The World : NATO : Come Home From ‘Over There’

Led by the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, on the eve of its 50th anniversary commemoration, went to war in Kosovo, in large part because the alliance’s post-Cold War credibility was thought to be on the line in the Balkans. Almost overlooked during the debate over intervening in Kosovo were two questions: A decade after the Cold War’s end, why is NATO still in business, and why does Washington still consider the maintenance of a U.S. military presence in Europe to be a vital U.S. interest?

NATO was created to contain the expansion of Soviet power and to protect the territorial security of its members. It succeeded without firing a shot in anger. Yet, last spring, the United States and its European allies were at war in Europe for the first time since 1945. They were fighting an offensive war against a small, economically run-down nation, Yugoslavia, that had not committed external aggression but was waging a counterinsurgency campaign on its sovereign territory against ethnic Albanian separatist rebels.

It is a well-established geopolitical lesson that alliances dissolve when the common threat to members’ security dissipates. But despite the Soviet Union’s collapse, NATO has expanded geographically and broadened its strategic mission. Kosovo and its aftermath have tested this “new” NATO.

The alliance’s post-Cold War strategic imperatives are different from the “counter-hegemonic” concerns that underlay traditional U.S. European policy. From its independence, the United States has feared the prospect of a single great power dominating Europe capable of challenging it in the Western hemisphere. But because the European balance of power normally prevented the emergence of such a power, the U.S. was able to stand aloof from European politics. In 1940, however, and again after World War II, the collapse of the European balance of power impelled the United States to intervene to check Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The counter-hegemony rationale lost its forcefulness by the mid- to late 1960s, when, fully recovered from World War II’s devastation, Western Europe regained the material capability to assume full responsibility for its defense. Moreover, the threat of Soviet aggression in Europe vanished as Moscow sought to legitimize the postwar status quo.

By the early ‘70s, a new concept of U.S. European strategy emerged. It regarded NATO as the instrument of U.S. hegemony in Europe. Washington rejected Western European self-reliance because of three basic concerns. First, the U.S. worried that an independent Western Europe would become a geopolitical rival. Second, and contradictorily, it assumed that Europeans would adopt a neutral stance in the Cold War. Finally, the U.S. feared that, left to their own devices, West Europeans would backslide into their bad old geopolitical ways. To head off these scenarios, Washington reconstituted NATO as the continent’s pacifier: protecting Europeans from themselves was at least as important as protecting them from the Soviet Union.

Washington’s post-Cold War commitment to NATO rests on the assertion, constantly repeated, that because Europe’s wars always threaten U.S. interests, the best way to prevent them is for the United States to maintain a strong military presence on the continent. But as Kosovo illustrates, this approach has troubling implications.

President Bill Clinton maintains that the purpose of an enlarged NATO is to do for Central Europe what the U.S. did for Western Europe after World War II. NATO expansion, however, has damaged relations with Russia. Even before Kosovo, Moscow felt threatened by the alliance’s eastward expansion. Both because it projected the alliance into a region of strategic concern to Russia, and because it belied Washington’s contention that the new NATO is a purely defensive alliance, Kosovo heightened Moscow’s apprehensions.

In expanding its geography and strategic mission, NATO has dusted off the Cold War domino theory. U.S. policymakers contend that instability at NATO’s fringes--in the Balkans, for example--will snowball and spill over into Europe’s core, eventually affecting U.S. interests. Accordingly, NATO finds itself committed for the long haul in Bosnia and Kosovo, places that lie well outside the alliance’s Cold War realm.

The problem with the alliance’s new strategic stage is that is has no logical stopping point. NATO expansion was rationalized as a means of protecting Western Europe from instability originating in Central Europe and the Balkans. But now that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are alliance members, and now that the alliance is in the Balkans, the origins of instability have been pushed eastward. The need to defend existing security commitments leads seamlessly to calls for further enlargement, which adds new strategic commitments and entangles the U.S. in a geopolitically volatile region.

In his recent book “The Grand Chessboard,” former National Security Advisor Zbigniew K. Brzezinski makes explicit what U.S. policymakers hint at: The logic of NATO expansion means that U.S. security commitments in Europe must progressively move eastward to embrace the Baltic states, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Caspian Sea regions, and the Central Asian area of the former Soviet Union. The implications of this logic are troubling: Instability at the periphery may affect Europe, but it does not affect America’s security. Contrary to the U.S. foreign-policy establishment’s conventional wisdom, it’s not the case that Europe’s wars always affect U.S. security interests.

Since the United States achieved independence, there have been great-power wars in Europe in 1792-1802, 1803-1815, 1853-1855, 1859-1860, 1866, 1870-1871, 1877-1878, 1912-1913, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. The United States has been involved in three of them but could have remained safely out of two of the wars it fought. In 1812, hoping to conquer Canada while Britain was preoccupied with the Napoleonic wars, the U.S. initiated war with Britain. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into World War I for idealistic reasons.

Fifty years after NATO’s founding, as the alliance struggles to cope with the messy aftermath of its first war, a reassessment of America’s continental commitment is overdue. In all respects, save one, the original purposes of America’s post-World War II policy have been fulfilled: Western Europe’s remarkable recovery from the war’s ravages has not yet been matched by the emergence of a strategically independent Western Europe.

Today, as has been true for 50 years, there is an ambivalence on both sides of the Atlantic. The United States fears Western European unity and the corresponding loss of its influence on the continent. The West Europeans hesitate to take the last, most difficult steps toward unity because doing so would cost them their U.S. security blanket. Still, as diplomatic historian John Lamberton Harper observes in “American Visions of Europe,” neither Americans nor Europeans see “the status quo as either salutary or desirable.”

Only Washington can cut this Gordian knot: As long as the Europeans believe the U.S. will retain responsibility for the continent’s security, they will not unify politically and achieve strategic self-sufficiency. In the early 1950s, Dwight D. Eisenhower, serving as the alliance’s first military supreme commander, observed that if U.S. troops were still in Europe 10 years hence, NATO and the Marshall Plan would have failed. The fact that a still U.S.-dominated NATO marked its 50th anniversary fighting a war in Kosovo represents the failure, not the success of U.S. policy.

The time has come to complete America’ s historic post-1945 project and, in an orderly fashion, devolve to a stable and prosperous Europe the task of ensuring the continent’s peace and stability. Having achieved its goals in Europe, America should come home from “over there.” With the disappearance of a great-power threat, U.S. security no longer is affected by European events. There is no reason for U.S. soldiers to be asked to die for Gdansk, or for future Kosovos.*