Contents

The continuing purpose of NATO; the value of an Extended NATO 7

Why be involved in Europe? Why is it in America’s interest? 7

Why add the Easterners as allies? 10

Expansion of NATO as a basis for successful Democratization in the East 11

Why keep NATO at all if “the enemy” is inside it? 14

NATO’s origins and functions: far more than a cold war instrument 15

The continuing purpose of NATO; the value of an Extended NATO

Where there is no vision, alliances perish.

Why be involved in Europe? Why is it in America’s interest?

Is it good or bad for America to have European allies? Until a few years ago, people knew the reasons why the answer was “yes” almost as surely as they knew why 2 plus 2 makes 4. With the rise of the theory of “America in decline,” however, the idea has spread that the main threat to America comes from its democratic industrialized allies – primarily Japan, but also Europe.

It is hard to believe that Americans, who pioneered the use in politics of a spirit of generosity and enlightened self-interest for the sake of partnership – and who, thanks to this approach, grew to be a vast continental federation, made always more friends than enemies, and rose to the status of the sole superpower in the world – could now be slipping into the mean-spirit cynicism of their old realpolitik critics and viewing with jealousy the prosperity of democratic Europe, as if it were a threat rather than a contribution to their own strength and prosperity. If these attitudes were actually acted upon, the consequences would be severe. It is time to reassert elementary common sense.

The Western European democracies are partners of America. They will continue to be America’s partners as long as their foreign policies and militaries are allied with America’s and used more often to buttress than to undermine America’s efforts. Their prosperity is a part of America’s prosperity. Their growth contributes to America’s growth. Particular American industries may be in competition with particular European industries, just as particular industries in New York are in competition with particular industries in California, but to view the economy of European society as a whole as a hostile competitor to that of America would make little more sense than to view the economy of California as a hostile competitor to that of New York. New Yorkers do not fret about their “decline” when California’s growth exceeds their own; no one whips up petty state-nationalistic fears of this sort any longer. Everyone understands that California’s greatness is part of America’s greatness and that the growth of California contributes to the prosperity of the people in all the other states as well.

Could the strength of democratic Europe be turned against the strength of America? This danger could arise only if America broke off the Atlantic alliance and threw out NATO. Separated, Europe and America could be dangerous competitors for power and influence in the world, starting with a more unbridled struggle for markets and moving on to strategic competition. Wrecking the alliance in the name of fear of a European threat would be an irrational exercise in self-fulfilling prophecy. Reforming the alliance to make it a more permanent commitment and enhance its sustainability would be the rational response to the residual theoretical danger of separation.

Thanks to NATO and the related Atlanticist political and economic organizations, Europe and America have used their weight cohesively enough to keep global politics and the world economy on an even keel for 45 years, despite the cold war. They could do so much more surely in coming decades, free of the cold war, if they hold together and add their former enemies to their Atlanticist nucleus of world order.

Europe remains essential for American security. American involvement in Europe remains essential for America’s own interest. If it were completely divided from America, Europe really could become problematic for America, even if it remained united internally. Infinitely worse, however, would be a Europe that re-divided into separate nationalisms. Such a Europe would revert to being a source of tyrannies and of world wars. In the Central and Eastern portions of Europe and Eurasia, there would once again periodically arise great nationalist rebellions against Western individualism. Disoriented Eastern nations would seek their roots in an integral, organicist nationalism. Threats to the survival of America, of freedom, and of human existence itself – which we had hoped we had finally left behind in 1989 – would return. New nationalist tyrannies would be far more volatile in their international behavior than the former Communist tyrannies. Only if the revival of national freedom since 1989 is coupled with a vigorous new extension of internationalist authority – which is what the Eastern democratic leaders have desperately wanted to get through integration into the Western international structures, but have not been allowed to get – will nationalism be kept moderate and liberal.

