The Political Interest the Case for a Bigger Nato

By Michael Kramer

"There are two ways you can tell when a man is lying," said Charles Bohlen, a respected former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow. "One is when he says he can drink champagne all night and not get drunk. The other is when he says he understands Russians."

Today's Russian specialists are too modest to claim an expertise Bohlen knew is impossible, but that hasn't stopped the Clinton Administration from crafting a Russia-centric foreign policy that seriously shortchanges other vital interests. To Secretary of State Warren Christopher, it's all perfectly clear: "Helping democracy prevail in Russia," he says, "remains the wisest and least expensive investment that we can make in American security." At the same time, however, almost everyone involved with America's Russia policy, including Christopher, admits the West can affect events there only at the margin. That being so, one would expect the Administration to pay greater attention to Central Europe, an area the West can influence far more than Moscow. But it isn't. Central Europe's fledgling democracies are suffering from the U.S. obsession with Russia -- as will become abundantly clear next week when the President attends his first NATO summit in Brussels.

Normally, NATO gatherings put people to sleep. This one is different. In the wake of communism's collapse, the question on the table for the first time is whether to expand eastward to embrace those former Soviet satellites finally in a position to join the free world's premier defense alliance. "It would be a historic sin to miss this opportunity to bind in the East Europeans," says NATO Secretary-General Manfred Worner. But the West, led by the U.S., is about to commit that very sin. The 16 nations that already enjoy NATO's protection are on the verge of effectively denying it to others.

The thinking behind exclusion has a distinct cold war slant, reflecting the 40-year period during which U.S. geostrategy ignored events and concerns outside the life-and-death struggle between the West and Moscow. In the past it was Russia's strength that drove U.S. policy; today it is Boris Yeltsin's weakness. The primary reason offered by U.S. officials for keeping the East Europeans out of NATO is the fear of provoking Russia's nationalists at Yeltsin's expense. Yeltsin endorsed NATO expansion last August, but Russia's military, to which he is clearly beholden, forced a retreat. It is unclear whether Moscow's generals are seriously worried about Western encirclement or want to preserve the option of reclaiming the nations Mikhail Gorbachev set free five years ago. But the effect is the same: Yeltsin now says enlarging NATO would be a hostile act. "We haven't a clue what that means exactly," says a senior Clinton Administration official, "but especially because we so completely misread Russia's recent elections -- we thought Yeltsin's forces would win soundly -- we're now more gun-shy than ever about substituting our judgment for his. Yeltsin's our guy. We're not going to undermine him with a policy of neocontainment that boosts the hard-line empire builders. Yeltsin says drawing a new line in Europe that shifts the Iron Curtain back to Russia's borders could do just that. And we're going with his instincts. End of story."

Not quite. A flat no to enlarging NATO would tread too roughly on Central European sensibilities, especially in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, the three prime candidates for NATO membership. So the Administration has constructed an elaborate mechanism called the "Partnership for Peace," a scheme its inventors claim substitutes "maybe" for "no." Yet stripped of its sweet-sounding provisions, the partnership is anything but satisfactory to those it is designed to pacify. According to the draft scheduled for formal adoption in Brussels next week, those nations that sign on as partners (and every country is eligible, including Russia) will "over time develop the habits and patterns of cooperation that NATO membership entails." That sounds encouraging and prudent; few would fault a plan that claims simply to be "getting them ready." But the fatal flaw is that NATO membership isn't ensured even if the wannabes demonstrate their worthiness. It's a "buzz-off project," complains Polish Foreign Minister Andrzej Olechowski. "They ask us to divert scarce resources and go through all kinds of exercises to prove ourselves. They ask us to talk and walk and act like a duck. That's O.K. And we agree that letting us in right away could upset Yeltsin at a difficult time. What's not O.K. is that after we've done all that's asked of us, NATO reserves the right to say, 'Well, now we want you to be a chicken instead.' "

Embarrassed by such criticism, the Administration is accentuating the positive. "Six months ago, the allies didn't even want NATO expansion on next week's agenda," says a White House aide. "We've moved them to where we'll now say that as a philosophical matter, enlargement is in the cards -- someday." Clinton himself will soon deliver several speeches designed to portray the partnership as a bold, creative step. "Maybe it'll fly, and maybe it won't," says a senior State Department official. "All the partnership really reflects is a judgment call. Since we don't see Russia moving on the Central Europeans militarily even if the revanchists take power, we don't see those states needing a NATO security guarantee. Moscow's the needy one. It needs reassurance, not deterrence."

