Contents

VI. What role for NATO in ethnic and border disputes? 65

VII. A dignified role for the Russian military 69

VIII. National interests in getting an Extended NATO 71

IX. Burden sharing 73

X. A sliding scale of entry into NATO: different levels, different paces? 75

VI. What Role for NATO in Ethnic and Border Disputes?

“Russia’s entrance into NATO would alleviate the fears of its neighbors, since the NATO process would be accompanied by joint elements of planning and command, as well as by a series of commitments. These commitments could include acceptance of NATO mediation and dispute settlement... New, less painful solutions would become possible for Russian troop withdrawal from the Baltic States and the status of Sevastopol for basing the Black Sea fleet.”

– Igor Khripunov (then First Secretary of the Russian Embassy to the U.S.), in Defense News, Springfield, VA, June 15-21, 1992

Problems of peacekeeping and peacemaking in the East would be made more evident – but not created – by extending NATO. The problems already exist. NATO has already decided in principle in favor of taking them on, in Nagorno-Karabakh as well as Bosnia.

What extension of NATO would do is to make it easier for NATO to solve these problems. It would make NATO’s role more legitimate in the region. It would provide local resources and skills, reducing the costs that the West would have to pay. And some of the problems would be headed off by the reassuring effects of NATO’s mere presence.

At present, the chaos and confusion in the former Soviet bloc is a poor advertisement for the area. It is making the area seem more trouble than it is worth. The area is a mess, it is argued, so why take on its problems? However, the problems will not go away by ignoring them. If they are left to fester, sooner or later they will spill over to do enormous damage to Western Europe as well. This is why NATO has already decided in principle to take on peacemaking and peacekeeping operations.

The difference that NATO membership for the Easterners would make is to provide greater resources for NATO’s handling of the problems. It would also make a NATO intervention in the Eastern regions more palatable to the peoples there.

Before it could come to an intervention, however, the main function of NATO membership would be to build, by the mere fact of its presence, mutual confidence among member countries. This role dampens ethnic and border disputes and can often forestall them from reaching the point of fighting.

NATO tends to build trust mostly as a side-effect of cooperative military efforts among its member countries. Forces that are enmeshed in NATO command, training, arming and planning are less likely to be preparing to launch an attack against one another, and less likely to fear attack from one another. The basic mutual defense commitment in NATO also builds trust, since it is made among a grouping of countries where there is an overall balance: trust in the balance of the whole spills over into mutual trust within the framework of the whole.

The balance of an Extended NATO would remain good and conducive to trust. Indeed, it would be even better than in the old NATO: no one country would have anywhere near a majority of the population or of the economic or military weight, but the stable democracies together would have a firm majority.

By contrast, the balance of C.I.S. left to itself is bad. The majority weight of Russia engenders fear and distrust among many of the minority members. Ukraine has fought against any supranationality in C.I.S. on the ground that it would be merely a reconstituted USSR and a Russian empire. The Baltic states have not even joined a non-supranational C.I.S. out of the same fear. A supranational sector of C.I.S. may be formed with Belarus and some of the Central Asian states, but for Ukraine, the Baltics and possibly the Caucasus, strategic unity with Russia is more plausible in a NATO context than in a C.I.S. context. It is through NATO that Russia can regain a comfortable relation with these countries. This makes it actually preferable for Russia’s own special interests that the relations between NATO and the command of Russian forces be as far as possible along the supranational end of the spectrum.

For all these reasons, the extension of NATO membership and its integrative arrangements to the East may well be itself the most important thing NATO can do for peace in the East, quite apart from any new peacekeeping commitments that NATO may make. However, the problems in the East have grown worse while the issue has been waiting. Whether or not they might have been headed off if NATO had been extended earlier, now many of them are out in the open. Putting the genies back in the bottle will not be easy.

The balance of forces within NATO would make it easier for NATO to serve as a guarantor to a settlement of the conflicts. But even in the best of circumstances, it will be some time before all of the simmering ethnic conflicts are pacified.

