-led minority was able to block them, consenting only to “review the process” of NATO enlargement in two years.

For France, a more equitable balance of power is indispensable if the organization is to survive the demise of its longtime enemy, the Soviet Union.

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“Since the reasons behind the creation of the alliance have largely disappeared, our alliance would not durably survive with an unbalanced Euro-American relationship, both in the sharing of power in the military structure and in the political decision-making process,” French President Jacques Chirac warned the summit.

Madrid was supposed to be the occasion when France brought its 398,000-strong military back under NATO command for the first time since 1966. But Chirac, while admitting some progress had been made in giving Europeans more powers and important jobs, told a news conference that the process wasn’t “fast enough or far-reaching enough” to merit such a step by his country.

Like last month’s summit of the European Union, where agreement was reached to expand that trade bloc eastward in principle, NATO’s Madrid meeting once again showed that Europe, despite its growing political and military ambitions and its restiveness at what many on the continent view as arrogant, domineering conduct by the Clinton administration, finds it nearly impossible to forge a united front to rival Washington’s leadership.

“At the end of the day, when it comes to Bosnia and so forth, who makes the tough decisions in the alliance?” the NATO official asked rhetorically, referring to the United States.