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World Policy Journal
Volume XIV, No 3, Fall 1997
Permanent Interests, Endless Threats: Benjamin Schwartz
Cold War Continuities and NATO Enlargement
Both its detractors and supporters characterize NATO expansion as a bold departure for American policy. Paradoxically, however, NATO's move eastward is at once the most radical extension of U.S. security interests since the late 1940s, and a move entirely consistent with the underlying methods and aims of American global strategy for the last half century. This paradox indicates a wider paradox: since the end of the Cold War, foreign policy commentators and officials have been trying to refashion America's global role for the post-Cold War era, but for all their talk about the need for a bold new vision, they take as a given the status quo, what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calls the "imperative of continued U.S. world leadership."
The Clinton administration's recently released Quadrennial Defense Review illustrates this stasis. Since the United States spread its security umbrella worldwide ostensibly to contain the Soviet threat, many hoped when the Soviet Union disintegrated that the U.S. defense budget could be reduced substantially, freeing America's energies, attention, and financial resources to meet long-neglected domestic needs. But after months of analysis, the administration's defense planners have concluded that the essential features of America's Cold War security strategy--U.S. leadership of NATO and America's East Asian alliances and guardianship of U.S. allies' access to Persian Gulf oil--must remain inviolate. These are America's "permanent interests."
Those who call for a more modest foreign and defense policy argue that American strategy seems to be extravagance born of paranoia, or of the defense establishment's anxiety to protect its budget. But in fact, given the way the makers of U.S. foreign policy have defined American interests since the late 1940s, these plans are prudent. And that is the problem. To assume that the Cold War's end allows for a sweeping reinvention of America's foreign policy is to misunderstand the broader purpose behind that policy. America's Cold War defense posture and its globe-girdling security commitments always had a more fundamental aim than containing the Soviet Union. As even the fiercely anticommunist Sen. Arthur Vandenberg said in 1947, in "scaring hell out of the American people," the U.S.-Soviet rivalry helped secure domestic support for Washington's ambition to forge an American-led world order.
The architects of American foreign policy realize today, no less than in 1947, that this world order will not go of itself. What Dean Acheson called the "hard task of building a successfully functioning system" has required nothing less than that the United States suspend international politics, which is in fact the purpose of American "leadership." In 1949, John Foster Dulles described one aspect of this "hard task," which continues to dictate America's world role. The future secretary of state explained that to build what he considered a successful international economic and political community, Germany's integration with Western Europe was essential. The obstacle, he said, was that the West Europeans were "afraid to bring that strong, powerful, highly concentrated group of people into unity with them." Similarly, as Dulles, Acheson, and other policymakers understood, a strong Japan was at once essential for building a prosperous and stable international order, and intolerable to its neighbors.
Since the 1940s, then, the fundamental challenge facing American diplomacy has been to foster a liberal political and econom- ic order within an international system characterized--as David Hume recognized 250 years ago while bemoaning the lack of economic cooperation among states--by "the narrow malignity and envy of nations, which can never bear to see their neighbors thriving, but continually repine at any new efforts towards industry made by any other nation."
A draft of NSC 48, the National Security Council's 1949 blueprint of America's Cold War strategy in East Asia, nicely summarized the promise of and the threat to the U.S. vision of world order. Starting with the premise that "the economic life of the modern world is geared to expansion," which required "the establishment of conditions favorable to the export of technology and capital and to a liberal trade policy throughout the world" (a statement that could have been written yesterday), NSC 48's authors went on to warn that "the complexity of international trade makes it well to bear in mind that such ephemeral matters as national pride and ambition can inhibit or prevent the necessary degree of international cooperation, or the development of a favorable atmosphere and conditions to promote economic expansion." Forty-eight years later, the United States remains committed to the one successful means that it has found to check these forces inimical to the integrative and interdependent character of the world order it has pursued.
Although the continuity and fundamental goals of America's global role have been obscured by focusing on the containment of its enemy, they are illuminated by examining the containment of its allies. Dulles's answer to the obstacle that inhibited European cooperation--and hence that stymied the international order believed necessary for America's, and the world's, prosperity and security--was, of course, that the American-led NATO, and not an exclusively European security system, had to guard the Continent:
The Germans would be too strong for the comfort and safety of our European allies.... The Germans can be brought into the West if the West includes the United States. They cannot be safely brought into the West if the West does not include the United States. The Atlantic Pact will superimpose upon the [West European] Brussels Pact another western unity that is much bigger and stronger, so that it does not have to fear the inclusion of Germany.1By providing for Germany's (and Japan's) security and by enmeshing their military and foreign policies with alliances that it dominated, the United States contained its erstwhile enemies, preventing its "partners" from embarking upon independent foreign and military policies. This stabilized relations among the states of Western Europe and East Asia, for by controlling Germany and Japan, the United States--to use a current term in policymaking circles--"reassured" their neighbors that these powerful allies would remain pacific. The leash of America's security leadership thereby reined in the dogs of war; NATO (and the U.S.-Japan alliance) by, in effect, banishing power politics, protected the states of Western Europe (and East Asia) from themselves.
