BYRONICA
Monthly newsletter of The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies Vol.
IV, No. 9 (September 2001), pp. 9-11
TRUE COST OF NATO EXPANSION
Srdja Trifkovic
Following the second summit meeting between Presidents George W. Bush
and Vladimir Putin at the G8 summit in Genoa last July, the proponents
of the missile defense plan - including the requisite American
abrogation of the 1972 Antibalistic Missile Treaty - and of NATO's
further expansion claimed a victory for their policies. They alleged
that the Russian leader is now reconciled to his country's incapacity to
resist either scheme, and reveled that Putin's inability to say "nyet"
amounts to a blank check for the United States to proceed without pause
on both fronts. Some have also invoked the results of the summit to
undercut criticism of those projects in Europe, notably in France,
Germany and Italy.
Mr. Putin irritably countered such reactions in Washington by repeating
his suggestion, first made over a year ago, that the Atlantic alliance
should admit Russia as a member - thus proving that it no longer sees it
as an enemy - or that it should disband as a geopolitical anachronism.
What Putin really meant is that NATO should close shop. The West is not
dangling the prospect of NATO membership, not even to make it easier for
Moscow to swallow admission of the Baltic republics. Putin knows the
score and merely wants to underscore the contradiction in extending the
alliance to Russian borders while claiming that it is not targeted
against his country.
To placate the Russians the Administration sent defense secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld on a day-return trip to Moscow (August 13) in an attempt to
sell the forthcoming American withdrawal from the ABM and the next round
of NATO expansion. His trip was an exercise in public relations, because
- as The New York Times put it on August 11 - "the outcome is
preordained": On missile defense and on NATO expansion "the United
States is unyielding." So why should Rumsfeld clock twenty thousand
miles in two days merely to talk to his Russian counterpart Sergei
Ivanov of "a new relationship" between the two countries that supposedly
require them to "move beyond the Cold War institutions such as the ABM
treaty"? Because the Administration wants to cite his trip as proof of
its good faith effort to appease the Russians and turn them into
"strategic partners" before Mr. Bush announces withdrawal from the ABM
treaty. This will happen by next November, paving the way for an
aggressive antiballistic test schedule in the spring of 2002. As a
Washington source put it, "we are on automatic pilot, and there's
nothing, nothing, the Russians can do about it."
Such neoconservative triumphalism, rampant in Mr. Rumsfeld's own
department, is no substitute for coherence, and the apparent ability of
the Administration to go ahead with "Son of Star Wars," or to extend
NATO deep into Russia's back yard, is no proof that those policies are
desirable or justified. Those plans entail hidden political and security
costs that may become fully apparent only when it is too late to reverse
the decision. There are five main areas of concern.
1. Rapprochement between Moscow and Peking
It is in the interest of the United States to prevent the emergence of
an alliance between other powers that would be directed against it. One
consequence of its present policy is the ongoing improvement in
Russo-Chinese relations. It does not have the character of a formal
alliance as yet, but may nevertheless create the groundwork for its
emergence if Moscow and Peking continue to feel threatened by what they
perceive as American unilateralism.
Mr. Putin came to Genoa only two days after signing a landmark
friendship treaty with China that was obviously designed to challenge
American influence. He and his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin, were
careful to emphasize that they were not creating a military alliance,
but in the same breath they issued a joint statement supporting the ABM.
After the signing ceremony in the Kremlin, Mr Jiang called the
friendship treaty "a milestone in the development of Russian-Chinese
relations."
The State Department was quick to dismiss the treaty, stressing its lack
of specific mutual guarantees and obligations, but this is an example of
historical shortsightedness. The Russian-Chinese treaty is comparable to
l'entente cordialle between Great Britain and France of a century ago.
That arrangement was also not a formal alliance to start with, as the
Germans consoled themselves at the time. Nevertheless, it did have a
similar underlying logic, it created a pattern of relations that was to
become fully apparent in August 1914.
Of particular concern to the Chinese is President Bush's declaration
that the United States would do "whatever it took to help Taiwan defend
itself"
- which amounted to the revival of the defense treaty defunct since
1979. In the aftermath of the spy plane affair last April the
Administration also announced that it would sell submarines, destroyers,
missiles and electronic equipment to Taiwan, although this decision is
in violation of the Taiwan Relations Act that restricted sales to
defensive weapons. The subsequent permission to Taiwan's President Chen
Shui-bian to meet U.S. congressmen during stopovers in the United States
amounted to granting Taiwan semi-official status, in violation of the
key "one-China" commitment. In Peking all this confirmed that China was
faced with a strategic challenge that demands a long-term response.