NATO peacemaking forces may be unavoidable for resolving in some conflicts, as well as peacekeeping forces for supervising the settlement. For these purposes, NATO forces would have two advantages: they would be better trusted than the forces of any single nation, and they be better trusted than UN forces to uphold a fair peace rather than just weakly ratify the results of aggression.

An Extended NATO would in these ways bring extended capabilities for solving these problems. But there is also a downside: it would bring extended commitments. An Extended NATO might feel obligated to carry out peacekeeping efforts in its own extended area. How much, then, should NATO do in the way of mediation, peacemaking and peacekeeping? – where, by whose decisions, under whose authorization? These are perhaps the most painful questions of an Extended NATO. However, it should be kept always in mind that some of the pain has been created by the delay in extending NATO, that continued non-extension of NATO would not make the pain go away but would only make it easier for the West to hold its head in the sand until the pain would grow unbearable and unmanageable, and that the difficulties of an intervention would only be greater if it were conducted by an un-extended NATO in a distant out-of-area country.

Some areas that have already fallen into internal conflict might be excluded from NATO membership, at least until such time as they reached an internal settlement. NATO mediation might nevertheless help them in reaching a settlement, especially if the extension of NATO membership to the surrounding area made for a realistic prospect of getting NATO guarantees for such a settlement.

More training of NATO forces for peacemaking and peacekeeping will be needed. “Peacemaking” means intervening to halt a war and separate the fighting parties. People in the former Yugoslavia have prayed for such an intervention. It may come to this in various regions of the former USSR, too.

If things really go bad – if NATO is not extended eastward, and Russia or a runaway Army tries to reconquer former Soviet territories like Lithuania or Ukraine – it will be beyond the point where NATO intervention would be possible. In that event, it will be possible only to pray that things will not degenerate further into a nuclear war with global ecological consequences.

Membership in NATO would help prevent such conflicts, but cannot guarantee against them. A NATO that included the smaller states bordering on Russia would be committed to defend them against an unprovoked Russian invasion (which would help dry up the residual dreams within the Russian military of reconquering the USSR), but could not commit itself blindly to take their side against Russia in any and every ethnic and border dispute.

How could NATO solve this dilemma? It could use several devices for this purpose:

• A negotiated solution to some of the sharper disputes might be required by the time of joining NATO, as a precondition for membership in NATO.

• NATO might serve as a guarantor of a negotiated solution between the parties.

Sometimes this would make it easier for the parties to reach agreement. E.g.: Ukraine has asked the West for a security guarantee in return for giving up its nuclear missiles; membership for both Ukraine and Russia in NATO would finally make possible such a guarantee on terms that would not be anti-Russian or taking sides against Russia. Ukraine has in fact proposed this solution. Likewise, sharing the use of Sevastopol with Russia might seem less threatening to Ukraine if it were done under NATO auspices rather than merely bilateral or C.I.S. auspices.

For the Baltic states, an accord with Russia on treatment of internal Russian minorities might be more acceptable if accompanied by NATO guarantees: it might quiet the complaints of Russian nationalists even while reducing Baltic fears of a use of the local Russians as a stepping stone for reconquest by Russia.

• NATO might require entering states to include, in the protocols for their NATO membership, a defintion of their borders, and binding commitments to submit any future disputes over minorities and borders to NATO/CSCE arbitration and mediation processes, and to respect the results of those processes.

• If, after joining NATO, a major ethnic or border conflict develops anyway – and if the mediation processes cannot stop it, if the parties will not all support a NATO intervention to halt the fighting, and if it is ambiguous which party is most at fault – then NATO might do better to retrench than to join the fray militarily. NATO might want an escape clause for divorcing itself from such a situation, and for demoting the countries involved from full NATO membership – so that the status of the warring countries, not of NATO, would suffer.