The dissolution of NATO would be a signal, giving unbridled rein to the tendency of “renationalization of defense” of which the East European leaders have warned. The trend to renationalize defense would spread from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. The German problem would return. The “security gap” in Eastern Europe would become much deeper and more acute. An unsettled Eastern Europe would compel Germany’s attention and draw Germany away from its orientation to the West. It would also divide Russia from the West, as Russia and Germany would compete to fill the “security gap” in their own ways. France and Germany would return to mutual suspicion. The EC would fray as trade issues once again came to be examined by each country with a view to its own separate strength and security position vis-à-vis its partners. Nations would once again compete for influence in their separate foreign policies. They would once again arm their militaries in competition with and for fear of one another. All the old nonsense would start up again.

Fortunately those who have made the most political mileage out of the public fears about America’s allies do not want to act these fears out in practice. Rep. Gephardt has been among the most eloquent and responsible of the proponents of helping Russia, using the analogy to the Marshall Plan unabashedly, and warning how foolhardy it would be if America let this moment pass and failed to make the most of this opportunity for which it have been waiting for 50 years. It was President Bush who, despite his campaign promise in 1988 that he would not run America as if it were in decline, nevertheless begged off of America’s responsibilities on the pretext that America lacked the money and the allies should simply do it without American leadership.

President Clinton, like Rep. Gephardt, has the political credibility among those who fear allied competition to turn around and relegate this fear to the margins. To some extent he has already done so. He has acted as a strong alliance leader on aid to Russia. He has put down those in the press who are rushing to proclaim NATO “dead” – and has cited the East European desire to join NATO as his proof that the alliance is not dead. Just as President Nixon could go to China, just as President Kennedy could renounce the myth of the “missile gap,” so President Clinton is in a position to lay to rest the myth of an economic threat to America from its European allies. With his interest in helping the new democracies and his call for a new Atlantic covenant, he could yet transform the slogan of burden sharing from an ally-bashing slogan into a call for placing the trans-Atlantic partnership on a stronger and more regular foundation.

Why add the Easterners as NATO allies? What’s in it for America?

Having Eastern Europe and Russia as allies – not just in the sense of being friends, but of being in a concretized, organized alliance through NATO – would mean adding their power to that of America and the West. It would mean that Russia’s nuclear weapons and those of its neighbors could be roughly added to those of America for purposes of calculating America’s strategic strength and security, instead of having to be subtracted or treated as wild cards. It would mean that we could move beyond détente to entente. It would mean that détente could be subsumed in the entente and completed, rather than seeing arms reductions being dragged out indefinitely (as at present) until a new arms race might emerge between Russia and Ukraine, and then between Russia and America. It would mean getting reliable help from Eastern Europe and Russia on a common agenda in the Middle East and avoidance of divergent agendas and wild cards, with all that this means for facilitating the handling of the multifarious inherent difficulties of the Middle East. It would mean laying a foundation for mutually beneficial cooperation with the Easterners in a thousand areas. It would mean a vast extension in the realm of the Democratic Peace.

The benefit of having the new European and Eurasian democracies organized with us in an alliance is enormous. So is the cost of not having them as allies. Allies tend to support one another around the world; non-allied powers tend to undercut one another around the world. Allies need not arm against one another; unconnected powers do need to count their armament levels against one another.

Strategic competition, unlike economic competition, is not in any sense a good thing. It leads to costly arms races. It turns separate powers into adversaries, and adversaries into enemies. It turns new democracies away from their fledgling democratic practices and back toward anti-Western, anti-democratic ideologies and systems.

Expansion of NATO as a basis for successful Democratization in the East

“Russia’s armed forces are taking shape as a separate national institution. A prospect of being fundamentally bonded with the Western military would have a beneficial impact in shaping its doctrinal approach and general posture.

“The main thrust of this initiative would be to engage the Russian military, currently in search of a new role and often left in the cold in the outskirts of the former Soviet empire, in a wider security system firmly rooted in democracy... Engaging the Russian military as a disciplined institution would enable democratic, pro-Western values to be spread through its channels and do much to help consolidate the orientation of Russia in favor of democracy.”