Thus the great story of American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War is not the thwarting of and triumph over the Soviet "threat" but the successful effort to impose an ambitious vision on a recalcitrant world. Freed from the fears and competitions that had for centuries kept them nervously looking over their shoulders, the West Europeans (and East Asians) were able to cooperate politically and economically. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued in 1967: "The presence of our forces in Europe under NATO has also contributed to the development of intra-European cooperation. But without the visible assurance of a sizeable American contingent, old frictions may revive, and Europe could become unstable once more." Recognizing, then, that Europe (and East Asia) could not be left to its own devices in the postwar world, Washington pursued not balance and diversity (George Kennan's preferred European policy aim) but hegemony.
A Europe divided into small, constricted national markets would carry dire consequences for world economic efficiency and growth and would inevitably lead (according to U.S. policymakers' favorite foreign policy guide, "the lessons of the 1930s") to war among the Europeans. The other, almost opposite, threat has been the "renationalization" of world politics, a threat that has been, ironically, accentuated by Washington's various efforts to promote regional economic integration in Western Europe and Northeast Asia. This integration, Washington has feared, could lead to the economic and security nightmare of these rising regional powerhouses forming independent regional economic blocs, shattering international economic interdependence, and engendering a dangerous multipolar world of autonomous great powers jockeying for power and advantage.
To realize and protect its global order, then, America has had to pursue two often conflicting goals, both of which have been served by the double containment strategy of restricting its allies' military and political independence: the United States must nurture economically strong and politically cohesive "partners," while also constraining these same "partners"--which has amounted to the imperative, in historian Melvyn Leffler's words, that "neither an integrated Europe, nor a united Germany nor an independent Japan must be permitted to emerge as a third force." Thus, for instance, as Henry Kissinger succinctly noted, U.S. policy toward Europe "has always been extremely ambivalent: it has urged European unity while recoiling before its consequences."
So, while there is much talk about the need to articulate a new foreign policy vision, a new set of interests and priorities, and a new international role for the United States in this "new era," post"Cold War policymakers have not found any really new global role possible or desirable. The significance of the "debate" concerning what America's "new" foreign policy should be is that there is, in fact, no argument. There is a remarkable consensus concerning the maintenance of America's fundamental world role and of the instruments that sustain it. The Bush Pentagon's January 1993 revised Defense Planning Guidance, for instance, defined the creation of "a prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's economy"--not the victory over Moscow--as "perhaps our nation's most significant achievement since the Second World War." In turn, that document defined the "reassurance," "stability," and "preclud[ing] of destabilizing military rivalries" as the sine qua non of this global capitalist order, making the maintenance of U.S. leadership of its Cold War-era alliances America's "most vital" foreign policy priority. Since this required retaining "meaningful operational capabilities," according to the revised Planning Guidance, the same purposes, the same means, and nearly the same costs that characterized America's Cold War global strategy define its post-Cold War strategy. To Bush's Pentagon, America's "leadership" in ameliorating the security problems of others--manifest in its Cold War alliances--thus continued to be vital despite the Soviet Union's demise. After all, the now infamous draft of the Pentagon's 1992 "post-Cold War" Defense Planning Guidance, which gave the public an unprecedented glimpse into the thinking that informs Washington's security strategy, merely restated in somewhat undiplomatic language the logic behind America's Cold War allied containment strategy.
The United States, it argued, must continue to dominate the international system by "discouraging the advanced industrialized nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role." To accomplish this, Washington must keep the former great powers of Western Europe, as well as Japan, firmly within the constraints of the U.S.-created postwar system by providing what one high-ranking Pentagon official termed "adult supervision." It must, therefore, protect the interests of virtually all potential great powers so that they need not acquire the capabilities to protect themselves, that is, so that they need not act like great powers. The very existence of truly independent actors would be intolerable, for it would challenge American hegemony, the key to a prosperous and stable international order.
As articulated by Dobbins, U.S. policy in Europe rested on the assumption that, acting alone, the West Europeans--particularly with Germany united--could not preserve order among themselves. Without the United States acting as the stabilizer, European squabbling would "undermine political and economic structures like the EC" and even lead to a resumption of "historic conflicts" on the order of the World Wars.2 Finally, the most conspicuous example of the Bush administration's foreign policy--the Persian Gulf War--cannot be separated from America's enduring imperative of allied containment and the concomitant requirement that the United States "retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing...those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations."
Were Washington to have relinquished its adult supervision and allowed its partners to protect their own interests in the Gulf--that is, to develop naval, air and ground forces capable of global "power projection"--such actions would, according to this thinking, have led to a situation in which, as the United States no longer kept Europe (and Japan) on a tight political and military leash, the multipolar and autarkic world of power politics would have returned.