The Chinese, the oldest nation-state in the world, take a long view of
foreign affairs, and the treaty signed by Putin and Jiang illustrates
the point. It seeks to settle permanently the centuries-old border
disputes between Russia and China that nearly led to war in 1969, since
the absence of territorial disputes is a key precondition for effective
alliances. Germany's solemn recognition of the Brenner frontier in 1934
paved the way for the Axis in 1936, and - less ominously - the Saarland
referendum helped Adenauer and de Gaulle launch their own historic
reconciliation just over two decades later.
2. Russia remains an adversary
If both the proposed missile defense program and a new round of NATO
expansion go ahead regardless of Moscow's misgivings - and this now
seems inevitable - the result will be perpetuation of an open-ended and
inherently adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow.
Forget the soothing Natocrats' rhetoric; to appreciate the effect of
enlargement on Russia's political establishment just imagine the
reaction in this country if China were to sign a pact with Mexico, Cuba,
and the republics of Central America, if it equipped and trained their
armies, and guaranteed the inviolability of the Rio Grande frontier.
NATO is seen in Russia as a slight that goes way beyond a celebration of
the end of Communism - which most Russians could share quite happily -
to a perception that Russia as a nation is a defeated adversary. In
addition, key Administration officials - Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz - have all made statements that indicate that the Bush
administration looks upon Russia as an inherently antagonistic power, a
near-bankrupt rogue state with missiles, to be kept in check when
necessary - and perhaps plundered when possible - but disabused of any
delusions it may have about its great power status.
A predictable and possibly intended paradox was at work. The containment
of any possible future Russian threat has been frankly advanced by some
NATO apologists (such as Dr. Henry Kissinger) as the key reason for its
continued existence and enlargement. But this approach distorted
Russia's post-communist evolution in favor of its traditional distrust
of Western intentions and thus enabled the "NATO Forever" enthusiasts to
turn their position with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, some of
them - notably former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski -
have acted as if they actively sought to force Russia into an
adversarial position, in order to pursue the policy of its isolation and
eventual dismemberment.
If one supposed argument for NATO's expansion is to enhance
Western-style democracy in Eastern Europe, in Russia it has already had
the opposite effect. The first victims of the previous round of
enlargement were Moscow's own "reformists" and starry-eyed friends of
the West, of Yegor Gaidar's ilk. It is no longer possible for someone
like Andrey Kozirev to be an influential voice in Moscow, let alone
Russia's foreign minister. Those people are now finished, some safely
sinecured by an NGO or a Western university, others - the genuine
idealists - disillusioned and personally discredited. In the perception
of the Russian policy-making establishment their assurances of Western
benevolence proved to be worse than mistakes; they are now seen as
deliberate misrepresentations aimed at lowering Russia's guard at a
vulnerable time of transition. The realists who are now in charge in
Moscow are not a priori "anti-Western" (unless one adopts the
neoconservative definition of someone unwilling to submit to every whim
from Washington). Putin's circle can and will do business with the West,
but it does not harbor illusions about it. The professions of Western
benevolence do not affect its strategic thinking, which now entails an
unabashed reliance on nuclear weapons and their possible first use. This
is hugely detrimental to American security, and cannot be offset by any
conjectural benefit of extending pax Americana to the suburbs of St.
Petersburg.
The only rational reason for a country to enter into an alliance is to
enhance its security. By assuring Russia's continued status as an
adversary of the United States NATO expansion will do the opposite. Even
in its weakened state, with all its economic and demographic problems,
Russia remains a nuclear power with nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads. This
number may be halved, or qurtered, without significantly changing the
magnitude of the threat it presents. If and when NATO is enlarged and
America proceeds with its antimissile system, Russia will retaliate by
putting more nuclear warheads on to each of its ballistic missiles. That
scores of North American cities will remain on their list of potential
targets goes without saying. While this may be of no consequence to the
denizens of Riga or Vilnius, it should focus the minds in New York,
Seattle, or Omaha. By extending its protectorate in Eastern Europe the
United States is diminishing, not enhancing its own security.
3. U.S. overextends security guarantees
Another cost of the forthcoming NATO expansion is the security guarantee
itself, the cornerstone of the alliance. Article V of the NATO Charter
states that an attack on one is an attack on all, an automatic guarantee
of aid to an ally in distress. The United States will supposedly provide
its protective cover to a host of new clients right in Russia's
geopolitical backyard. It will theoretically accept the risk of an
all-out war in defense of an area that had never been deemed vital to
this country's interests. But once included, those flatlands will become
a permanent fixture of our foreign policy establishment's mindset.
