This year, the legislatures of the 16 Nato member countries will take the most momentous decision regarding European security since the Yalta and Potsdam meetings at the close of the second world war. Seven years after the end of the cold war, should Nato quietly declare vic-tory and stalk silently from the European scene? Or should it go boldly forward, to seek new tasks from the Carpathian basin to the foothills of the Hindu Kush?
The accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to Nato was approved at the Nato Madrid summit last July. In February their entry was approved by the Canadian and Danish parliaments, and most others are expected to follow suit in the next few months. More important, on 30th April the US Senate approved the enlargement of Nato-by the comfortable margin of 80 to 19. Senate approval of Nato expansion laid to rest fears that the end of the cold war would lead to a resurgence of isolationism. International organisations, from the UN to the IMF, are highly unpopular in the US, but Nato is regarded with favour-presumably because it is an "international" organisation over which the US exercises tight control.
The Nato debate unfolded in a sporadic and confused manner and passed almost unnoticed by the American public. The liberal American foreign policy establishment mounted a strenuous campaign against Nato expansion-a campaign which appears to have failed, despite the presence of Bill Clinton in the White House. The anti-Nato lobby included respected academics such as Michael Mandelbaum and John Gaddis, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, and the father of containment policy himself, George Kennan. (Samuel Huntington bitingly observed that Kennan's opposition to Nato expansion is not surprising; he was against the creation of Nato back in 1949.)
The debate produced some strange bedfellows, with liberals and conservatives on both sides. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that Nato is both a military and a political organisation. Its core purpose, enshrined in Article 5, is to provide its members with collective security against external attack. However, Nato entry has strong political overtones, symbolising membership in the western democratic community. Hence, some people argue that the central Europeans deserve the political reward of Nato membership irrespective of the military implications; others worry about the implications of the symbolic exclusion of Russia and other countries which did not make it into the first round of expansion.
Opponents of Nato expansion argue that moving the alliance eastwards will antagonise Russia and encourage it to behave more aggressively towards its neighbours. Nato expansion is a classic example of the "security dilemma." According to this, steps to promote a country's own security may provoke reactions by potential adversaries which increase the risk of war. In response, Nato proponents argue that Russia has nothing to fear from a defensive alliance, and can be persuaded not to take aggressive counter-measures.
The main contention of expansion advocates is that Nato has worked to preserve peace in Europe, both by deterring aggression from countries outside the alliance and by encouraging member countries to see each other as allies. If Nato did not bring in any new members from central Europe, it would be restricting itself to its cold war mission and would thus consign itself to gradual irrelevance. Enlargement is necessary to reaffirm US commitment to preserving peace in Europe. Nato expansion carries risks, to be sure, but the uncertainty which would follow from dismantling the only extant security alliance in Europe would be much higher.
Unfortunately, the debate over Nato expansion has become clouded by emotional rhetoric about the cold war. Both sides have been using it to settle old scores about the abandonment of east Europe on the one hand, or the demonisation of the Soviet Union on the other. The anaemic public debate has tended to overlook the real challenge: the shift in the type of military missions which Nato will have to fulfill. No longer simply a deterrent to aggression from Russia, Nato is also the only viable military instrument for damping down conflicts in the Balkans or elsewhere on the periphery of Europe. (Nato planners are currently studying a range of options for intervening in Kosovo, which could encompass everything from helping to deliver humanitarian aid to air strikes.)
THE OLD Nato
Nato was a unique-and uniquely successful-military organisation. For 42 years it kept the peace in Europe by preventing an outbreak of war between the two nuclear superpowers. It did so without firing a shot, although this was only possible because it showed itself more than ready to go to war.
It is easy, in retrospect, to take the achievements of Nato for granted; to assume that the cold war stayed cold because nuclear weapons were innately unusable. Such an assumption is unwarranted. Nato was not an empty symbol but a military organisation, with 300,000 US troops in West Germany poised to go into battle at a moment's notice. A small example: Nato combat units kept their stores in warehouses on the back of trucks. Within an hour the entire logistical apparatus of an armoured brigade could be moved out to a camouflaged forest location.
The role of Nato combat units as a "tripwire" in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack was crucial in sowing doubt in the mind of Soviet leaders: if the Nato armies started to crumble, would they start lobbing tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield? That, then, was the "old Nato": a military alliance serious about fulfilling its obligations under Article 5 to come to the aid of a member state under attack.
What happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union? The western frontier of the Russian state has been pushed 500 miles to the east and new countries have emerged (Belarus, Ukraine) providing a buffer zone between Russia and central Europe. Russia still has plenty of nuclear weapons (more, in fact, than the US), but it requires a prodigious feat of imagination to come up with a scenario in which Russia's conventional armed forces pose a military threat to Poland or Hungary.
The traditional military role of Nato as a conventional-force tripwire to deter nuclear war is no longer relevant. Nato has even, apparently, ceased to conduct contingency planning for such a war. The official line is that, were the bad guys to return to power in Moscow, it would take them years to rebuild Russia's army, and then to reposition Russian forces in Belarus and Ukraine. By that time Nato would have come up with a new operational strategy. So, from the point of view of military planning-the raison d'?tre of the alliance during the cold war-the old Nato has already gone. But even as the old Nato became irrelevant, demands grew that it should be enlarged to include the former Warsaw Pact countries of central Europe.