– Igor Khripunov (then First Secretary of the Russian Embassy to the U.S.), “NATO Must Welcome Russia: Allies can ground its military in Western values,” Defense News, Springfield, VA, June 15-21, 1992

Military forces are blunt instruments. They tend either to cooperate or to compete; it is hard for them to view one another neutrally.

Cooperating, military forces greatly reinforce the political solidarity of their countries with one another, because they enable their countries to identify with one another’s power as their own. Competing, they reinforce the political differentiation of their respective countries from one another. Integration of the Eastern militaries with the West is not a luxury, it is a basic element in consolidating the democratic spirit in the East and anchoring the political identity of the East to that of Western-style democracy.

A long-term way for two militaries to evolve toward cooperation is by experiencing decades of cultural solidarity and foreign policy harmony between their respective countries, punctuated by wars fought side by side against third parties. We can afford neither the time nor the wars to develop by these means a spirit of unity between Eastern and Western militaries; the pace of choice between democratization and other paths is too quick. There is one other path that can be taken among countries with a potential for compatibility of interests, a path which still can be afforded: namely, organizing the militaries across national boundaries for cooperation, as in NATO. Once this is done, plenty of time will be available for habits of cooperation to be solidified by training and practice and by joint missions of fighting and pacification.

If military cooperation is not actively organized – and it does not happen by itself, it requires a rare degree of initiative – then militaries are prone to compare themselves against one another as potential enemies and to slip into hostile competition. This competition is prone to spill over from the core military sphere to general foreign policy. This tendency is especially true of countries that are significantly interdependent by dint of proximity or of technology, such as the industrialized countries of Eurasia. It is even more true of great powers, and above all of powers like Russia and Germany which are ambivalent about Western values: they feel impelled to be either allies of the West or enemies of the West.

George Kennan could not have been more mistaken when he wrote that Russia cannot be an ally of America but it need not be an enemy either. Russia is just such a country that, in its periods of settled government with clear moral foundation, it must be either an ally or an enemy. The periods in between can only be unstable transitions – periods of drift toward enmity to the West, or else periods of floating uneasily in the hope of arriving at an alliance with the West.

The history of liberal Russia’s search for a more solidaristic international order, one through which it would be better joined with the West, dates back to Tsar Alexander I and his appeal to Britain to prepare for establishing a liberal league of nations after the Napoleonic Wars. The history of Russia’s disillusionment with the West and its turns backward into an organicist nationalism dates to the selfsame Alexander I: spurned by the British, he turned to Metternich for support for what became the Holy Alliance. The reactionary trend was deepened by Nicholas I and by the Slavophiles. It was they, paralleling the German romantic nationalists, who developed the ideology that, in order to lay the basis for international solidarity and cohesion, it was necesary to turn away from Western individualism in national social and political life and to restore a supposedly organic form of intra-national solidarity and cohesion. Meanwhile, they added sotto voce, a reversion to illiberalism under the new guise of nationalism would protect their governments and empires against the dissolving wave of Western liberalism.

Ever since then, every anti-Western ideological movement has had this same logical structure, at once fantastic in its internal contradictions and inevitable in the appeal it has for non-Western nationalists. Never mind that a moderate, practical national solidarity is what fits best with international solidarity. Never mind that extreme forms of intra-national solidarism are in practice extremely damaging to international solidarity. Never mind that international solidarity must in any case be built by an international effort not by intra-national changes. None of these considerations can prevent the appeal of the sleight-of-hand of investing hopes for international solidarism into magnification of national solidarism. The appeal becomes irresistible in a backward country when it feels insecure before the vicissitudes of world politics and experiences liberalism as a disintegrative agent.

Russian Communism – which came to power on the wings of disillusionment with the West over World War I – was a variation on the theme of extreme national solidarism as the basis for international solidarism. So was Hitler’s national socialism. So is Islamic fundamentalism. So is the ideology of the contemporary Russian nationalist Right: it holds that the selfish individualistic West will never be generous to Russia or help make the equations of democracy work in Russia, but will only exploit Russia’s weakness; so the only way to save Russia is by turning against the West, rebuilding the empire by force of will and spirit, and holding up the East’s own moral universe apart from and against the West, until such day as the decadent West collapses of its own individualistic contradictions.

