#6534
#18
Commentary: Trivializing NATO's future
By Ira Straus
Ira Straus is former Fulbright professor of political science at the Moscow
State Institute of International Relations.
Comments to: irastraus@aol.com
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- NATO's plans for expansion, far from inspiring confidence in its future, are giving an impression of frivolity as the international bloc gears up for its Nov. 21-22 summit in Prague.
A dramatic expansion of NATO was inevitable after the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. The new government of Russia, in a worthy tribute to the merits of its former enemy, pronounced NATO expansion to be inevitable long before NATO itself did. And Russia stated that joining NATO was its own strategic goal.
Yet in the West, plans for expansion were made only belatedly in the mid-1990s, and with more attention to special interest groups than to the broad common interests that the expansion should have been serving.
The plans were in many respects misdirected from the start. Between the hardened old realists at NATO headquarters in Brussels who were satisfied with the status quo and the new democratic idealists in Central-Eastern Europe who wanted in, there was one easy basis for agreement: anti-Russian sentiment.
An unhealthy compromise resulted, in which NATO expansion took on an anti-Russian coloration. It had the effect of resurrecting old habits of mutual opposition and mutual undercutting between Russia and the West, at a time when the two former enemies should have been building habits of mutual support for facing new dangers.
The plans for expansion were always inadequate in face of the emerging security needs of the post-1991 era, when the potential threats came from elsewhere. Today they are worse than inadequate: now that the potential threats have become manifest, the old plans are dangerously misdirected.
Everyone knows -- even if few find it politically expedient to say -- that, in 2002, admission of half a dozen small powerless states is a distraction from Western security needs. Yet this remains the centerpiece of the NATO summit agenda.
Everyone knows that admission of the three little Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in particular would mean taking on a major security liability rather than a benefit, as long as Russia is not included on an equal footing. Yet this too remains a major part of the summit plan.
Everyone knows that, with mass-scale terrorism out in the open, the West cannot afford any more of the strategic self-indulgence of the 1990s, when it used NATO mostly as a place for handing out certificates of good reform behavior. Yet NATO goes on preparing its expansion on a basis of reform scorecards drawn up in the 1990s.
Everyone knows that Russia is America's only new European ally of any substantial value in the war against terrorism. Yet few people say it; instead, writers go to great lengths to find some strategic benefit, no matter how miniscule, that the other states can bring to the West. NATO expansion continues to proceed in a form that obstructs the prospects for bringing in Russia -- the same form that in the 1990s repeatedly set back the process of reconciliation between the new Russia and the West.
Russia has opposed the 1990s plans for NATO expansion with reasons good and bad. The West has spent too much time polemicizing against the bad reasons; it has failed to pay much heed to the good reasons.
The core Russian objection has been a pro-Western one: that the plan of expansion is a threat to Russia's national goal of unity with the West. By bringing an entire series of anti-Russian mini-states into the alliance, while keeping Russia itself out, Russia is being penalized and marginalized. This can only encourage negative attitudes on both sides. And this in turn can only do damage to the West's own need for strategic cooperation with Russia -- a need that has become intense in the war on terrorism.
Russia is the only post-communist country for which there is no real NATO plan for bringing it in. In terms of Western strategic needs, it ought to be first in line for joining. In terms of the NATO treaty requirements, too, it ought to be first. Even on the terms of NATO's mid-1990s moral scorecard, Russia ought to be ranked higher than several of the states that are likely to be invited in the present round.
Yet, in the anti-strategic mood of the 1990s, Russia was stuck at the end of the line. There it remains today, as if nothing has been learned from Sept. 11.
For a brief period in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, it seemed that this might change. Russia spoke of joining the alliance. British Prime Minister Tony Blair proposed a form of half-membership for Russia. The alliance was considering this seriously. But an anti-Russian hysteria was whipped up by the three new Central-Eastern European members of NATO, saying that it would amount to giving Russia a veto and killing the alliance. They found support in portions of the NATO and Pentagon bureaucracies, and in influential publicists such as former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the resultant matrix of forces, the Blair initiative was whittled down to a mere fraction of its original form.
A new NATO-Russia Council was created, replacing the old one but replicating many of its weaknesses. Each member of NATO was handed a daily veto over the mere continuation of discussion with Russia on any subject in the new NATO-Russia Council. Many of the Eastern Europeans were against even this minor progress in relations, but a Baltic press service expressed delight at the killer veto they were given over it.
Further steps could yet be built on the NATO-Russia Council that would really deepen the cooperation, but a major effort would be needed to take such steps. It will become much more difficult after NATO lets in more Eastern European members, some of them far more extreme in their anti-Russian attitudes than the Poles or Hungarians. Each new member means a new veto to be overcome, a new arm that has to be twisted -- and they would all have to be successfully twisted at the same time, every time.
The plan for expanding NATO at the summit amounts to handing out mass veto powers over the progress of collaboration with Russia.
These are real vetoes, not the phantasmagoric ones that are often attributed to Russia. They are being handed out to countries that are not rational when it comes to Russia. The irrationality is perfectly understandable, given the history; but it is not going to go away for a long time to come. They constantly need emotional reassurance against Russia, and the sake of this emotional need, have proved ready to sacrifice the strategic needs of the West for closer collaboration with Russia against terrorism. The West, in giving priority to their demands and sensitivities, has let them get away with this. It has already paid a high price for it.
Further upgrading of collaboration with Russia is NATO's greatest diplomatic-strategic need. The incorporation of the small states is the least of the West's needs: on the present plan, it is a form of strategic suicide.
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