In retrospect, the collapse of communism seems inevitable. Yet a decade ago it seemed almost impossible to imagine that central Europe would free itself from Moscow's tutelage, still less that the Soviet Union would collapse. Overnight, what was inconceivable came to be seen as inevitable. A similar paradigm shift has taken place with regard to Nato expansion: what was unthinkable became unavoidable.
In the initial years following the fall of the Berlin Wall the attention of east-central European leaders was focused on negotiating the withdrawal of Soviet forces. The January 1990 deal between Moscow and Bonn which cleared the path to German unification included a pledge not to place nuclear weapons or station Nato forces on the territory of the former East Germany, but made no mention of Nato expansion. Russian diplomats have since claimed that "informal" commitments were given to Mikhail Gorbachev that Nato would not expand, but this seems to derive from wishful thinking. The fact is that back in 1990 it did not occur to either Washington or Moscow that Nato might expand.
The character of the debate changed with the failed Soviet coup of August 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. With the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Germany and the fact that Russia's borders now lay hundreds of miles to the east (save for the Kaliningrad enclave), it became possible to imagine Polish entry into Nato.
In those early years Washington focused its diplomatic efforts on building a good relationship with the new Russia. US policy towards Russia was orchestrated by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a leading "dove" who saw Moscow as a partner in building a new post-cold war order.
The administration's position on Nato took a 180 degree turn at the end of 1993. The change was a result of both woolly emotionalism and hard realpolitik. A pivotal event was the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in April 1993, at which Bill Clinton was berated by Presidents Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa for doing nothing to ease the pain of transition in east-central Europe. Clinton buckled under this attack. By July 1994, in his tour of eastern Europe, he was saying that it was not a matter of whether to expand Nato, but when.
It would have been quixotic to base US security policy on a gesture to right the wrongs of 20th century history. But behind the rhetoric of overcoming the legacy of Yalta, the US policy shift was motivated by a more serious concern-a growing awareness that Russia's political trajectory was not necessarily benign. Boris Yeltsin's dismissal of the Russian parliament in September 1993 was followed by elections in December which saw a victory for communist and nationalist forces-with the party of wacky nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky polling 23 per cent.
As the months passed, however, passions calmed. The state duma turned out to be toothless: such was the concentration of power in Yeltsin's hands. As a result, US policymakers soft-pedalled the question of Nato expansion, and in 1994 and 1995 attention was diverted to the Bosnian imbroglio. Yeltsin's invasion of Chechnya in December 1994 provided a reminder of the Russian leader's willingness to resort to violence, but Washington studiously avoided criticising Yeltsin for his efforts to prevent Chechen independence.
The onset of the 1996 US presidential election campaign, and the need to woo ethnic lobbies such as the Chicago Poles, returned the Nato issue to the front burner. But this time the administration was motivated more by a desire to placate the east Europeans than by a hard-nosed calculation of security interests. Hence the shift in tone of the debate from military security to political inclusion. Nato expansion was a reward to the central Europeans for choosing the path of "market democracy," and a carrot to encourage other countries to follow. In 1997 the administration's campaign to move the Nato accession process forward moved into high gear, with the opening of a special office in the State Department to promote congressional and public support for Nato expansion.
MEET THE NEW Nato
Once the first round of Nato enlargement takes place, we must hope that attention will shift to the neglected question of a change in Nato's mission.
The new Nato will still have the potential to deter Russian aggression should the need arise. But it will also need to develop a new profile for the 21st century. The old Nato was structured around a bipolar confrontation, but in the future the alliance will be multilateral in scope. The old Nato was built around preparations for an all-out war: the new model will involve rapid response in a variety of missions, from humanitarian aid through peace-keeping to peacemaking. Its range of activities will extend beyond the territory of existing member states-as exemplified by Nato operations in Bosnia, and possibly next in Kosovo.
The new Nato must include the active participation of non-member states, even including Russia. The Partnership for Peace programme already involves the armed forces of 43 nations in joint training and exercises. Hence the landmark Founding Act, signed between Nato and Russia in May 1997, giving Russia a voice in Nato councils and opening the door to a role in operations. At the time, US hawks saw the Founding Act as a political sop to ease Russian opposition to Nato expansion. In reality it is more ambitious and far-sighted in intent, and represents a serious effort to bring Russia into Nato operations.
Some argue that it would have been better to create a new security organisation, rather than try to graft new missions on to tired old Nato. Experience suggests that it is much harder to create a new international organisation from scratch than to adapt an existing entity. Moreover, efforts to bolster existing institutions which could substitute for Nato expansion have proved woefully inadequate.
The EU has shown no enthusiasm for developing its own military arm. The Western European Union, the body which unites European members of Nato, is a paper tiger with no capacity to deploy troops. The fact that the WEU could not even come up with a force to chase off Albanian bandits in 1996-that job fell to the Italian army-ended the argument about the viability of the WEU as even a partial alternative to Nato. The US still has a monopoly of command and control, intelligence gathering, satellite reconnaissance and long-range air transport; and Nato is currently the only vehicle through which these assets are made available for use in Europe.