Since 1991 the democratic leadership in Russia has been trying almost desperately to be an ally and partner of the West. So have the East European democrats. Crucial to their stabilization in this pattern is the integration of their military forces with those of the West into a structure of cooperation in which they can routinely work together and routinely wash away the instincts of mutual suspicion and strategic competition. Absent this integration, the Russian military is left hanging in a state of disorientation, strongly susceptible to arguments for restoring security in its immediate vicinity by rebuilding a separate Eastern empire and turning against the West. The East European militaries, meanwhile, are susceptible to mutual suspicions in light of cross-border ethnic problems.

No European institution without America is big enough to integrate the Easterners. The EC is certainly not big enough; its geographical reach will always be limited, and its pace is bound to be slow because it will take a long time to integrate the entire economic structures and labor forces of the countries across the divide that used to be the iron curtain. Only NATO, OECD and CSCE have the requisite geographical size and balance of populations. OECD and CSCE lack the strength or structure to play more than a supplemental role. NATO is the core of the matter.

The role of NATO in supporting and stabilizing the democratization of the Eastern countries has hitherto been grossly underestimated. Support for democracy in the East has usually been discussed as if it were merely a matter of “how much money” – and then whittled down to a less-than-adequate scale because the West does not want to put up very much money for such an uncertain project. What is actually needed is not money alone but a balanced program, including strong political and military-security components. No one component by itself is a sound investment; together they are sound. To balance the program and protect the economic investment in reform, the political and military components of Western involvement need to be greatly increased at this time.

Stabilization of international relations through a common military-security system is not the icing on the cake of democratization; it is a precondition for business confidence, economic growth and internal stabilization along democratic lines. Democratization, economic reform, and securing of peace – they must all be done. The lack of any one of these components can destroy the others. But they do their destructive work at radically different paces. It is war that is the sharpest danger, along with military insecurity and strategic competition. Democracy may eventually fail if economic reform fails, and vice versa, but democracy and economic reform will both immediately fail if peace fails. Anyone who doubts this need only look at the former Yugoslavia. Entry into NATO is sometimes pictured as the last step after the stabilization of democracy; it would better be used as a first step in the stabilization of democracy, after the establishment of a base-level democratic regime in a country.

Extension of NATO is the great untapped opportunity for promoting democratization. It would “annex” the militaries of the Eastern countries into being instruments of democratization instead of threats to democratization. Instead of adding to foreign aid budgets, it would allow for tremendous savings in military budgets. And it would leverage the foreign economic aid that we do send, by providing an atmosphere of confidence and security.

It is time to stop looking at NATO primarily in terms of danger and start looking at it – as its Atlanticist founders did – in terms of opportunity. The opportunity to nail down partnerships for the long haul. The opportunity to strengthen democracy. The opportunity to leverage resources internationally. The opportunity to strengthen the core of international order. The opportunity for combining the powerful levers of realism with a sober idealism in order to transform the realities of power and make this a better world.

Why keep NATO at all if “the enemy” is inside it?

“Why NATO? It is the only international security community with any substance that still exists.”

– Igor Khripunov, Defense News, June 15-21, 1992

The most common objection to having Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO is that, with “the enemy” in NATO, there will be no need for NATO. This is often accompanied by a remark that NATO is a “cold war relic” and ought to be gotten rid of now that “the enemy” is gone.

Despite its semblance of clear logic, this argument is actually an appeal to old cold war animosities against NATO. On the logical level it cancels itself out: if NATO is already an irrelevant cold war relic since the enemy is gone, then inclusion of its former enemies does not create the irrelevance; indeed it may be the only way to escape it.

For those who do still see the relevance of NATO despite its loss of enemies, inclusion of its former enemies inside it would only add further to its uses and relevance.

Both sides can agree that NATO has a problem of being perceived as irrelevant. A drastic transformation of NATO away from its cold war form is likely to be the only way to save the alliance. Inclusion of Eastern Europe and Russia is the logical heart of such a transformation.