NATO cannot accept full onus for managing the mutual relations of these countries: that would far exceed its capabilities and undermine its credibility. The protocols for their entry into NATO would probably therefore make clear that the primary onus remains on these countries to maintain peaceful relations with one another, and would require them to submit to and abide by NATO/CSCE mediation as a condition for remaining full members of NATO.

Which is the danger: too far too fast, or too little too late?

This raises the question of the schedule on which it is advisable to bring the new states into NATO. On the one side it is argued, ‘NATO cannot take on their problems. Let these countries solve their problems by themselves, and then, when the situation is clearly stabilized and they are reliable partners, it will be possible to let them into NATO.’ On the other side it is argued, ‘These countries can become reliable partners only by joining the West; their situation is too paradoxical for them to solve their problems democratically on their own. Better to forestall wars by extending NATO now, than watch them sink into the abyss, as in Yugoslavia, until it becomes too late to bring them into NATO – or until they decide to solve their problems the old fashioned way, as Russians are increasingly contemplating, and no longer want to join NATO. Even while we wait for them to become reliable partners, the opportunity to draw them in as reliable partners is slipping through our fingers – and we are proving ourselves to be unreliable partners to them.’

We will return to the question of “reliable partners” later. Here we need only note that, while there are dangers on both sides, the main danger by far is on the side of delay. Delay has already been tried. It has already led to a serious compounding of problems and deterioration of prospects.

Plenty of delay will be provided in any case by the necessary negotiating processes, political and bureaucratic resistances, and difficulties in multilateral synchronization. These factors would impose a delay no matter even if the most rapid accession were attempted. It is necessary to factor the inevitability of such technical delays into any recommendations on scheduling. This is not fully appreciated when arguments are made for tacking on extra willful delays in the name of gradualism.

Those who prefer a certain gradualism in bringing these countries into NATO, yet also sincerely want to get them in not to wait for an entire generation, would probably find that the inevitable technical delays would more than suffice to slow things down enough to meet their gradualistic concerns. Even if a hard push is made for extending NATO, the action is still likely to come slower not faster than the sincere gradualists would like. In order to achieve their goal of entrance for these countries in the present era, they might find it best simply to advocate and push for bringing these countries into NATO without any extra delays beyond those that are required to deliberate on and negotiate the issue.

In an alliance of 16 countries, all with a formal power to veto the admission of new members, and with the need for negotiation of an agreement on protocols on all sides, the danger of going too far too fast is highly theoretical. It is the danger of too little too late that is real, indeed that is almost inevitable.

What is constructive in gradualism is not the “ism” (that is, the dogma of going slowly) but the willingness of its more sincere proponents to move ahead with whatever partial steps can be agreed on at the time, and to use these steps as jumping off points for further steps. One such constructive gradualist proposal was made by David Abshire, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO: he urged a NATO commitment to bring in the Central European countries as full members by the end of the decade, in order to give these countries hope while the delays are still in process. He did not counterpose this in any dogmatic fashion to acting now to let these countries in; what he counterposed it to was waiting while nothing meaningful was done.

VII. A dignified role for the Russian Military

The Russian military needs a dignified, non-aggressive role in the world; military officers want to feel and to report that they are serving a worthy purpose. Indeed, Russia as a whole needs a dignified role in the world that is compatible with its memory of its long historical status as a great power; yet somehow this major role must not be felt by its neighbors to be threatening, and must be compatible with Russian democracy. The failure to provide a dignified, pro-democratic great power role for Russia has been providing a continual temptations to revert to the one great power role that does seem available to it: an anti-Western role.

The Russian military can be given a democratic role and can be freed of being feared and loathed by its neighbors, by (1) being embedded inside the NATO Command system, and (2) NATO’s extending its mutual defense commitments to Russia’s neighbors.

