|
|
|
|
European Affairs
Book Reviews
NATO's Death-Defying Act Goes On
Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era
By Ronald D. Asmus
Reviewed by Helle Dale
From the day of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, there have been predictions of its demise. Near-death experiences have in fact been a staple of life for the Alliance. From the Suez crisis in the 1950s to the French withdrawal from NATO's military structure in the 1960s, to the protests against intermediate range nuclear forces in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, NATO has had to meet numerous and varied challenges to its existence.
The spring of 2003 saw the most recent crisis unfold when Germany, France and Belgium threw the alliance into turmoil in the build-up to the war with Iraq. After Turkey, a neighbor of Iraq, requested NATO assistance for military preparations, the three countries refused, to the great consternation of other members. Officials in Brussels speak of exchanges at NATO headquarters of a ferocity virtually unheard of in diplomatic circles.
So far, however, NATO has endured. In this book, Ronald D. Asmus tells the story of how the Alliance reinvented itself in the face of its most profound existential crisis. Oddly enough, the greatest challenge NATO ever had was dealing with victory - after the Soviet Union crumbled and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in the early 1990s.
"For decades academics had debated what would happen to the Atlantic Alliance if and when Moscow mellowed . . . and relaxed the Soviet grip on Eastern and Central Europe," Mr. Asmus writes. "Would Washington choose to remain in Europe or declare victory and go home, too? Did our European allies want us to stay or go? If NATO was supposed to survive, what would be its purpose in a Europe where the Soviet threat had disappeared?"
In his capacity as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe from 1997 to 2000, Mr. Asmus played an important role in shaping the answer to those questions. Even before that, in 1993, when he was working as an analyst at the RAND Corporation, he had been among the first to argue for enlarging NATO to include the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Opening NATO's Door is an engaging and meticulously detailed first-hand account of how it came about that on March 12, 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic became the first three former Warsaw Pact members to join the Western alliance.
As early as 1991, when Yugoslavia erupted into war, countries of the former East Bloc started knocking on NATO's door. Many were fearful that instability in the traditionally explosive Balkans would cascade into Central and Eastern Europe, where border and ethnic disputes had been frozen in place under communism, but had far from been forgotten. Membership in NATO and the European Union were seen in these countries as bulwarks against instability - and against Russian revanchism.
Yet, as Mr. Asmus acknowledges, there was much foot dragging in the Clinton administration, resulting in years of delay. As President Clinton's first National Security Advisor Anthony Lake put it, "The politics of NATO enlargement were like sex in the Victorian age: no one talked but everyone thought about it."
There were certainly members of Congress who rejected the idea of granting formal Alliance security guarantees to countries beyond the erstwhile Iron Curtain. The biggest problem, however, was relations with Russia. The reactions of the mercurial Russian President Boris Yeltsin ranged from hostility to acquiescence. In August 1993, Yeltsin stunned the world by signing a communiqué with Polish President Lech Walesa, which stated that with regard to NATO membership, "In the long term, such a decision taken by a sovereign Poland in the interests of overall European integration does not go against the interests of other states, including the interests of Russia." Though diplomats would debate how much vodka Mr. Yeltsin had put away before signing, it was a watershed in the debate.
Even so, the State Department, and particularly Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, wanted to make the new strategic relationship with Russia their top priority, which meant placing Central and Eastern Europeans on the back burner. It took six more years before the first round of enlargement became reality.
It was painstaking labor to move the ball forward under these conditions. Most European governments did not warm to the idea, though NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner became one of its staunchest and most important advocates. In view of the war in the Balkans and NATO's failure to deal with it, he said, without enlargement and engagement, "NATO would wither and die." As a stopgap measure, Mr. Lake came up with the idea of the Partnership for Peace, a lose military association short of NATO membership, which brought the aspirant and some other countries closer to the Alliance, but failed to address the candidates' needs for security guarantees.
The book ends with the Washington summit of March 1999, which concluded the first round of NATO enlargement. It also set the stage for the bombing of Serbia less than a month later, NATO's first "out-of-area" mission - in fact the Alliance's first ever military action. The Washington summit presents a natural boundary, but so much has happened since then that the book cries out for a sequel.
In November, 2002 in Prague, NATO committed itself with great fanfare to a second round of enlargement, a "Big Bang" that included seven new member countries from the Baltic to Central and Eastern Europe. This high point, however, was soon followed by the extreme low of the intramural fight in January over the Iraq war, which was adamantly opposed by France, Germany, Belgium and and Luxembourg. NATO members looked into an abyss of discord. It was at this moment that the four dissident countries chose to push for an independent EU military planning structure, deepening the rift.
Those curious about Mr. Asmus's views of these later developments are fortunately able to find them in the spring issue of European Affairs ("Allies Must Try to Pick Up the Pieces").
"Iraq, however, while the most obvious reason why NATO suffered a diplomatic train wreck, is not the only problem facing the Alliance. The last few months have revealed deeper difficulties that will have to be tackled if NATO is to have a viable future," Mr. Asmus writes. "It is both possible and desirable to put the pieces together, but it will not be easy."
While some will want to give up on NATO and let the United States and Europe take their divergent paths, others have argued for a looser structure premised on "coalitions of the willing," in which the alliance framework persists, but not the requirement that decisions be made by consensus, which becomes increasingly difficult as NATO is enlarged. Mr. Asmus believes saving NATO will take major radical reform "that offers the hope of harmonizing strategic perspectives on both sides of the Atlantic."
To the mind of this reviewer, "harmonizing strategic perspectives" is unlikely to take place in view of the growing imbalance of military capabilities between the United States and Europe. As a consequence, more modest aspirations such as selective cooperation in expeditionary and peacekeeping missions may be both more realistic and more productive. By the summer of 2003 NATO had begun to operate further "out-of area" than anyone would have imagined just a year previously. The Alliance is currently supporting the Polish mission in Iraq and taking charge of the International Stabilization Force in Afghanistan. These are important steps in the effort to carve out a new raison d'&Acute;tre for NATO, perhaps the first baby steps in the next reinvention of the Alliance.