EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1

Policy Recommendations 1

Summary of Structural Aspects and Options 2

PART A

WHY AN EXPANDED NATO? 4

The Historic Opportunity 5

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

NATO’s New Goal. The Partnership For Peace has established, as the goal of NATO, the inclusion as full NATO Members of all of the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

This is far from fully satisfying the “Easterners,” many of whom have been asking into NATO ever since 1990. However, it is the first real step toward saying “yes” to their proposition. In fact, it is a “yes” in principle, while leaving it open to figure out how the principle will be translated into practice.

This means there is much work to be done. Now is the time to figure out what the West needs to do to make a successful go of an Extended NATO. The options need to be explored and the contingency plans developed, without self-defeating narrowness of vision as in the past. Thus the present study.

Rationale. There are urgent reasons for bringing the Easterners into NATO: to validate their pro-Western orientation, stabilize their democracy, defuse mutual ethnic fears, and anchor their militaries to a common perspective. The historical opening will not stay open forever. If Opportunity is too long neglected, it turns into Crisis. This is already happening in parts of the former East. It is a matter of vital interest to America that the opportunity to bring in the Easterners be realized sooner not later.

The offer of ex-Communist countries to join NATO corresponds to the vital national interests on both sides. At the same time, it is an unbelievably great gift to the West. For a long time the West acted as if it did not believe it, and put the Easterners in a position of begging to be allowed to give this gift. This should not have happened. The West should have made the diplomatic efforts and organizational adjustments needed for accepting the gift. Now it has agreed in principle to do so. How that can be done in practice is elaborated herein.

Policy Recommendations. The “Partnership for Peace” plan needs one amplification and one clarification in order to meet the actual challenge of the times:

1.) A “Committee on NATO Membership,” with all Partner countries participating not just present NATO members, so that it will be possible to work out a plan for extension of NATO membership that is balanced, realistic, and concrete. Such a plan will need to include: full-scale use of commitments for post-membership transitions (not just pre-membership criteria), model membership protocols, side agreements on settlements of territorial and minority issues and on NATO authority to mediate these issues, and changes (or “criteria”) needed on NATO’s side as well as in the East in order to make an Extended NATO work well.

2.) Clarification of the procedures by which NATO will authorize use of its name and resources (or “separable but not separate forces”) by coalitions of the willing. If the decision procedure is flexible and generalizable (i.e., for use by any coalition, not only WEU, and with a need for broad consent but not full consensus), this will mean a greatly improved NATO capability for filling the security gap to its East, and also for continuing to make decisions after it has more members.

Summary of Structural Aspects and Options

An Extended NATO can be visualized as an “inner core” (continental Europe) with two “outer wings” (the U.S. and Russia). Not all of the military forces of the “wings” would be as closely integrated under NATO structures as those of the inner area.

At the same time, an Extended NATO can be visualized as a solid core of the old western Members, plus a less stable periphery of new eastern Members and Associate Members. The Easterners need to be firmly anchored to NATO during their long transition to stability. The West can afford to anchor the Easterners as Members – assuming that the Extended NATO itself operates by sensible, flexibly weighted procedures (see Part B Section XI) – since the solid Western core has over 60% of the population of the entire CSCE area.

The defense arrangements with new members would most easily be “added on” to the present NATO structures rather than being immediately and completely integrated with them. There is no reason why this need detract from the capabilities or cohesion of NATO’s Western core; rather, it would simply add new capabilities onto NATO. Transitions to fuller integration should be conceived as coming after membership; they cannot all be completed beforehand. The formal status of membership itself has great importance, reinforcing a country’s pro-Western identity and opening up opportunities for collaboration; it must not be kept waiting on too many transitions.

The farther the militaries of Russia and its neighbors are integrated into NATO, the more chance Russia will have of being rejoined with its neighbors in a common strategic space (which is what it most wants), yet in a context in which it cannot dominate and will no longer be feared and hated. This is the way to reconcile the Russian military definitively to democracy and to the West. (Ways of integrating Russian forces into NATO command structures are outlined in Part B, Section II.)

