The dangers of expansive realism.

• Author: Harries, Owen
• Position: Proposal for North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion

. . . it is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality. It may be boring, but one has to know where it is. We cannot have the Mississippi flowing toward the Rockies, just for a change.

- Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

In many ways NATO is a boring organization. It is a thing of acronyms, jargon, organizational charts, arcane strategic doctrines, and fired rhetoric. But there is no gainsaying that it has a Mississippi-like centrality and importance in American foreign policy. When, then, proposals are made to change it radically - to give it new (and very different) members, new purposes, new ways of conducting business, new non-totalitarian enemies (or, conversely, to dispense altogether with the concept of enemies as a rationale) - it is sensible to pay close attention and to scrutinize carefully and repeatedly the arguments that bolster those proposals. Even at the risk of making NATO boring in new ways, it is important to get things right.

Before getting down to particular arguments, the proposed expansion of NATO into Central and Eastern Europe should be placed in the wider context that made it an issue. For nearly half a century the United States and its allies fought the Cold War, not, it was always insisted, against Russia and the Russian people, but against the Soviet regime and the ideology it represented. An implicit Western objective in the Cold War was the conversion of Russia from totalitarianism to a more or less normal state, and, if possible, to democracy.

Between 1989 and 1991, a political miracle occurred. The Soviet regime, steeped in blood and obsessed with total control as it had been throughout most of its history, voluntarily gave up its Warsaw Pact empire, collapsed the Soviet system upon itself, and then acquiesced in its own demise - all with virtually no violence. This extraordinary sequence of events was by no means inevitable. Had it so chosen, the regime could have resisted the forces of change as it had on previous occasions, thus either extending its life, perhaps for decades more, or going down in a welter of blood and destruction. That, indeed, would have been more normal behavior, for as the English scholar Martin Wight once observed, "Great power status is lost, as it is won, by violence. A Great Power does not die in its bed." What occurred in the case of the Soviet Union was very much the exception.

A necessary condition for its being so was an understanding - explicit according to some, but in any case certainly implicit - that the West would not take strategic and political advantage of what the Soviet Union was allowing to happen to its empire and to itself. Whatever is said now, such a bargain was assumed by both sides, for it was evident to all involved that in its absence - if, that is, it had become apparent that the West was intent on exploiting any retreat by Moscow - events would not be allowed to proceed along the liberalizing course that they actually took. Further, there seemed to be no basis for the United States objecting to such a bargain. For, after all, its avowed objective was not the eastward extension of its own power and influence in Europe, but the restoration of the independence of the countries of the region. In effect, the bargain gave the United States everything it wanted (more, in fact, for the breakup of the Soviet Union had never been a Cold War objective), and in return required it only to refrain from doing what it had never expressed any intention of doing.

Now, and very much at the initiative of the United States, the West is in the process of reneging on that implicit bargain by extending NATO into countries recently vacated by Moscow. It is an ominous step. Whatever is said, however ingenious and vigorous the attempts to obscure the facts or change the subject, NATO is a military alliance, the most powerful in the history of the world, and the United States is the dominant force in that alliance. And...