NATO’s Origins and Functions: far more than a cold war instrument

In historical fact, the argument that NATO is a “cold war relic” reveals a certain amnesia. The roots of NATO are in the Atlantic alliances of World War I and World War II. NATO is already the third generation of the Atlantic alliance.

In the first generation of the alliance, America was only an associated power of the World War I allies. In the second generation America was a full ally in World War II, with Dwight D. Eisenhower as the main common commander. In the third generation the alliance was revived before World War III could break out, with the purpose of deterring world war rather than fighting it, and meanwhile of building an enduring structure for internal cooperation out of the pressures of adversity. The continuity with the World War II alliance was accentuated when Eisenhower returned to Europe as SACEUR, reestablishing the common command which he had left off in 1945.

With each generation, the alliance grew better-organized, and the interruption from the previous generations grew briefer. Today the fourth generation can grow directly out of the third. Can, and ought to: failure to do so would mean throwing out the entire patrimony built up as the positive side of all of the anguish of the world wars. It would mean losing the opportunity to improve on the alliance by deliberate construction for peacetime conditions. Instead, some fine day, after conditions had deteriorated back to the edge of war, the alliance would have to be re-created anyway, but in much worse conditions.

Underlying all three generations of the Atlantic alliance was a growing awareness, dating to the late 19th century, of deep common ideals and interests among the democracies on the two shores of the North Atlantic, and of a need for building common instruments for acting on these interests. A philosophy of “Atlanticism” had developed.

Atlanticism was based on the premise that the Atlantic democracies were the core and leadership of the real existing world order. It deduced that the Atlantic powers could lead the world toward order or toward chaos, and that the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century and the decline in confidence in Atlantic-style democracy was a result of the failure of the Atlantic countries to provide cohesive global leadership in an era of ever-increasing interdependence. It argued that the main way to strengthen world order and to renew confidence in democracy was by placing the unity of the Atlantic powers on an effective, reliable and institutionally visible basis. It held out the hope that an Atlantic union would provide a nucleus not only for a more orderly world but for the reunion into the West of the countries east of France which had fallen temporarily under the spell of anti-Western tyrannies.

When Andrei Kozyrev is called an “Atlanticist” today, he is called this in the true original meaning of the word – an Atlanticism which builds on realities in order to find the right orientation for change and that strives toward a transformation commensurate with the scope of the needs of the time – not in the truncated meaning that is too often found in the official Atlanticism in the West where, the Atlanticist goal having been part-way realized, there has come to be too much attachment to the status quo.

The Soviet threat in the late 1940s did not create the idea of NATO out of nowhere. Rather, the threat was used by Atlanticists as the occasion finally to overcome the inertia of the Atlantic governments and get them all to join in a plan to institutionalize their links in an enduring way, a way that could finally deter wars as well as win them and that could help to win the peace as well as the war.

NATO today is a tremendous asset. It is an international instrument for security, the like of which few if any others exist. The UN is still a long way from being as effective an instrument as NATO for the internationalization of security. NATO has been able to grow so capable thanks to its formation and tempering in the teeth of adversity. To throw out the asset now because the old adversary is gone would be a terrible mistake, setting the organization of peace back by two world wars. The costs would be paid for generations to come.

The amnesia about NATO’s roots and role is bi-partisan. It covers large portions of Left, Right and Center.

In some circles on the Left there is an aversion to anything that can be tarred as a “cold war relic.” Some people would seem to prefer to destroy the best international assets for democracy and peace than to live with these “cold war relics.” It makes no sense logically; it is a classic case of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” (or in this case, long after the bathwater is gone). It has the flavor of perpetuating a vendetta against anyone and anything that participated in the cold war on the Western side. It is itself a relic of the cold war mentality.