NATO has decided in principle in favor of peacemaking efforts in the Eastern areas. However, Russians will be nervous about use of NATO forces until Russia is in NATO. Extension of NATO will enhance NATO’s legitimacy and capabilities in such efforts by making them local efforts rather than projections far out of area.

An Extended NATO will open up space for East-West collaboration on a vast scale. The West should be drawing up plans for this, like an investor preparing a prospectus for a newly-opened land. Some of the prospects – an extended COCOM, a common nuclear force, anti-proliferation work, a common space program, cooperation in intelligence and technology – are sketched in Part B, Sections III-V.

The Eastern countries should not be asked to solve all their problems and make all transitions prior to joining NATO; rather, they should be brought into NATO as a way of helping them solve problems and make transitions. The West should not invent novel membership standards or place all of the burden of mutual adaptation on the Easterners. There has been too much of a one-way-street approach and moving of the goal post. This is creating doubts that the West is a reliable partner. It is inducing new anti-Western feelings. The West needs to make good on its long-standing promise that Western unity was meant for the Easterners, too. NATO is the main near-term venue for this.

The terms and conditions for NATO membership should be based on what is actually needed to make the extension of membership work. They should not be punitive of the countries that have thrown out Communism to join the West. Conditions discussed recently in NATO circles have arbitrarily exceeded the conditions demanded in the past. This is self-defeating for the West: it ignores the West’s own interest in incorporating these countries as allies, and instead treats membership as if it were simply a favor from the West. It is also unrealistic: countries are asked to solve in advance a number of problems which it would be more practical for them to solve after membership. To arrive at more useful standards, the issue needs to be re-worked in a joint forum where the Easterners play a full role.

New members will create a need – and provide an occasion – for changing NATO’s decision-making system. The old unanimous-consent system, which creaked along in the cold war years when facing a single long-term Soviet threat, is in any case inadequate for making decisions in the new era, with its multitude of fast-paced crises. Bosnia has been a painful demonstration of this. For a long time, old habits prevented any discussion of adapting NATO’s decision-making to the needs of the new era.

In January 1994, a NATO policy was adopted to make for a bit more flexibility, by allowing use of the NATO banner and facilities by “coalitions of the willing.” To make good on this, the policy needs to be elaborated to provide for less-than-unanimous decision-making for such a coalition’s action, including any coalition that can muster the necessary majority not just the WEU, and with the other members committed to avoid obstructive action.

Only the prospect of more members will bring this issue to a head, by forcing NATO to ask how it could go on making unanimous decisions with more members around the table. Ironically, this question was used at first simply as a rhetorical argument against new memberships, on the assumption that the old unanimity system was still viable and no change in it was imaginable anyway. If this issue is now placed squarely on the table and resolved constructively, then it will become possible to accept any number of new members without harm to decision-making. (The options on decision-making are weighed in Part B Section XI.)

PART A

WHY AN EXPANDED NATO?

– America’s opportunity – the national interest –

– background and development of the issue –

– the political and diplomatic context –

“For NATO, these are not ordinary times. They require extraordinary and bold action, not NATO’s traditional incrementalism... Anything less risks being outstripped by the pace of events in Eastern Europe.”

– Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (former Director, National Security Agency), in an appeal for prompt inclusion of three Eastern European states in NATO

The Historic Opportunity

Unimagined opportunities were opened up for the West in 1990 and 1991 by the requests of the East Europeans and Russians for membership in NATO. A more substantial response will be needed from the West if the opportunities are to be realized and the dangers of a strategic vacuum are to be ended. This paper was written to outline the issues involved and the lines of potential action.

To date, the Western response to the Easterners has left a lot of room for improvement ... and thus a lot of space for initiative by the new Administration. The offers to join NATO had come as a complete surprise to the West. A paradigm shift was required of most Westerners before they could give a normal welcome to the Easterners who wanted to join. For more than a year, no response was given at all.

Contingency plans were lacking for an extended NATO. Virtually no one had been thinking about it before 1990, much less planning for it. True, an obscure Atlantic Unionist journal, The Federator, had argued in 1985 that, if Communism were to collapse, responsibility for rapid integration of Eastern Europe and Russia would fall to NATO even more than to the EC (European Community). But in the same breath, it had argued that both NATO and the EC would be unprepared.

