U.S., Allies Can’t Agree on Funding New NATO

As U.S. senators prepare to ponder the wisdom and implications of a larger NATO at hearings that begin today on Capitol Hill, Europe and the United States remain worlds apart over which countries should foot the bill. The Americans want the Europeans to pick up most of it; the Europeans insist they don’t have the money--as much as $33 billion--that the enlargement process might cost.

“Normally, the U.S. can count on having allies like Germany or Britain on its side. But not this time,” said Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

For many countries in Western Europe, grappling with stagnant economies, high unemployment rates and curbs on public spending imposed by the planned single European currency, the U.S. stance on “burden sharing” in the Atlantic alliance is yet one more example of the Clinton administration’s willingness these days to try to dictate terms even to friends.

“Europeans are getting the idea that a lot is being asked of them but that there is not a ‘responsibility sharing’ in exchange,” contended Frederic Bozo, a researcher at the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations.

As usual, it is the French who are the prickliest of U.S. allies. Last week, they announced that NATO has not changed enough to warrant the return of their troops to the alliance’s unified command structure, which they left in 1966.

In his first official visit to Paris, U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen has been trying to soothe Gallic sensibilities, also rubbed raw by American opposition to a contract signed by a French-led energy consortium, Total, with Iran last week.

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“Sovereign nations, even those who are strong, dependable allies and historical friends, often see problems in a different way,” Cohen told reporters Monday.

The French have been especially irked by the continued U.S. refusal to give up control of NATO’s Southern Command, in Naples, Italy, to a European officer.

At the Madrid summit of the 16 member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in July, the Clinton administration, though outnumbered by the Europeans, put its foot down to insist that the first round of enlargement would involve only three countries: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

President Jacques Chirac of France immediately made it clear that his country will not pay a single franc more to defray any additional costs incurred. But at a meeting of alliance defense ministers in the Dutch city of Maastricht last week, it was clear that Washington still expects the bulk of the expense to be borne by current and future alliance members in Europe.

Bedeviling the debate is the annoying fact that nobody really knows how big the enlargement price tag will be, or exactly what a new, improved NATO should encompass. In February, one Pentagon study estimated the cost at $27 billion to $35 billion over the next 12 years, of which the U.S. share would be only $2 billion. Existing NATO members in Europe would pay up to $16 billion, the trio of new countries as much as $17 billion.

The American rationale for this burden-sharing formula is that the European countries are the chief beneficiaries of a safer Europe and that the continent’s armies need to outfit themselves with the vehicles, aircraft and other equipment needed to meet new standards of rapid mobility.

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Some European officials, however, have flatly rejected the U.S. estimates, and a few have suggested that what the U.S. military-industrial complex really wants is to force new NATO members to go on a buying binge of state-of-the-art American weaponry. German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe called in Maastricht for a “realistic calculation of costs, not on the basis of the Cold War.”

NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana of Spain has said most of the new expenditures should be picked up by the three new members. But what the countries emerging from decades of state socialism and fealty to a Kremlin-led military alliance can afford is a matter of debate.

U.S. foes of NATO enlargement have accused the Clinton administration of keeping the question of cost fuzzy and confusing so it won’t become a rallying point for opposition. But there’s little question that it could become a flash point for trouble. After Chirac’s “not one franc” comment in July, an offended Senate adopted a nonbinding resolution announcing that if the Europeans won’t pay “their share,” the U.S. won’t either.

“I can think of few things worse or more destructive to the health of NATO than if we enlarge the alliance and then find ourselves in a situation where there is disagreement about who is responsible for funding the costs of the enlargement process,” warned Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who introduced the resolution.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall in Washington and Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau contributed to this report.