In the isolationist wing of the Right, it has long been held that the European allies are decadent and that NATO weakens America. This theme has recently been translated into economic language. There is now a widespread myth that NATO costs the U.S. taxpayer $100-150 billion a year and is destroying the American economy to the benefit of Europe. This myth is based on the sleight-of-hand of counting the U.S. troops that are stationed inside the U.S. as if they were NATO troops, and then talking as if the U.S. could save all that money by pulling out its far smaller stock of troops that are in Europe. The actual dollar savings to the U.S. of bringing all its troops home from Europe would be virtually zero, even negative. The European allies spend billions of dollars on direct and indirect support for U.S. forces in Europe, including compensation and equalization funds, with the result that forces in Europe cost only barely more per troop than in the U.S. A huge political cost would be paid for pulling out the troops. It would reduce American influence in Europe. It would invite far worse crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Meanwhile $10,000 per soldier would be paid for withdrawing and relocating them in the U.S. – and the costs would become astronomical just as soon as we had to send troops back to Europe or the Middle East in a crisis. The real way to save money on defense is by cutting troops and bases here at home, not in Europe. The really massive forces are here at home. They used to be needed for reinforcements in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. They are no longer needed for this purpose: they really are a cold war relic. What is still needed is a continuing force in Europe to provide a convincing American presence. Such a substantial “presence” force is needed, (a) for its reassuring political effects, (b) for readiness to respond in case of local crisis, and (c) for its role in making possible American leadership, which is still needed on important occasions for the vitality of the alliance.

In the status quo Center it is sometimes held that NATO cannot survive without an enemy, so NATO has to keep most of the Easterners out and keep organizing itself on the theory that Russia is the potential enemy. This may make sense as a strategy for driving Russia back into being an enemy, but not as a strategy for a West that has pressing responsibilities for global leadership and can manage those responsibilities much better with Russia’s collaboration than with Russia’s enmity. It is doubtful that the contemporary exponents of this view remember where the argument comes from – that it derives out of the line of thought of the great Nazi political theorist, Carl Schmitt, who in his most extreme formulations held that people unite only to fight against a common enemy, that the state cannot be built except by war, because true mutual dedication is built only in the course of fighting an enemy, that the state is the agency that defines the enemy, that the enemy relation is the basic relation in politics, that without an enemy the state becomes decadent...

This theory contains an important grain of truth. It brings out how hard it is to develop common institutions backed by real mutual dedication, and how important it is to cherish the really important institutions and commitments that have been built at the terrible cost of a common struggle. But atop this grain of truth it piles a mound of falsehoods. It hides the fact that there are positive roots of unity, not just negative ones, and that commitments and institutions that have been built in the course of a common struggle can be perpetuated for common positive purposes long after that struggle is ended. It fails to explain why peaceful democratic states, which are not constantly seeking out internal and external enemies, not only exist but are more stable than tyrannical, enemy-focused states. It creates an “either-or,” nihilistic attitude, in which the only choice is between pacifist instruments that will never grow strong and militarist instruments that will never make peace. It tempts people on the militarist side to neglect to make peace when the time is ripe, and people on the pacifist side to throw out at the first opportunity all the positive structures and commitments that had congealed in the face of adversity. It brings us back to the old American temptation of losing the peace after having won the war. The idea, for example, that NATO should be discarded in favor of CSCE – which was for a time a hope in anti-NATO circles – would only deprive CSCE of the possibility of ever growing into something strong, since that possibility depends on its hope of incorporating the strength of NATO. There is no reason to believe that, if NATO were disbanded, the peoples would come back together in a new solidarity of any comparable effectiveness through CSCE, or for that matter through any other institution. There would be no common enemy to force them back together, nor the strong popular movements for international organization that existed in the 1940s.

NATO is an achievement in military integration, purchased at an enormous cost of experience. It is the most important instrument that exists in the world today for internationalization and harmonization of military forces. It is the positive fruit the allies finally brought out of two terrible world wars, in order to prevent a new attack on the West and to prevent Germany from going bad again. The Soviet threat was the focus around which it was conveniently organized and most people still think of it mainly in terms of the conjuncture of a Soviet threat, but it would be a tragic mistake to let NATO disappear with that conjuncture.