At What Price NATO Expansion?
(Washington, D.C.): Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright’s world tour is taking
on the hallmarks of a fire-sale — a
frantic bid to sell the merchandise, no
matter what it takes. In her bid to make
the concept of NATO expansion palatable
to the Kremlin, however, Mrs. Albright is
offering a number of ill-considered and
strategically portentous inducements.
The most recent of these is her trial
balloon about a joint NATO-Russian
brigade that would be permanently
available for peacekeeping operations
around the world.
The problem is that the joint brigade
initiative and other ideas aimed at, in
Secretary Albright’s words, “giving
Russia a voice but not a veto” in
NATO affairs have the potential greatly
to advance the Kremlin’s long-standing
objective of destroying the Atlantic
Alliance. At a minimum, they promise so
to mutate NATO as to threaten the support
it has long enjoyed in the United States
— and that it must have in the future if
it is to survive, let alone expand.
What’s Wrong with This
Picture?
Of particular concern is Mrs.
Albright’s proposal to build on the
experience of the U.S.-Russian
cooperation in Bosnia to create a
permanent joint U.S.-Russian brigade to
perform peacekeeping missions. There are
a number of questions begged by such a
proposal that should have been carefully
vetted at home — including with the
Congress — before it was floated
publicly, to say nothing of being
proposed to the allies and Russians.
These include:
- Further diverting the
U.S. military from its principal
mission: In her
capacity as UN Ambassador, Mrs.
Albright was a strong proponent
of multilateral peacekeeping
operations and an advocate of
committing U.S. military
personnel to them. Toward these
ends, she has made a personal
priority of changing Pentagon
doctrine, training and planning
to emphasize support to
peacekeeping at the expense of
traditional combat readiness and
power projection capabilities.
The idea of dedicating what may
be a significant portion of the
United States’ front-line
warfighting capability to a
permanent bilateral brigade would
only serve to advance this
dubious objective. - A standing multinational
army: The idea of a
joint brigade available for
peacekeeping activities around
the world (obviously including
“out of area”
operations for NATO) smacks of an
idea long-favored by those like
Mrs. Albright who have been
enthusiasts for the United
Nations’ brand of
supranationalism: an
international force available to
the UN — or other multinational
arrangements — that could be
dispatched quickly to world
trouble-spots without going
through messy national procedures
(such as receiving congressional
assent). - Further ‘hollowing-out’
of the U.S. military:
The adverse impact of removing
American combat units from other
tasks will be all the greater if,
as expected, the Pentagon
responds to the woeful
underfunding of modernization
accounts by further reducing
force structure. Allied nations
are making even more draconian
cuts in their end-strengths. To
the extent that a significant
proportion of whatever assets
that remain available to NATO get
tied up in this brigade, the
result is sure to be a further
degradation of the alliance’s
defenses. - Russians inside the tent:
Integrating Russian forces into a
joint brigade would complicate
tremendously various activities
critical to the future
performance of the U.S. military.
These include necessary efforts
to conceal aspects of the
performance characteristics of
advanced U.S. weapon systems and
to maintain security of
communications, operations and
intelligence activities. - ‘No Russian Veto?’:
The practical effect of making
Russian forces part of a joint
brigade is to ensure that, at a
minimum, that brigade
will not be used without Moscow’s
permission. While the
amorphousness of the Secretary’s
proposal makes it hard to say for
certain precisely what impact the
withholding of such permission
would have on activities
involving U.S. and/or other NATO
forces, it seems reasonable to
expect that the unavailability of
key units of the brigade (i.e.
Russian components) will
complicate decisions involving
any use of other forces as well.
