NATO Welcomes Expansion Until It Comes Time to Pay

All 16 members of NATO are eager to see the alliance grow, as they showed in July when they invited Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to apply for membership. But beyond a shared feeling that a NATO extended eastward will mean a safer and more stable Europe, little consensus has come from NATO’s internal debates. A number of the Europeans, for example, think that Romania and Slovenia ought also to be brought quickly into NATO’s ranks, an idea the United States has flatly opposed. Now NATO again finds itself divided by the width of the Atlantic Ocean over the issue of how its growth should be paid for. It’s a dispute that could conceivably bring enlargement plans to a dead stop.

No one knows for certain how much it will cost to assimilate three new members into the alliance. Done gradually, the armies of the former Warsaw Pact states could perhaps be retrained and re-equipped for between $27 billion, the Clinton administration’s less than credible low-ball estimate, and $60 billion, the minimum figure set by the Congressional Budget Office. The alliance is supposed to come up with a common cost estimate by December.

What NATO is unlikely to come up with soon is an agreement on who will foot what share of the bill for enlargement. France, pouting because Washington vetoed Romania’s membership and furious because the United States refuses to turn over to a European officer control of NATO’s Southern Command--which consists mainly of the American Sixth Fleet--says it won’t contribute a single centime of enlargement costs. Other Europeans say there is no way they can afford to pay up to half of total expansion costs, as Washington proposes. Neither can they, say the prospective new members. All of which prompted the U.S. Senate, where hearings on expansion opened Tuesday, to adopt a nonbinding resolution in July proclaiming that if the Europeans won’t pay “their share” of enlargement costs, neither will the United States.

Cost apportionment is, obviously, something that should have been figured out before the enlargement express ever left the station. It is hardly a trivial matter. Neither is the basic question of whose interests NATO now most protects. The chief though by no means only beneficiaries are obviously the Europeans, because it’s in Europe where the stability that NATO is supposed to assure matters most. Yes, a strong NATO is also a key U.S. interest. It has proven that, at considerable expense, for the last 50 years. Now the costs NATO faces must be more equitably shared out.