This is a form of pernicious "vital-interest-creep": the United States
will soon assume the nominal responsibility for open-ended maintenance
of a host of disputed frontiers that were drawn often arbitrarily by
communists, Versailles diplomats and assorted local tyrants, and bear
little relation to ethnicity, geography, or history. At no visible
benefit to itself America will underwrite the freezing in time of a
post-Soviet outcome that is neither inherently stable nor necessarily
"just" or "democratic." It will do so at a time when there is simply no
such thing as a "security vacuum" in Eastern Europe. It will impose a
formal, calcifying organizational framework that will make eventual
adjustments - if and when they occur - not only more potentially violent
for the countries concerned, but also for the United States, which does
not and should not have a vested interest in preserving an indefinite
status quo in the region.
That Washington and Jefferson would be horrified is obvious; even
Metternich would frown, not on principle but because the policy is
simply illogical. It means two things: either the United States is
serious that it would risk a thermonuclear war for the sake of, say,
Estonia's border with Russia, which is insane, or it is not serious,
which is both frivolous and dangerous. President Clinton naturally
leaned to the latter option. He tried to smoke but not inhale by
questioning the meaning of words and asserting that Article V "does not
define what actions constitute 'an attack' or prejudge what Alliance
decisions might then be made in such circumstances." He claimed the
right of the United States "to exercise individual and collective
judgment over this question."
This classic fudge cannot be the basis of serious policy. This is an
echo of previous Western experiments with security guarantees in the
region - of Czechoslovakia's carve-up in October 1938, or Poland's
destruction in September 1939 - which provide a warning that promises
nonchalantly given today may turn into bounced checks or smoldering
cities tomorrow. Over seven decades later the lesson of Locarno for the
Bush administration is
clear: security guarantees that are not based on the provider's complete
resolve to fight a fully blown war to fulfill them are worse than no
guarantees at all. They are almost certain to be challenged sooner or
later. The exact price that will have to be paid in America's
credibility, or security, or both will only become fully apparent when
it is too late.
4. Division of Europe will be perpetrated
There is another geopolitical price to pay. By having its nose rubbed in
its defeat Russia will remain an adversary at a time when its economic
and demographic weakness may result in a violent Asiatic scramble for
its natural resources and increasingly depopulated territories along its
southern rim and east of the Urals. By extending its cordon sanitaire
around Russia the United States indirectly encourages the belief that
the bear may soon be up for grabs. A coherent long-term policy based on
American interest would dictate a very different strategy: Far from
being treated as a threat, Russia should be helped on the road to
recovery. In the short term its recovery may help it develop democratic
institutions that would make its aggressive comeback unlikely. In the
longer term Russia needs our help so that it can become the West's
bulwark against the real threat to our common security, the new
antemurale christiensitatis as we enter the century that is certain to
see a renewed assault of militant Islam on an enfeebled Europe.
NATO extension pleases some East European ethnic lobbies that never see
the forest for the trees, but it will jeopardize Europe's chances of
long-term survival. The United States should understand why some former
Soviet satellites have a vested geopolitical interest and an even more
acute psychological need to treat Russia as the enemy, but it should
never allow itself to be seduced by their obsessions. They all proclaim
their undying devotion to the ideological assumptions of the new NATO
but their real agenda is twofold: to have a western (read: American)
security guarantee against Russia, and to strengthen their own position
vis-�-vis those neighbors - mostly again Russians - with whom they have
an ongoing or potential dispute. NATO membership may even embolden some
to revive territorial or ethnic claims that would have otherwise
remained dormant. A former Hungarian defense official, Zoltan Pecze, was
frank: "It is in the interests of the ethnic Hungarians living beyond
our borders. . . NATO membership does not mean giving up our national
interests. On the contrary: it means an opportunity to assert our
national interest." Turkey shows that the alliance cannot stop one of
its members from aggressive intent or adventurous conduct.
Future and recent members know - and rather like - what Western NATO
apologists unconvincingly deny: that extending NATO into Eastern Europe
is a real threat to Russia, and that it will indefinitely perpetuate the
division of the continent. Instead of pandering to the former
satellites' insecurity the United States should encourage them to
comprehend what many farsighted "real" Westerners already see: that we
all need a Russian economic revival focused on its links with Europe,
and a strategic understanding with Washington based on the underlying
common interest with the United States in keeping Islamic marauders at
bay. A litmus test of their preparedness for the "Western" club should
be their readiness to follow, in relation to Russia, the Franco-German
post-1945 model of overcoming ancient grievances.