Presently Russia and its army are suffering one indignity after another. The ending of the Cold War led to the collapse of the outer empire in Eastern Europe. The collapse of the outer empire led to the collapse of the inner empire (the USSR). Now the collapse of the inner empire now seems to be leading to the break-up of the Russian State itself — just as the Communist hard-liners had warned. This is a situation fit to breed a coup. Indeed, it is music to the ears of fascist theoreticians, who have long held that the State is based on the friend-enemy relation, and that if the State loses the will and ability to define the external enemy, it will collapse in internal dissension. This has not happened in the West, where the foundation of the State (and of the alliance system) is in positive values and harmonies of interest which go deeper than having an external enemy, and which have survived the end of the Cold War; but the collapse is happening all too clearly in the East. For a military that used to be one of the two main players on the global scene, it is undignified to watch itself being chopped into pieces and drawn into conflicts that are becoming narrower and narrower, pettier and pettier.

Joining NATO would help with this, by enabling the Russian military to feel itself a part of something greater and steadier. Membership in NATO would anchor the Russian military to the stable and global perspective of the Western military. Gradual increases in informal contacts between the Russian military and NATO are not enough to achieve this anchoring. Formal status matters. So do institutional structures.

The Russian military, as a part of NATO, could play a major role in support of the world order, without frightening its neighbors. This role might include:

Peacemaking and peacekeeping as a part of NATO forces

UN enforcement missions

Joint allied operations against terrorists and nuclear proliferators

National operations, formally independent of NATO but coordinated with the national actions of other allies; especially U.S.-Russian actions

Coordinated U.S.-Russian actions could include moves against pairs of former client states, or against pairs of rogue states that are loosely identified with the U.S. and Russia, respectively. There could, for example, be a simultaneous move by Russia against the government and nuclear program of North Korea, and by the U.S. against the extremists in Afghanistan who are creating trouble across the C.I.S. border.

As a more daring example, there could also be a simultaneous move by the U.S. against Tudjman in Croatia and by Russia against Milosevic in Serbia. Replacement of these two governments would be a far cheaper and more effective way to end the carnage than intervention inside Bosnia proper. Russia would also be more sympathetic to it than to a one-sided intervention for the Muslims against the Serbs. NATO or the U.S. might provide logistical support for Russian forces in Serbia.

Such parallel actions, accompanied by statements of mutual support, would do much to build a spirit of alliance. They need not wait until after Russian membership in NATO; they could blaze the way for Russian membership in NATO.

Unilateral national actions would not be ruled out by the fact of membership in NATO. However, they would usually be taken only after careful consultation of the allies and would be constrained by Russia’s own interest in making its actions multilateral so as not to ruffle its neighbors’ feathers.

As a member of NATO, Russia could also play a more dignified diplomatic role in the world. It would no longer be forced to choose between tagging after the West diplomatically or opposing the West diplomatically, because within NATO it would participate in defining the joint Western goals and strategies. Russia could become a more fully cooperative long-term partner for the West in the Middle East. It would be able to regard the upholding of COCOM controls as a part of its own honor and pride rather than an act of kowtowing to an alien COCOM.

A Russia and a Germany inside NATO could cooperate closely with one another, as they have historically been prone to do, without this setting off alarms in capitals further west. They need such cooperation; the countries in-between them need it from them; and the West also needs it from them, although as long as either of them is separate from the West, their cooperation will continue to make the West uneasy.

If the Turkic peoples of the former USSR also joined NATO, this would reinforce Turkey’s attachment to NATO and prevent the emergence of a greater anti-Western Islamic front. Indeed, by buttressing a modernizing fraction of the Islamic world and incorporating it within the West, it would strengthen the case of all modernistic Moslems who look to the West.

VIII. National Interests in getting an Extended NATO

Russia. The present renaissance of the Russian national spirit needs to be embraced, but at the same time integrated into a respectable international role. NATO enabled Germany to play legitimately some of that leadership role, the denial of which was a cause of World Wars I and II. Russia must not now be driven into a corner, or given only humiliation in return for its pro-Western posture, but welcomed into a partnership with the democratic powers. At the same time as extending protection to Russia’s neighbors, NATO should also extend access for Russia, so that Russia can gain back, in a non-threatening non-imperial way, some of the access and sense of a “common space” that it once had with its neighbors. Among international organizations, only NATO has the muscle to be able to do this.