Another Bad Idea: ‘Helping
the Russian Military Modernize’
Concerns on several of the foregoing
scores are further aggravated by the
suggestion unveiled last on 18 February
1997 by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe
Talbott — a man whose judgment about the
Soviet Union/Russia has been consistently
wrong throughout his career, if not
highly pernicious. In an op.ed. in the New
York Times entitled “Russia Has
Nothing to Fear,” Secretary Talbott
wrote:
“Today, at NATO headquarters
in Brussels, there is a Russian
liaison. We have suggested
expanding these exchanges and
including Russian officers at all
the top levels of the alliance
command structure. This
kind of interaction with NATO can
help the Russian military address
its difficulties in trying to
modernize.“
(Emphasis added.)
As it happens, the Clinton Administration
is doing quite a bit to “help the
Russian military modernize.” A
report in the Washington Times
yesterday revealed that the
Administration’s lax approach to export
controls and confusing signals about
whether Russia is a friend or foe
contributed to the unauthorized
transfer of U.S. supercomputers to a
former Soviet organization still engaged
in designing nuclear weapons. When
combined with a litany of other examples
of U.S. assistance — often provided
through the Cooperative Threat Reduction
program (known universally as the
Nunn-Lugar program) — that have wound up
enhancing, rather than
dismantling, the Russian
military-industrial complex,
the problem appears to be one of too
much U.S. “help” with
Russia’s modernization programs, not too
little.
Speaking of wasteful spending
of U.S. taxpayer resources, it is
predictable that the United States will
wind up paying a substantial part of the
funding associated with Russian
participation in any joint brigade. This
sort of absurd American underwriting of
the Kremlin’s military capabilities would
probably be rationalized as necessary to
ensure that the brigade can perform its
assigned tasks. A precedent for this sort
of off-loading of Russian
responsibilities onto the U.S. Treasury
can be found in the International Space
Station debacle, where American tax
dollars are increasingly being tapped to
carry the costs of both U.S. and Russian
participation.(3)
The Bottom Line
The case for NATO enlargement has
become increasingly debatable as the
Clinton Administration has gone along
with, if not actively encouraged,
postponement of this step for the past
four years. The passage of time has
served only to intensify Russian
opposition — adding to the perceived
need to appeasement the Kremlin — and
seen the return to power in Poland and
Hungary of governments that are, at best,
unreliable. At worst, they represent a
return of the Old Guard against whom NATO
once defended itself. For example,
another report in yesterday’s Washington
Times revealed that Poland, among
other former Warsaw Pact states, has been
involved in providing advanced weapons to
pariah states.
While the arguments for including in
NATO countries that were formerly
involuntary parts of the Soviet empire
and that are genuinely committed to
pro-Western foreign and security policies
and democratic capitalism at home
remain compelling, it is entirely
possible that the Clinton Administration
is prepared to pay too high a price to
Moscow to be allowed to include in the
alliance nations that fail to meet these
critical tests. Far from strengthening
the Atlantic Alliance, this could be a
formula for destroying it. It
would be the height of folly were
Congress to allow such a policy to be
relentlessly pursued between now and the
Madrid summit this summer without the
required adult supervision and course
corrections.
– 30 –
1. The Russians
are clearly making every effort to
intensify Mrs. Albright’s sense of panic
about closing the deal on NATO expansion.
For example, the press in Moscow has
featured preposterous portraits of the
Secretary of State as “a hard-line
Cold Warrior determined to keep Russia
divided and weak.” Nezavisimaya
gazeta has gone further, predicting
that her visit to Moscow would feature a
meeting with the thuggish KGB operative
turned Foreign Minister, Yevgeny Primakov
that “will be of an uncompromising
and far from friendly nature, which
undoubtedly will affect relations between
Russia and the United States.” Such
statements seem calculated to induce the
Secretary to try to protect bilateral
ties by being compromising and friendly.
2. J. Michael
Waller of the American Foreign Policy
Council has documented a number of these
travesties in the Council’s Russian
Reform Monitor as well as in articles
published in Readers’ Digest, American
Spectator and the Wall Street
Journal.
3. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled A
Scorecard for Gore-Chernomyrdin
(No. 97-D 20, 5
February 1997).
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