Perhaps so, says Robert Zoellick, who was James Baker's Under Secretary of State. "But bringing in the Central Europeans after xenophobic nationalists come to power in Russia would be far harder. No one doubts those bad guys would threaten war if we sought to enlarge NATO at that point." Zoellick and his former boss prefer a clear road map with sure NATO membership at the end. "Doing it that way," says Baker, "sets up a mechanistic process. It shows the Russians that we're not acting hastily, that we're pursuing our interests in a carefully calibrated way. If we consult with Moscow as we go, we can give them time to adjust and deny them a veto over Western policy."

For their part, the Central Europeans' primary motivation for NATO membership has little to do with the possibility of Russian troops swarming to reannex them. "It's not to defend against a Russian attack," explains former Polish Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz. "We see that as a virtual impossibility. The key reason we want to be in NATO is to secure our own democracies. We need to keep down in our country the very same kind of nationalists Yeltsin's contending with, the same kind that have destroyed Yugoslavia." It is this point, repeated by more than a dozen Cabinet-level officials from East European countries at a recent security conference in Budapest, that warrants more attention in the debate over NATO expansion.

Ethnic and national tensions are perhaps most troublesome in Hungary. Not long before he died several weeks ago, Prime Minister Jozsef Antall declared himself the leader of 15 million Hungarians, pointedly extending his domain beyond the 10 million in the country. Antall, who was considered a moderate, is not alone. Many Hungarians want to protect their expatriate brothers currently enduring discrimination in Serbia, Romania and Ukraine. "If our reaching out to the West doesn't produce results in three or four years with something like NATO membership -- or its clear prospect -- the nationalists will roar back," says Istvan Gyarmati, Hungary's Director of Security Policy. "They'll just say we moderates tried a policy that would tie us to the West and that it failed and that it's time to try something else." Then what? "Then it's entirely possible that we Central Europeans would form our own / security alliance, complete with a new arms race. Or the nations in our neighborhood might realign with Russia or with a newly nationalist Germany. Any of those scenarios could destabilize Europe all over again. How would the U.S. like that?"

Nationalism and ethnic conflict "have already led to two world wars in Europe," says Stephen Larrabee, a former National Security Council staff member now at the Rand Corp. "The time to act is now, and not with hollow promises." What Larrabee and others know is that NATO has always been more than a security alliance. "We understood this at the beginning," says Larrabee. "West Germany wasn't a stable democracy before it was allowed into NATO. Belonging to the alliance helped it become one. It's silly to insist that the Central Europeans must be functioning democrats before they can join up. NATO can help them on that road, as it also helped stem authoritarian backsliding in Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey."

Oddly, this rationale appears to have largely escaped notice by the Administration players most responsible for promulgating the partnership. When asked about the Central European argument that NATO membership is more important for internal stability than as a military shield against Russia, a senior Administration official responded, "It's pretty compelling stuff when you think about it. I guess we've just been too fixated on Russia to have given enough thought to this aspect."

Clinton's Russia-first emphasis is understandable but needs to be moderated. "We resisted blackmail when Russia was strong," says Henry Kissinger. "Does it make sense to permit Moscow to blackmail us now with its domestic weakness?" The problem, says Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb, in an insight several Administration aides agree is "right on," is that Clinton "is determined to avoid being tagged with having lost Russia. Yet it should be obvious that democracy in Russia will be won or lost almost exclusively by the Russians themselves." And if reform fails in Russia, says James Baker, an enlarged NATO would at least "protect democracy" where it is showing signs of taking "firm root -- in Warsaw, Prague and Budapest."

To be sure, the expansion of NATO is no trifling matter. Extending the free world's nuclear umbrella should never be undertaken idly. But leaving Central Europe in the cold would be an inexcusable folly. Refusing to help these democracies could eventually raise a question as real as the question of losing Russia is phony: Who lost Central Europe?