The NATO mistake: expansion for all the wrong reasons.

This July, the 16 leaders of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's member nations will convene in Madrid for a special summit meeting. In between the customary public photo-ops and back room shmoozing, they will take a bold and unprecedented step: this year they will formally invite at least three, and possibly five, Eastern European countries to begin the process of joining the NATO club. The invitation of former Warsaw pact nations to join the very alliance they had opposed for four decades will mark a watershed event in NATO's history. But what is really remarkable is that almost no one thinks it is a good idea. The Eastern European countries are only interested in entering NATO insofar as doing so integrates them into Western Europe; their real preference would have been membership in the European Union. The Western European NATO members are, for the most part, following the United States' lead. Thus responsibility for NATO expansion falls squarely with the Clinton administration. Without the administrator's continual pressure on the American bureaucracy and on the European NATO states, the project would have died a natural death in the NATO Council.

Clinton has yet to articulate a single reason for his drive to expand NATO that is compelling enough to override its clear downside. But ever since Clinton's 1994 announcement that "the question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members, but when and how," it has become increasingly difficult to turn back. And once adopted, a big multilateral project like NATO enlargement tends to take on a life of its own; it is tough to stop because doing so would be very costly to the prestige of governments that have supported it.

But why did the Clinton administration push for NATO expansion in the first place?

Misreading History

The administration's first mistake was its misapplication of historical analogy, which led it to harbor an exaggerated fear of Russia!s threat to European security and to believe that a weak Eastern Europe must inevitably elicit aggressive behavior from both Russia and Germany. For one thing, administration analysts overlooked the far-reaching changes that have taken place in Germany. And they misread the future prospects for Russia. In short, the administration fell victim to what philosopher Karl Popper called historicism, a process that converts distinctive historical events into general laws of historical inevitability ruling future policy.

Of course, administration officials never actually came out and declared that their intention was to counter future Russian aggression. They knew that revealing such an analysis of the future would precipitate an immediate crisis. Consequently, the disease for which NATO enlargement was to be the remedy was never fully diagnosed in public. Instead, fear of Russian aggression as a motive for NATO enlargement was translated into a bland desire to promote democracy in Eastern Europe -- a goal which the Western countries were already supporting with other programs. The explanation for enlarging NATO most frequently stated by the Clinton administration officials was "instability" in Eastern Europe. In a March 1995 Foreign Affairs article, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke claimed political instability of the newly established democracies of Eastern Europe as the main grounds for rapid Western action to bolster them. In an article written 18 months earlier, Ronald Asmus, Richard Kugler and Stephen Larrabee, three Rand Corporation analysts who played a central role in selling NATO enlargement within the administration, argued that East-Central Europe was littered with "potential mini-Weimar republics" who were "experiencing a wave of instability and conflict generated by virulent nationalism"

Yet the argument that NATO must expand rapidly to save tottering Eastern European democracies was and is far from compelling. There was conflict and instability in former Yugoslavia, but by 1995, when the NATO enlargement project went into full gear, this was being contained by NATO forces. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, who were the main candidates for NATO membership, were not perfect democracies. However, they had democratic constitutions. Most had had two or even three nationwide free elections. All were making progress in free market economies.

Meanwhile, the missing part of the argument for NATO enlargement -- the reason why administration leaders believed the project was urgent -- was obvious to everyone: Russia. Russia's leader, Boris Yeltsin, an unhealthy alcoholic, had used artillery against his own parliament in October 1993. In late 1993, the supporters of democracy and reform were reduced to a minority of 25 percent in Duma elections that brought in a majority of communists and extreme nationalists. There was fighting in the republics surrounding Russia, in most cases involving Russian forces. In December 1994, the Russian military entered Chechnya in a bloody, brutal attempt to end secession.

Many administration analysts concluded from these developments that Russia would collapse, sending streams of refugees westward or, more likely, that it would become involved in a new European war. A single sentence of his Foreign Affairs article reveals Holbrooke's underlying concern: "And for Germany and Russia." instability in Central and Eastern Europe "has historically been a major contribution to aggressive behavior." In other words, World War III would have the same genesis as World Wars I and II, the tendency of two large imperialistic countries to expand at the cost of weak neighbors between them.