U.S. A reduction in the U.S. role in NATO is inevitable given current attitudes. It is already underway. The only question is whether it will continue to be done destructively, as a step away from an unchanged NATO, or whether it will henceforth be done as a part of a constructive transformation of NATO. Since 1990, America has whittled down its role begrudgingly. Mutual irritation between Europe and America has grown, threatening to reduce NATO to insignificance. Extension of NATO would allow the emergence of a more natural balance in the alliance, on the basis of which roles could be reorganized in a sustainable way – not by palming them off or abandoning them for someone else to take up, but by regularizing and redistributing roles within the common organizational structure.

In an extended NATO, America would play a less predominant role than in the cold war NATO, but it would be a more sustainable role. The U.S. would continue to be the single most important country. It would continue to be seen as a guarantor of justice for the small member countries. NATO would continue, in a more normal and sustainable way, to serve as a vehicle to ensure American influence in Europe and indeed throughout northern Eurasia – an influence in which not only America has an interest, but which most of the countries there consider highly desirable, especially the East Europeans. It will spare Germany from any necessity of emerging as a dominant power, which is the last thing that wise Germans want to see happen.

Germany would be extremely happy with an extended NATO: it would finally be able to develop close relations in both directions, East and West, without reviving the old suspicion that its interest in Eastern relations meant that it was taking over there or that it was turning away from the West. For quasi-constitutional reasons, however, Germany may have to be temporarily exempted from extension of its military commitments.

France might at first be upset at an extended NATO for the very reason that it would give NATO a renewed lease on life. However, France should come around and become happy with the greater balance in an extended NATO and the more limited American role. If France can be brought along with a new trans-Atlantic bargain for a new NATO – and there are some indications that it could – this opportunity should be seized upon for ending the old quarrel with France. However, France should not be given a veto over progress in NATO, in whose common instruments France has not participated for decades anyway. The worst that France would do is renounce its Treaty commitment and walk out of the North Atlantic Council; it would not cease to be a democracy or a friendly country if it leaves NATO. The danger is not losing France, but losing the East while waiting on France and trying to get its agreement.

The other NATO countries should be mostly happy with giving NATO a new lease on life and should realize that an extension of NATO eastward is in their own true long-term national interests. However, they can also be expected to be jittery over the details, slow to accept changes in the NATO structure, jealous of their own former importance in a smaller alliance, and prone to inertia.

NATO itself has an interest in extending eastward, in order to give itself a form that can survive in the new era. NATO circles are finally coming to realize this. They may now push for the changes.

Eastern Europe. But what will do the most to carry the changes, if indeed they are carried, is the continuing pressure of the new democrats in Central and Eastern Europe, and even in Russia. These people feel the need for NATO in their bones – and in their hearts. For them NATO is an ideal of democratic unity, not a tired old commitment where most of the parties have long since forgotten about the daily benefits it brings them. They have no luxury of forgetting about the benefits at stake: they know that is a matter of rock-bottom national interest, the difference between success and failure for their countries, the basis on which their countries can stabilize in freedom as they want. NATO membership is for these countries, as Helmut Kohl has said that it is for Germany, an “existential” question for their democracy.

As long as the first generation of democratic leaders is in power in the East, these leaders will keep pushing for entry into NATO. Sooner or later they will get their countries into NATO – unless they fall first. Their successors, however, are likely to have narrower visions; they will be more prone to nationalism, especially if the Atlanticism of the first generation has not been validated by membership in NATO. Opponents of an Extended NATO should take notice: it is by delaying the extension of NATO until the first generation of democratic leaders has fallen in the East that they can prevent the extension of NATO.

IX. Burden Sharing

The idea of Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO sometimes runs into a bitter jesting question: “Will we have to pay for Eastern Europe’s and Russia’s defense, the way we pay for Europe’s?”