5. Global hegemonists win again
There is a domestic reason NATO expansion is bad for America. It
strengthens the unholy alliance of one-world multilateralists and
neoconservative global interventionists who run the show in Washington
and who now see the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a permanent
tool for the execution of their policies. This misuse of NATO by the
enemies of the Old Republic is a recent phenomenon, and painful to those
of us who appreciated the alliance's key function during the Cold War.
In NATO's early days and until the fall of communism America's leading
role in the alliance was not incompatible with a foreign policy based on
the pragmatically defined national interest and true to the spirit of
the Republic. NATO came into being as an implicitly temporary
arrangement to prevent Stalin's invasion of Western Europe. It was
America's response to a dramatic moment in European history when, had it
been left to its own devices, the Old Continent could have succumbed to
totalitarian might. Its creators never thought of the U.S. role as
permanent: General Eisenhower told Congress at the time that American
troops would not be needed along the Iron Curtain for more than ten
years, by which time the Europeans would be able to defend themselves. A
decade turned into four, but with the disintegration of the Soviet Union
and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact the stated rationale for NATO's
existence had finally disappeared. Yet instead of proclaiming victory
and disbanding it, the ruling duopoly in Washington has invented a new
mission for NATO: that of the self-appointed promoter of democracy,
protector of human rights, and guardian against instability.
It was on those grounds, rather than in response to any supposed threat,
that the Clinton Administration pushed for the admission of Poland,
Bohemia, and Hungary four years ago. (In Mrs. Albright's words this
expanded "the area in Europe where wars simply do not happen," implying
that the tranquility was due to some metaphysical quality of the
alliance rather than the dynamics of those European countries
themselves.) It is important to note that under the new doctrine NATO's
area of operations is no longer limited, and its "mandate" is entirely
self-generated. Its war against Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 marked
a decisive shift in NATO's mutation from a defensive alliance into a
supranational security force based on the doctrine of "humanitarian
intervention." The trusty keeper of the gate had become a roaming
vigilante.
In world affairs this remarkable process has mirrored the longer and by
now almost completed domestic evolution of the federal government into a
Leviathan unbound by constitutional restraints. The lack of debate about
missile defense or NATO's expansion is unsurprising, considering the
dominant duopoly's identity of basic assumptions and its domestic
consensus. Expansion was advocated in the Republican "Contract With
America" and eagerly embraced by President Clinton in 1996. It suited
both the globalist "left" and the hegemonist "right," for different
reasons but with the same result: George Washington's warning against
permanent alliances will now be violated in perpetuity. Reinvention of
NATO as an organization based on the ideology of neoimperial
interventionism proves yet again that foreign policy is an extension of
domestic politics.
Finally, America's insistence on the missile shield and its curious lead
in extending NATO may jeopardize its relations with some of its old
allies in Western Europe. It is notable that Mr. Putin stresses his
country's commitment to "Europe," while Russian diplomats no longer talk
of "the West" as an entity. This is no accident. During the Cold War the
unwritten trans-Atlantic agreement had Europe and America act as equals
in economics, while in defense issues the Europeans followed the lead
from Washington. This may change when the implications of NATO
enlargement become fully apparent in Paris, Rome, Brussels, and perhaps
Berlin. The Russians will be on the lookout for trans-Atlantic cracks,
and they will find them.
Neither a new cold war with Russia nor a chill in America's relations
with its European allies is in the interest of the United States,
especially with the Middle East at the boiling point and America's
position in the Far East open to challenge in the foreseeable future.
Risking them in the name of an unproven and probably unnecessary
antimissile system, and an even more harmful expansion of NATO, is
irrational and dangerous. We deserve better from a foreign policy team
that prides itself on experience, professionalism, and determination not
to be distracted by neo-Wilsonian metaphysics.
A few wise Frenchmen already suspect that the latter-day, U.S.-led Drang
nach Osten is a poisoned chalice that the Germans will only accept to
their peril. From a neoconservative, inside-the-Beltway hegemonist point
of view there is no better way to ensure American dominance in Europe in
perpetuity than by using an array of Havelite lickspitles fom the Baltic
to the Black Sea to prevent the long-overdue Russo-German rapprochement.
This historic step remains the last unfulfilled prerequisite for a long
period of stable peace throughout the Old Continent. NATO expansion will
artificially postpone it in favor of a psychotic imperial utopia made in
Washington that is utterly divorced from the interests, political
traditions, and natural inclinations of the American people.
* * * * *
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