Our Postwar Alliance Retools for the Millennium

In voting on NATO enlargement, the U.S. Senate is about to make its most consequential foreign policy decision since Congress authorized Desert Storm in 1990.

Agreeing to admit three new countries to the Atlantic Alliance is the formal issue; but the underlying premise is acceptance of America’s permanent commitment to a transatlantic security strategy for the 21st century.

In reinventing itself, the NATO alliance is pursuing four clear and connected goals:

* to ratify America’s role as a European power, in all critical dimensions;

* to preserve half a century’s gains in Western Europe, including the “denationalization” of defense and the rejection of war among the European Union’s 15 members;

* to provide strategic certainty in Central Europe, help its peoples gain a permanent home in the West, and snuff out regional conflict (Bosnia);

* and to try to draw Russia out of its 80-year self-imposed isolation, enabling it finally to be part of an encompassing European security system, rather than either villain or victim.

Since enlargement was formally decided at the January 1994 Brussels summit, NATO has pursued its four goals through a variety of interlocking means, each necessary to create security in which everyone can be a winner and no one will be a loser.

In a remarkable 44-day period last year, the allies created a new framework for European security that touched on each critical element. The Madrid NATO summit chose the three countries most ready to join the alliance now, and it kept the door open to others prepared to assume the responsibilities of membership. That was the centerpiece. But NATO also took steps to engage every European state, even those that do not some day join the alliance. Most important was the beefing up of NATO’s flagship program, the Partnership for Peace, which prepares some countries to join and lets others craft a practical engagement with NATO. In a companion venture, the allies also created a new political unit, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council.

Meanwhile, President Clinton and other allied leaders recognized that there are two very special cases in European security. Thus they signed a charter with Ukraine and, in the most revolutionary act of NATO history, concluded the NATO-Russia Founding Act. This does not reconcile Moscow to NATO’s expansion, but it does offer the possibility of a long-term strategic partnership that builds on the successful military cooperation in Bosnia and could, over the years, benefit both the alliance and Russia. And to complete the restructuring of European security, NATO agreed on a blueprint for renovating its command structure to meet tomorrow’s real-life challenges, and it completed the work of building a new relationship with the Western European Union, thus offering the chance that the European allies will take more direct responsibility for dealing with crises not so serious as to require NATO’s action.

In charting this new course, NATO has confounded its critics and defied the lessons of history in becoming the first alliance that both outlived its own success and re-created itself for a decisively different political and strategic era.

The best proof of NATO’s continued crucial importance is in Bosnia. The alliance was crumbling because of differences among the members until its first-ever military operation in 1995. Since then, a NATO-led force has kept the peace and provided the basis for civilian economic and political renovation in the most conflicted corner of Europe--remarkably, with no combat fatalities.

In so doing, the allies and partners have developed patterns of cooperation in political-military relations and among military services and environments that provide a critical basis for responding to 21st century challenges.

NATO-led cooperation in Bosnia is also a symbol, though not a conclusive test, of a central principle of NATO’s new doctrine: that every country should gain something from the alliance’s new architecture, if not everything it would like, to promote its security.

In the process, the alliance is helping to resolve dilemmas and difficulties created by all three European wars of this century, dramatized by the reconciliation of Hungary and Romania and the role of Sarajevo in 1914 vs. 1998. This is the background for inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO, taking them out of a history of competition and contention by Great Powers and marked so regularly by tragedy for themselves and all of Europe. For them and for the others who will later join the alliance, the strategic and political certitude conferred by NATO membership--and the direct link to U.S. power and purpose--can underpin all other efforts to engage them in the West, including those by the European Union.

Now the Senate must play its historic role: deciding whether to embrace the full body of this strategic vision--a vision consistent with America’s interests and consonant with our deepest values as a people.