NATO enlargement: what's the rush?

• Author: Garfinkle, Adam
• Position: North Atlantic Treaty Organization

The question of enlarging NATO has occasioned the most important foreign policy debate in the United States since the end of the Cold War, and rightly so. The issue is integral to determining America's future role in Europe, still a very important place in world politics.

But it has been a curious and unsatisfying debate in several ways: Unsatisfying because it often seems as though there has been no debate at all, only contrary assertions passing each other without making useful contact; curious because of the various and contradictory trajectories of shifting opinions. Several policy analysts who started out favoring NATO enlargement have subsequently become opponents of it, while the Clinton administration has moved in the opposite direction, from skepticism and efforts at deflection to avid embrace and the declaration, last summer, that debate over essentials was closed.(1)

Not only have the intellectual and policy processes been out of sync, but the debate has also divided both rock-hearted realists and passionate idealists in unusual ways. That Henry Kissinger and Vaclav Havel find themselves together on one side of the issue, Paul Nitze and Richard Barnett together on the other, suggests that this is a trickier problem than most. And it is tricky, not least because the question at the center of the debate - to enlarge NATO or not? - turns out to be the wrong question (but of this more below).

Realist Enlargers

Realists define foreign policy as first and foremost about being national security in the literal sense: protecting the country and its citizens from physical or economic harm. How does the prospect of NATO enlargement look from this perspective, in which geopolitics trumps all? As indicated above, it looks equivocal, for, although operating from the same premises, various realists reach different conclusions. To give one striking example: a Council on Foreign Relations working group co-chaired by Henry Kissinger and Harold Brown could not agree on their Final Report in 1995. That report - Should NATO Expand? - lists only Brown as chairman, a note within stating that Kissinger and Samuel Huntington, though members of the group, declined to sign it.

The central argument made by realists who favor enlargement is that, in the nature of things, given its size and historical ambitions, a resurgent Russia is likely again in due course to threaten Central and Eastern Europe (hereafter, for the sake of parsimony, simply Central Europe). It is therefore best to seize the moment of opportunity and to move the line of confrontation east while Russia is weak. We should consolidate the historic outcome of 1989-91 while we can, permanently erasing the unnatural division of Europe represented by the Cold War.

It is on the basis of this logic that such advocates refer unrepentantly, and often unselfconsciously, to Central Europe, the Baltic republics, and Ukraine as a No Man's Land or a cast of nervous neutrals - as though the Washington-Moscow conflict were a historical constant rather than a politically contingent condition. Peter Rodman expresses clearly the essential logic of the pro-enlargement realist case - its assumption of the incorrigible nature of Moscow's ambition - in these terms: "The only potential great-power security problem in Central Europe is the lengthening shadow of Russian strength, and NATO still has the job of counter-balancing it. Russia is a force of nature; all this is inevitable."(2)

Further, not to expand NATO would be taken by the Russians as tacit U.S. acceptance of Moscow's right to define Central Europe as its security glacis. And to allow Moscow this interpretation would amount to acquiescence in the rebirth of the Warsaw Pact, or something like it - a folly, some say, destined to rival Yalta as a symbol of infamy.

Some prestigious early commentary also argued for NATO enlargement in institutional as well as substantive terms. We need NATO against an uncertain future, said Dr. Kissinger in 1994, but "NATO cannot long survive if the borders it protects are not threatened while it refuses to protect the borders of adjoining countries that do feel threatened."(3) Senator Richard Lugar's view that NATO had to go out-of-area or risk being out-of-business was similarly motivated: preserve the alliance by expanding its functions as well as its members, for while we do not need a military shield now, we may find it impossible to reconstitute one should we need it later.(4)

Other realists favor expanding NATO less out of fear of a future Russian military threat, and more as a means of achieving long-term political stabilization in Europe. This argument comes in three related variations.

First, expanding NATO is said to be necessary to protect Central Europe's new democracies and their liberal economic reforms from being swallowed up by political opportunists feeding on the dislocations of the post-communist era. The West, it is maintained, needs to give these countries a roof for their reconstruction more than a wall against an external threat.(5) This is particularly the case in such an ethnically heterogeneous region, it is argued, because liberal free-market democracies provide better protection against explosions of ethnic hatred than regimes commandeered by nationalist oligarches.

Second, keeping Central Europe at peace with itself, both within and between its countries, helps prevent a broader danger, that of this region's again becoming a theater for the intrigues of Russia and Germany, a fate that has been its historic lot. Some worry more about Russia, some more about Germany, but all worry about a collision (or collusion) between them. The gist of the pro-enlargement view based on this concern is that just as NATO managed in time to solve the problem that had given shape to the First World War - the long-standing Franco-German rivalry - so it should expand to solve the problem that helped shape the Second World War - the equally long-standing Russo-German rivalry. Few who reason this way claim that this will be easy. What they do argue is that this should be a preeminent task of a geopolitically-minded statecraft for the next several decades, and that only the wise application of American power can achieve it.

Third, there is fear of German resurgence itself. After forty years of tense competition between the United States and Russia, few are inhibited from speaking of Russia as a future problem. Not so with Germany, a democracy and an ally; but the fear exists and the inhibitions do sometimes break down. Tony Judt describes the basic physiognomy of this fear in the context of EU deepening; now that the Germans

. . . lead Europe, where should they take it? And of what Europe are they the natural leaders - the West-leaning Europe forged by the French, or the traditional Europe of German interests, where Germany sits not on the eastern edge but squarely in the middle? . . . [T]he image of a Germany resolutely turning away from troubling Eastern memories, clinging fervently to its postwar Western allies, as though they alone stood between the nation and its demons, is not very convincing.(6)

Anthony Hartley, too, in an essay entitled "Thomas Mann and Germany's Demons", argues that "Germany still retains the indetermination that Mann saw in it. Behind it looms the ambivalence of German culture. No one", he added, "can have much certainty as to the direction in which a newly reunited Germany will jump."(7) Robert W. Tucker and Thomas C. Hendrickson have argued that Germany as "the most powerful state in Europe will entertain pretensions to a role and status commensurate with its power. In doing so, it is bound to stimulate the...