The logical answer is that the expansion of NATO will make possible much deeper reductions in U.S. military spending. It will change Russia’s and Eastern Europe’s forces from being subtractions from American security into being additions to American security.

However, logic does not always suffice. In order to develop public support for an Extended NATO, it will be helpful to emphasize ways in which this could lead to burden sharing as well as to reduced defense spending.

The new member countries in the East, despite reducing the military pressures on the West by the mere fact of joining NATO, will be in no position to share positive financial burdens for some years to come. Any new system of burden sharing will have to start among the old members of NATO. If the protocols for an Extended NATO provided for such a system, they might have to exempt the new, penniless members for a specified number of years.

Usually discussions of burden-sharing engender heat and irritation within the alliance. A system for burden-sharing ought to be such as to resolve tensions rather than engender new ones. For this reason, it would be best if it operated by pre-defined technical criteria and processes rather than continuous diplomacy. This is unlikely to be achieved at the present time.

For the sake of discussion, and with the proviso that such a system may not be realizable yet, here is a rough draft of language providing for such a system of burden-sharing system:

The pre-1990 members of NATO agree to share all burdens for agreed measures for defense, development aid, and integration of the new allies. The real and hidden national expenditures contributory toward agreed alliance policies, the personnel and material equivalent costs, and the cost that ought to be borne on a basis equivalent to a mildly graduated income tax, will be appraised by a committee of experts, whose report will go into effect after acceptance by the North Atlantic Council. A NATO equalization fund will be formed, to which countries will contribute the amount needed to fulfill their share of the burden, and out of which countries that have fulfilled more than their share will receive compensation.

In 10 years, when the financial recovery of the ex-Communist countries should be complete, they will join as equals in this system of sharing of burdens.

The goal of NATO is not only to share burdens but to reduce burdens. The fact of being allied and of working together enables all of the members to reduce their individual burdens. Every effort will be made to cut defense costs further, by eliminating unnecessary expenditures, reducing armaments levels, eliminating duplication of military effort among allies, and achieving full standardization and intra-NATO trade. A NATO Commission on Arms Reductions will assess areas for reductions and propose an allocation of the benefits and adjustment costs of arms reductions, with equalization from the NATO equalization fund.

It deserves to be noted that, if European conscript troops were costed out at the equivalent value of the high-paid American all-volunteer army, and if Europeans and Americans were assessed defense shares proportioned as if by a mildly graduated per capita income tax, the result would show Europeans as already coming much closer to fulfilling their share of the burden than most people on either side of the Atlantic realize. It would be important to emphasize this point among Europeans, so they would not be unduly fearful of a burden-sharing provision.

However, power-sharing is the real basis that is needed for power-sharing. People naturally share burdens for decisions that they have taken in common. People naturally balk at decisions that they feel that others have taken for them; the attempt to force them to pay up anyway is known as “taxation without representation.”

Real power-sharing, by the way, does not mean giving up power, or getting someone else to displace one’s relative power, or somehow precisely equalizing power for separate action. Redistributing roles for separate power is power-bearing, not power-sharing. Real power-sharing means sharing the power to decide and act. That is to say, it means deciding policies by a common process which is itself fair and equitable.

A system for deciding policies in common is logically prior to a system for sharing burdens of implementation in common. It tends to be politically prior, too. The system of power-sharing normally supplies the structural outlines for the system of burden-sharing. A system of deep burden-sharing (like the one outlined above, which sounds a bit utopian by itself) emerges as a matter of course when there is a system of deep power-sharing.

X. A Sliding Scale of Entry into NATO?

Different levels of membership, different paces of entry?

From mid-1992 to mid-1993, as from late 1989 to early 1991, it has been useful to think in terms of a sliding scale of levels of membership in NATO – liaison, observer status, associate member, and full member – with different concrete links and commitments to be formed at these different levels and for different countries. This way, the East-Central Europeans and the Russians can be in process of joining NATO simultaneously. The Russians would lag a few steps behind some of the East Europeans, but would still be visibly on their way into NATO.

