For Avoiding Disaster At The NATO Summit: ‘The Wallop Doctrine’

As things stand now, next month’s summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization promises to be an utter debacle. A rudderless Clinton Administration has failed to date to provide the leadership required to preserve NATO as an effective alliance structure — to say nothing of guiding its necessary evolution into an expanded and reinvigorated security arrangement for the future.

As the Center for Security Policy has repeatedly warned(1), neither the United States nor its European allies can afford such outcomes. This is particularly true in the wake of recent events in Russia. Were the West to persist in its present strategy of appeasing Moscow — for example through the addled concept of a “Partnership for Peace” that includes Russia but would exclude a nuclear-armed Ukraine — it will endanger NATO, not preserve it; it will encourage instability that Moscow will be tempted to exploit, not diminish it.

Fortunately, at such a critical moment, a voice of uncommon wisdom and clarity has emerged. Senator Malcolm Wallop (R-WY), a longtime member of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees and 1992 recipient of the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame” award, offered an incisive analysis of the challenges facing NATO and what the President must do now to meet them:

“…It is not clear that Russia can be assumed to have permanently abandoned its historic designs on much of Eurasia. The recent election provides a stark reminder. The conquered states that Russia coughed up with the collapse of the Soviet Union are again being eyed with renewed appetite. Russia’s new military doctrine makes it clear that the so-called “near-abroad” is intended to become, at a minimum, a Russian sphere of influence.

 

“The United States and NATO should not condone or encourage this trend. Unfortunately, President Clinton’s ‘Partnerships for Peace’ proposal does both. By supporting Russian demands regarding the expansion of NATO and its approach to the “near-abroad,” the West is again praying at the altar of that “tin god,” stability. A Cold War definition of stability almost led us to prop up a collapsing Soviet empire two years ago. Again today, we seem willing to allow this misunderstood concept to stand in the way of healthy evolution in the European system of states. By reinforcing Russia’s belief that it is a privileged state with rights over its neighbors, we hinder the cause of democracy and freedom, undermining genuine and lasting stability.”

 

Additional excerpts of Senator Wallop’s address today before a conference in Washington sponsored by the Potomac Foundation and the Boston University Center for Defense Journalism are attached.

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1. See in particular two recent Decision Briefs entitled Yalta II: Western Moscow-centrismInvites New Instability in Former Soviet Empire(No. 93-D 101, 3 December 1993) and ‘Le Moment Zhirinovsky’: The West Can No Longer Afford Illusions of an Accommodating Russia, (No. 93-D 105, 15 December 1993).