The Yugoslav experience is also instructive. The limits of the UN approach were revealed by the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995, under the eyes of Dutch peacekeepers. The pusillanimity of the international community only ended with the Nato air strikes of 1995. Nato intervention did not "solve" the Bosnian riddle, but it did stop the killing. Moreover, the intervention came with the participation-under US command-of Russian army units.
This remarkable development has not featured prominently in the Nato expansion debate. It should be shouted from the rooftops, yet US officials are keeping quiet about it. Why? Perhaps because it clashes with the Yalta imagery, which they allowed to dominate the expansion debate. More likely the reason is that the whole question of US involvement in the former Yugoslavia is potentially explosive. If some of the 23,000 US troops get drawn into a shooting war and start taking casualties, another Somalia d?b?cle might unfold. Hence the US was careful to insulate the Yugoslav situation from the Nato debate, refusing Italian and French requests to include Slovenia, for example, in a bid to ensure that Nato expansion could proceed even if Yugoslavia explodes.
The new missions for Nato would not completely displace the old Article 5 guarantee. However, collective security against external attack would have a lower priority in planning and force structure than during the cold war. For example, the new entrants are so geographically distant from Russia that they will not have to spend billions of dollars modernising their conventional forces to act as a credible nuclear tripwire. But this argument will become more difficult to sustain if the next round of Nato enlargement includes the Baltic countries. It is possible to imagine a conflict erupting between, say, Estonia and Russia, and it is not clear whether Nato would be able to develop a military presence which could credibly threaten Russia with nuclear retaliation if Estonia was attacked. Expanding Nato to the Baltics is problematic even for the "new Nato."
what about russia?
US policymakers may have hit upon a formula for Nato expansion in the face of an indifferent public and congressional leaders whose foreign policy repertoire is limited to teary-eyed invocations of past horrors. But Nato was and must remain a military alliance, not merely a political club for trans-Atlantic democracies.
Without sufficient public understanding of the new mission of Nato as a multilateral, inclusive peacekeeping alliance, there is a danger that insufficient time, money and effort will be invested to make Nato effective. Rather, US leaders may rest on their laurels when the first round of new entrants is accepted, increasing the anxiety of east-central Europeans jostling to join the second round.
Nato expansion could turn into a counter-productive exercise in political symbolism. The Poles, Czechs and Hungarians are being told "you are part of the west." Implicitly, the others are being told "you are not part of the west yet." If this trend continues, Nato will become a symbol of European division rather than a vehicle for European security.
The Russians are watching these developments with jaundiced eyes. Still, fears that Nato expansion will make it more likely that aggressive, reactionary forces will win power in the Kremlin are overstated. Such worries are a relic of cold war thinking: they perpetuate the image of Russia as a "neurotic bear" riven by psychological insecurities.
This line of thinking overstates the importance of foreign policy for contemporary Russia. Russian security policy is in ruins; and both the public and the political elite are engrossed in economic affairs-the struggle to survive, the struggle to get rich. Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov has engineered something of a revival of foreign policy since his appointment two years ago, but this is little more than a holding operation, trying to maintain Russia's influence over its core geopolitical interests (not least of which is the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation), with no illusions that Russia can rebuild a sphere of influence beyond its borders anytime soon-even within the former USSR.
It is true that Nato expansion has had the effect of uniting all parts of the Russian political spectrum, from wise westernisers to nutty nationalists. This is usually taken to mean that Nato expansion is bad for Russia, and that the west should think twice before making the move. But this very unanimity can also be interpreted to suggest that Nato expansion is not a divisive and threatening issue, but a relatively abstract and empty symbol around which the Russian elite can afford to rally. Ex-general Alexander Lebed has bluntly stated that Nato expansion poses no threat to Russian security interests, and he is right. After months of bombast and pouting, Russia did eventually sign the Founding Act in May 1997, and thus formally acquiesced in Nato expansion.
What are the worst-case scenarios which are circulating among Russian hardliners? Russia's mainstream leaders seem offended by the mere symbolism of, say, the Baltic countries joining Nato. They surely cannot believe that if Estonia joined Nato it would feel emboldened to launch a pogrom against ethnic Russian residents or make territorial claims on its huge Russian neighbour. (If Russia is worried about its border with Estonia, it should sign the border treaty currently pending ratification.) Some Russian nationalists allege that the US is plotting to put Russia on the list of international pariah states, and will not rest until Russia has been stripped of its nuclear arsenal, just as Saddam Hussein is being deprived of his weapons of mass destruction. According to this vision, Nato "encirclement" could provide the US with the capacity to blockade Russia.
Rather than worrying about appeasing Russian fantasies, Nato should be moving ahead to build on the experience of Bosnia, drawing Russia into playing a positive role in conflict-resolution in the Balkans, the Caucasus and elsewhere. There is a mission for Nato in the heartland of Eurasia, but that mission has little to do with reversing the legacy of Yalta.