In the actual event, in October 1989, the EC acknowledged its obligation to let in the new democracies of the East – and its unpreparedness for letting them in. Its recognition of the obligation to let them in was the basis of its ability to recognize its unpreparedness. It set about to negotiate the Maastricht Treaty in order to restructure itself so as to be able to function with more members.

NATO, by contrast, was not ready in 1989 to recognize any obligation to extend its membership. As a result, it was unable even to begin a discussion on how it might need to prepare itself for new members.

CEERN was formed in 1992 by independent American, British and Eastern Atlanticists, in order to begin to fill the gap in attention to this issue. It has set to developing the missing contingency plans for adapting NATO and bringing in new members, through an iterative process of inquiring into the issues, formulating plans and options, gaining feedback from informed persons and officials in both East and West, and reformulating the plans and options. This is the sixth iterated report.

How should NATO conceptualize the way to bring in new members? How should it choose among its options for dealing with the new East? Two opposite temptations need to be avoided: (1) whittling the changes down to the minimum needed for day-to-day adaptation; (2) insisting immediately on the maximum changes needed for making full use of the new opportunities. The criterion used herein is, to find those changes needed for assimilating the former enemy lands into NATO on terms that strengthen NATO not weaken it.

It is necessary to warn against an optical illusion that could be created by the format of this report. The main body of this report – “Plans and Scenarios” – is a study of nuts-and-bolts problems and options for their solution. As such it mostly offers technical-sounding solutions to dramatic-sounding political problems. This could leave a misimpression that the problems are more numerous than the solutions and more important than the opportunities. The reality is the opposite: the opportunities are extraordinary, the problems are prosaic. Many of the issues should not be regarded as problems at all, but as normal adjustments to be worked out in the course of making major historical changes.

The passage of time since the issue was first raised in 1990 has also magnified the impression of difficulties. Thoughts about the complicated details have accumulated passively while opportunities have lain unrealized – and while real security problems have piled up in the East. The “security gap” of which the Easterners warned in 1990, and which they had hoped to avoid by entry into NATO, has taken its toll.

Nevertheless, the passage of time since 1990 has also seen a gradual shift of élite opinion in the West in favor of extending NATO eastward. NATO circles have grown accustomed to meeting with the East Europeans and Russians and to regarding them more as allies than as adversaries. The new U.S. Administration is not satisfied with the old NATO and wants a deep transformation in the Alliance. The danger that NATO will be discarded altogether has impressed many NATO circles with the need for moving faster and farther. The old defensiveness in NATO and the minimalization of change now look like reckless unwisdom not ripe old wisdom.

In the end, all the changes needed in NATO are minor in comparison with the revolution that the countries of the ex-Communist world are putting themselves through. The West has asked the Easterners to turn their political systems inside out so as to cease being its enemies. The Easterners have done it. They have gone further and abandoned their empires – leaving themselves strategically “homeless.” They are now enmeshed in the process of turning their socio-economic systems inside out as well. It is highly disorienting – it is like “reversing polarities.” The NATO West owes it to these countries to make adjustments in its international structures in order to accommodate them in the Western home and stabilize their new pro-western orientation. If this is too much to ask, then in a sense the West deserves to lose them and to have them as enemies again.

Even for its own selfish reasons, NATO ought to be trying to maximize its internal structural changes at this time, not minimize them. Many people see no more need for NATO. Absent basic changes, NATO is in real danger of dissolution or of reduction to insignificance. But the NATO structure resists change even more than most structures, thanks to its unanimous-consent diplomatic circuit and its consultationist ideology. New memberships would have the virtue of forcing the issue. Only in the course of taking in new members is NATO likely to face up to the changes that it really needs anyway.

The West should approach the issues in a spirit of looking for a way to carry through the changes. In this spirit, we will consider the basic options. First, however, we must pause to reconsider the purpose of NATO and whether it is worth it to America to keep NATO at all.