#5
New York Times
December 1, 2001
Join the Club
By BILL KELLER
Next year, unless President Bush has a drastic change of heart, the United States will enlarge the American-led military alliance in Europe by as many as seven countries and extend its boundary to within an hour's tank drive of St. Petersburg. This may seem like an awfully ungrateful way to treat our new friend Russia, so quick to our side after Sept. 11, but the terror attacks have actually made this enlargement of the NATO family more right than ever.
In fact, if he is not too distracted by fighting a war abroad and shredding civil liberties at home, Mr. Bush has a chance to accomplish three grand purposes in a single feat of political choreography: consolidating the gains of free-market democracy, drawing Russia closer to Europe, and rejuvenating our most important alliance.
The illustrious skeptics of further NATO expansion have ranged across the foreign-policy mainstream, and include opinion writers for this newspaper. They have argued that shoving our mutual defense pact up against Russia's border will inflame resentment in Russia and undermine reformers who want to work with the West. There is also a unilateralist camp that sees a bigger NATO as bringing a new burden of obligations and constraints. We'll get to why they're all wrong in a second.
But first, for readers who just can't find time to keep up with those pesky think-tank issue papers, here's the story so far. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was hatched in the ruins of World War II, to prevent anything like that from happening again. The tired but honest joke is that NATO was created to keep America in, Russia out, and Germany down. When the cold war ended, a lot of countries that had been Soviet captives began clamoring to join NATO, seeking both the protection of America's might and the validation of their own status as civilized countries. Two years ago President Clinton persuaded the clubhouse to admit Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Assured that these newcomers would not play host to American bases or nuclear weapons, Russia took it with a grumble.
Whether the new Bush administration would continue the enlargement of NATO was, at first, not clear. Mr. Bush had shown no passion for alliances. The next round of candidates includes no countries that excite as many American voters as Poland does, no celebrities of the stature of Vaclav Havel. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the three former Soviet republics along the Baltic Sea, are admirably scrappy little democracies, but did America really want to commit its arsenal to defending the Duchy of Grand Fenwick? Our military was not enthusiastic.
To the surprise of many, Mr. Bush answered the doubters in a stirring Europhile speech that could have come from Madeleine Albright. Visiting Poland in June he emphatically endorsed NATO membership for all of Europe's new democracies, "from the Baltic to the Black Sea." Now the word in Washington is that by spring the administration will tell Congress it wants NATO invitations for all three Baltics, for Slovenia and probably Slovakia. Bulgaria and Romania are closer calls.
It is fair to ask whether Kmart parents, as Colin Powell calls the families that provide most of our military enlistees, will like committing their sons and daughters to defend Estonia. One could ask the same about Luxembourg or Iceland or other states that enjoy NATO protection because they were there at the beginning. Membership has never been about acreage, population or the size of your army (Iceland has none) but about your commitment to democracy, human rights, open borders and free markets. Those things flourish best in societies that feel secure. The military obligations of NATO are serious, but they are mainly deterrent — the promise of protection lessens temptation. The heart of the founding treaty is Article 5, which obliges all members to rally to the defense when any member is attacked. Care to guess how many times it has been invoked in the half-century of NATO? Once, on Sept. 12 of this year.
The war against terror has enhanced the cause for expansion in several ways.
First, it has given President Vladimir Putin of Russia a common cause with the West, and he is not inclined to rock the bandwagon by making aggressive noises about the Baltic republics. Mr. Putin says somewhat elliptically (and his ambassadors tell Western leaders more directly) that Russia can live with it.
Yes, Mr. Putin does have a problem with his military. The only land route to the Baltic Fleet headquarters in Kaliningrad runs through Lithuania, and while that fleet is now a sorry collection of rustbuckets, it has symbolic weight. But appeasing the Russian military is Mr. Putin's job, not ours, and he seems to think he has it in hand. Henry Kissinger, who in his most recent book said allowing the Baltics into NATO was "too inflammatory," tells me that after listening to Mr. Putin he has changed his mind. One down.
Last week NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, was in Moscow negotiating exactly what Russia should get out of this deal. It is an important question, and one that should not be answered impetuously.
Ignore the talk of Russia becoming a member of NATO. Russia has no real interest in joining an alliance whose supreme military commander is an American. And among the current members, even those countries that are inclined to trust Russia don't want to be obliged to defend it from, say, China. But orienting Russia more toward NATO is clearly good for everyone.
President Clinton's people spent considerable effort concocting a structure that would have Russia cooperating more closely with NATO on things like peacekeeping, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, but the Russians walked out in a spat over Kosovo. They will come back if Mr. Putin gets something he can present to skeptical countrymen as new and worthy of Russia's stature.
Russia should have a real voice when it decides to partner with NATO, but not a veto that stops the alliance from operating without Russia. Even more important is to create not just a new bureaucracy but genuine, on-the-ground, military-to- military activities. There is nothing that builds trust over time like Russian and Western troops working side by side as they did in Bosnia. Finally, if the president wants any partnership with Russia to outlast Mr. Putin, he should get over his sophomoric disdain for treaties.
Mr. Putin will not concede the point, but including the Baltics in NATO is good for Russia. The Balts do not trust their Russian neighbors. Ten years ago last January, I watched Lithuanians being crushed to death under Soviet tanks that were sent to suppress their demand for independence — and this was under the benign Mikhail Gorbachev. After independence, the republics sometimes treated their Russian residents vengefully. But with NATO membership requiring decent standards of civil rights, the republics have lowered barriers to citizenship for ethnic Russians. Once these states feel fully protected they can be friendlier, becoming a useful commercial bridge to the West for the western parts of Russia.
The civilizing effects of alliance are not just for Estonians and Russians, by the way. The counsel of European allies since Sept. 11 has helped temper our impulse to lash out at Iraq or Syria and prodded us back into the Middle East peace process. Spain has applied familial pressure to drop the idea of military tribunals, by refusing to extradite suspects. And Europe is wisely imploring us not to scrap the 1972 ABM treaty. Thank you, Europe.
But our NATO allies have done nothing to slow America's purpose at war. Thus has Sept. 11 demolished the unilateralist argument by demonstrating that when America perceives its interests at stake it does not have to call for NATO.
Once you've assembled the neo- NATO, what do you do with it?
Mr. Putin — echoing Mr. Gorbachev — says that NATO should evolve from a military alliance into something more purely political. That would be a mistake, for two reasons. First, the promise of military security is the main reason anyone joins. And second, in a fledgling free society the one constituency you most want integrated into a democracy support group is the military.
A better use for NATO is to project its values — and, sometimes, its force — into regions where its interests are less immediate: fighting terror, keeping the peace, or coaching armies in the fine points of civilian rule. Sept. 11 drove home the truth that threats can come from far afield, which is why so many Europeans have been willing to offer not just moral cover but soldiers and weapons for the fight in Afghanistan.
The United States has treated these offers dismissively, thereby missing an opportunity. Expanding NATO is a good step. Now Mr. Bush has to show he's interested in leading it.
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