This would eliminate the assumption that the expansion of NATO eastward would be at the expense of the Russians. Indeed, it could change the movement of NATO eastward from a minus to a plus for the Russians, since it would mean that NATO was coming closer to including them.

If a rapid “sliding scale” entry of the Eastern countries had actually been attempted in 1990, the world today would be a noticeably different place. NATO would have been ready to start bringing in Russia when Russia became interested in joining NATO at the end of 1991. Meanwhile the expansion of NATO would have fostered a far more serious Western commitment to the easterners: not just more economic assistance, but real mediation backed by power. It would have prevented the “renationalization of defense” and provided a security umbrella to cover the withdrawal of Soviet power, instead of the “security gap” that was actually left. In these ways it would have eased the East European and Soviet transition out of communism. It might have even saved part of the Soviet Union from collapsing and averted some of the conflicts in its outlying areas. It would probably have spared Yugoslavia its descent into war.

After the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991 and the empowerment of a mostly-democratic government in Russia that was interested in joining NATO, there was no longer much need for a sliding scale. Unfortunately NATO was not ready in 1991 for entertaining the thought of Russian membership. It would have been possible at that time to have admitted all the Easterners as Associate Members and prepared for full Membership for them all simultaneously (excepting the Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asia, where conditions had already deteriorated too far), if NATO had been ready. Instead, a purely consultative NACC was set up in late 1991 for the Easterners, without any sliding scale.

In the second half of 1992, a negative turn in Russian political moods provided reason for a return to the sliding scale. The Russia of early 1993 would have found it harder to join NATO than the Russia of late 1991 or early 1992. While the dismissal of the old Parliament has brought the pendulum swinging partway back toward Atlanticism, it is still far from where it was in 1991.

Atlanticism was a Russian dream at the end of 1991, perhaps a bit novel but in keeping with the fashionable trends of the time. President Yeltsin and his Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, led the trend. But the West failed to validate it. By spurning Russia’s interest in joining NATO, the West made Russian Atlanticists seem ridiculous. By late 1992 “Atlanticism” had turned into something of a political curse word in Russia. It came to be used as an accusatory label for Kozyrev.

In reality not only Kozyrev and a number of Russian foreign policy specialists but the vast majority of the leaders of Eastern Europe are “Atlanticists.” Indeed, they are far better Atlanticists than most of the Western leaders who hold the reins of power in NATO. The Eastern leaders understand the transformative idea and spirit of Atlanticism: they came to power on the basis of Atlanticist-style hopes, whereas Western leaders simply inherited the formal status of being allied.

The new Atlanticists in the East needed a real outreach from the entrenched Atlantic structures of the West in order to validate their Atlanticism. Instead of being validated, they seemed to be spurned. Instead of being let in and being allowed to develop a dignified role within the Western world order, they were let to know that they would have to jump through a number of additional hoops before the West might condescend to consider letting them join. Their Atlanticism was made to look naïve.

In face of the failure of NATO to reciprocate Russia’s interest in joining, the Russian nationalists were enabled to argue that the West had only exploited Kozyrev’s Atlanticism and his desire for good relations with America in order to take advantage of Russia and destroy Russia’s power and influence, leaving Russia in the position of a beggar at the door of the West. A new turnaround began in Russian thinking on foreign policy, a turnaround which has influenced Kozyrev’s own thinking. Already there is much more belief in a need to pursue Russia’s separate interests, less of Kozyrev’s old presupposition of a harmony of interests with the West. There is also a desire on all levels, reaching straight up to Kozyrev, to feel independent and avoid acting in a way that might seem like kowtowing to Western dictation. This provides an early measure of the new problems and dangers that rush into the open space when the West itself fails to fill the space of its opportunity.