According to the logic of Washington's global strategy, while the end of the superpower rivalry has reduced American security risks and commitments in some respects, it has in other ways expanded the frontiers of America's insecurity. During the Cold War, stability in Europe could be assured by the Soviets sitting on and the Americans keeping a tight rein on their respective clients. In fact, this superpower condominium was probably the best means of ensuring America's overriding interest in the stability of the continent, as American statesmen have often privately acknowledged.
With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, however, its former charges have become unrestrained and consequently free to make trouble for each other and for Western Europe. As former Bush administration deputy assistant secretary of defense Zalmay Khalilizad, one of the leading advocates of NATO enlargement, asserts, "Western and East Central European stability are becoming increasingly intertwined. For example, turmoil in East Central Europe could drive hundreds of thousands of refugees into Western Europe--challenging political stability in key countries, especially Germany."
Even more important, proponents of NATO enlargement fear that if the newly independent states of Eastern and Central Europe are not enmeshed in multilateral security arrangements under "U.S. leadership," the region could once again become a political-military tinderbox as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Baltic countries, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics, Hungary, and Romania worrying about each other and with all of them worrying about Germany.
This tense situation, according to a sort of post-Cold War domino theory, will threaten the stability of the entire continent, as, for instance, a nuclear-armed Ukraine provokes the nuclearization of, say, Poland, which in turn pressures Germany into acquiring nuclear weapons, which ignites latent suspicions between Germany and its neighbors to the west. So, the argument goes, since European stability is, as Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN)--one of the most ardent advocates of NATO enlargement--argues, threatened by "those areas in the east and south where the seeds of future conflict in Europe lie," the U.S.-led NATO must now stabilize both halves of the continent. The important point is that the logic of American global strategy does indeed dictate that the U.S.-led NATO move eastward. While NATO expansion is often described as a "new bargain," it is in fact only the latest investment, made necessary by changing geopolitical circumstances, in a pursuit begun long ago. For instance, although the perceptive foreign policy commentator Walter Russell Mead opposes NATO expansion as costly and provocative, his 1993 analysis of the dangers of instability in Eastern Europe in fact points directly to the need for that expansion. Starting from the assumption that an economically "closed Europe is a gun pointed at America's head," Mead draws a frightening scenario of America abjuring leadership in Eastern Europe:
In a well-intentioned effort to stabilize Eastern Europe, Western Europe, led by Germany, could establish something like Napoleon's projected Continental System. Eastern Europe and North Africa would supply the raw materials, certain agricultural products, and low-wage industrial labor. Western Europe would provide capital and host the high-value-added and high-tech industries. A Europe of this kind would inevitably put most of its capital into its own backyard, and it would close its markets to competitors from the rest of the world. It would produce its VCRs in Poland, not China; it would buy its wheat from Ukraine, rather than the Dakotas.3Since Mead is unwilling to allow America's West European "partners" to assume responsibility for stabilizing their neighborhood, America's responsibilities must multiply. The U.S.-led NATO expansion is hence nothing more than the logical outcome of the imperative that America must play--in the words of Secretary of State Albright and President Clinton--the role of "the indispensable nation" for global order. NATO enlargement thus manifests the draft Defense Planning Guidance's argument that Washington must forestall the advanced capitalist states from challenging American leadership "or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role." As Senator Lugar warned, "American leadership on European security issues is essential....If NATO does not deal with the security problems of its members, they will ultimately seek to deal with these problems either in new alliances or on their own."
Its "leadership" role means not only that the United States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated states in Europe and East Asia--America's "allies"--but also that it must deal with such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong Il, so that potential great powers need not acquire the means to deal with those problems themselves. And those powers that eschew American supervision--such as China--must be both engaged and contained. The upshot of "American leadership" is that the United States must spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined.
Must not NATO, then, expand even further eastward and southward than is currently proposed? Senator Lugar argues that the U.S.-led NATO must go "out of area" because "there can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery." If this logic is followed, then the ostensible threats to American security will be nearly endless.
If America is to forestall the risks and costs that inevitably accompany these expanding frontiers of insecurity, then a new debate must begin. Rather than focus on the narrow issue of NATO enlargement, this debate must assess the underlying assumptions that impel that policy; the debate must stop revolving around how the Pax Americana should be administered and instead examine whether there should be a Pax Americana at all. Once that debate is under way, the public will come to realize that it has been funding an arcane endeavor indeed. Its response to those urging NATO expansion was likely anticipated five years ago by Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican, upon hearing NATO secretary general Manfred Woerner's explanation that the United States should remain militarily present in Europe to stabilize security relations among the West Europeans and thereby prevent "renationalized" European defense structures, replied that "Americans would never accept that the maintenance of stability between Western Europeans could be a plausible rationale for continuing to deploy troops in Europe. Most Americans believe [the Europeans] can do this on their own."4
Is the public likely to continue to support an imperial project that is perforce open-ended and permanent? Arguing for the maintenance of Washington's Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "If we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?"5 The problem is that America can never know, so, according to this logic, it must always stay.
Benjamin Schwartz, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and former staff member in the International Policy Program at the Rand Corporation, writes on international political economy and U.S. foreign policy issues.