Thus, in 1993, the sliding scale came back. It was once again necessary to proceed more rapidly de facto with membership for Central Europe than for Russia, even while placing this in a context of also bringing in Russia and of taking convincing steps in that direction. The push for Central European entry reflected this, although it became too one-sided at times. The slope of the slide had to be moderated by the Clinton “Partnership” plan. Nevertheless a sliding scale of stages of membership appears to continue to be envisaged within the Partnership program. This is necessary: differentiation will be inevitable, not only for Russia where it may possible to moderate the differentiation still further after the December elections, but for Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, where NATO is right in refusing most of the states membership at this time.

The slide will not be as smooth today as it could have been in 1990-1. The trend of thinking in the East is no longer as convergent as it was in 1990 in the direction of Atlanticism. Admission of some countries into NATO in advance of Russia will lead to greater Russian resentment today than in 1990-1; admission of Russia will be harder than in 1991-2. Convergence might be redeveloped through a policy of more serious engagement of the East in NATO, which hopefully the Partnership program will provide, and also by more serious economic assistance; but there can be no guarantee of the result. Part of the hopeful spirit of 1990-1 must be written off as lost for some time to come.

In 1990, the Easterners had rightly understood Atlanticism to consist of an integration of national interests, embodied in joint institutions for managing joint problems together, with the way into this harmonious condition smoothed by the generosity – both in money and in security guarantees – of the better-established Atlantic countries, which are rich enough and secure enough to be able to recognize that such generosity is in their own enlightened self-interest. This was the meaning of Atlanticism during the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO and the EC.

But from 1989 to 1991, in the time of the Easterners’ greatest hope and greatest need, such Atlanticism was nowhere to be seen – except in the criticisms that were lodged against Mr. Bush by such persons as Richard Nixon, Richard Gephardt, Jeffrey Sachs, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. This was the time of deepest impressionability of the Easterners. A deep impression has been made, and it has not been a good one.

Today in 1993, even if a full-blooded, living Atlanticism were again to become visible in Western policy, the Easterners would retain some skepticism toward Western promises for years to come. The Ukrainians would no longer trust so much in a mere NATO guarantee as a substitute for their own nuclear deterrent; they might need a concrete NATO presence on the ground before they would give up their nuclear weapons. Nor would the Russians welcome a Western presence in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet periphery quite in the way they might have earlier; now they need far more reassurances. Nor would the Russians or Ukrainians so readily make military concessions to the West in order to merge their power into that of the West, and then passively wait on the West to show enlightened generosity; instead they might demand quid pro quos, and the West might have to make concessions, too, in order to salvage the opportunity.

When the recognized legitimate power fails to fill the historical space, it loses its prestige and must go to an enormous effort to prove itself and legitimize itself again. The West today will have to give far more reassurances and put itself out to a far greater effort, in order to accomplish what might earlier have been achieved by the mere virtue of Western prestige.

The sliding scale points to a series of stages in the transition into full practicing membership. However, it would be a mistake to assume that every country must go formally through all of the stages. Such rigidity might economize on thinking but at the cost of wasting opportunity. Often several stages can be rolled into one. Sometimes it is politic to leap over stages and leave it to later to fill in the gap. Sometimes the very order of stages can be reversed.

Two such possibilities deserve particular attention:

1) It would be a mistake to turn the Partnership plan into a long term program which would have to be “completed” before moving on to further stages like Associate Membership or full Membership. Opportunities to move on should be welcomed. Any delays that may be advocated in the name of the Partnership plan should be examined on a case by case basis to see if they are really necessary.

2) It may be that the formal status of “Member” would best be given sooner rather than later. It is the least costly thing that NATO has to “give away.” It can have helpful consequences in itself (see Section XIV below, “Status is substance”). It should not be begrudged or applicants kept in a probationary status too long.

There should be plenty of room for transitions in a country’s specific role in NATO after it has been granted the formal status of membership. For example, one would want to make sure that new memberships could not disrupt or damage the capability of the old NATO countries to act together. One might admit new members might join on condition, e.g., that they would not have a veto for a specified number of years. This brings us to the question of decision-making.