Administration analysts had made a wholly pessimistic analysis of the future of Russia (and of Germany as well) and had decided that Eastern Europe must be saved from possible aggression by Western action while there was still time. As the reference to Weimar revealed, NATO enlargement was for them a mental recreation of the struggle with Hitler -- moved eastward. NATO enlargement was a panicked administration reaction to a potential crisis which, if it had any real existence, had passed after the Russian military was defeated in Chechnya, Russia had the common sense to make peace, Yeltsin was re-elected in free elections in 1995, and then survived serious heart surgery.

Of course, Russia still has its dangers, but it is lumbering on toward a rough democracy and a crude capitalism. The chance for a positive outcome is there in the long run. And even if the analysis of possible future conflict with Russia were correct, the administrations method of isolating Russia outside an expanding NATO was and is the wrong way to deal with the problem.

A Substitute for Action

The second reason for the administration's drive to expand NATO was its conviction that doing so would preserve NATO's (and consequently the United States's) key role in Europe while allowing the United States to avoid intervention in Bosnia. Again, this calculation backfired.

With the end of the cold war, the Clinton administration was keenly concerned about Americas position in Europe. After nearly half a century of playing the dominant role in European security, the U.S. role seemed at an end. How could American influence in Europe be maintained? The Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe was too weak a structure. There, the U.S. was only one of 53 members, without the primacy it had in NATO from the outset. The transatlantic structure of liaison with the European Union was also still too weak. So it had to be NATO.

But NATO was in trouble. Since mid-1991, conflict had raged in former Yugoslavia. However, following the example of the Bush administration's decision not to intervene in Yugoslavia, Clinton held back. In the meanwhile, public criticism of NATO mounted both in the U.S. and Europe. Here was the world's most powerful military alliance, victorious in the cold war, whose forces were still costing over $200 billion a year, reorganized and ready for a fight, but standing on the sidelines while some of its own soldiers were being humiliated by armed Serb and Croat bands as a result of the restrictions of a neutral role under UN command.

Sen. Bob Dole said NATO's absence from Bosnia conveyed the impression that the NATO alliance had outlived its usefulness. NATO Secretary General Manfred Worner said that failure to handle the Bosnia crisis would seriously damage NATO. In a much noted speech in June 1993, Senator Lugar argued that, "NATO had to go out of area (western Europe) or out of business." In an article published at the time of the January 1994 summit, Secretary of State Warren Christopher declared that "a NATO that does not adapt itself to the new security challenges facing Europe risks being pulled apart by the centrifugal forces of apathy and parsimony as budget-conscious governments in the West respond to an increasingly skeptical public." Secretary Christopher had laid out a primary motive for NATO enlargement: there was a real risk that NATO would be brought low if it did not remain relevant to Europe's security problems. In the administration's analysis, if NATO went into decline, so would U.S. leadership in Europe. If, in turn, NATO could not act in Bosnia because of the administration's own self-imposed strictures, then let it at least justify itself by extending its membership eastward. NATO enlargement was a bureaucratic response to institutional crisis.

There is great irony in the fact that NATO enlargement was undertaken as a kind of bureaucratic surrogate for NATO involvement in Bosnia. If the Clinton administration had come earlier to the overdue decision to intervene in Bosnia, the world would then have seen, as it did two and a half years later when Clinton finally did step in, that NATO continued to have a valuable function. The need to justify NATO by eastward expansion would have been subsumed in the drama of Bosnia, and the enlargement project might never have been advanced as a serious administration program.

Finally, in sponsoring NATO enlargement, the Clinton administration had an obvious partisan political motive. In the presidential race with Sen. Bob Dole, Dole was absolutely sure to criticize the administration for inaction on international security issues, especially NATO, exploiting President Clinton's vulnerabilities from his lack of military experience and his opposition to the Vietnam War. In particular, NATO enlargement was of direct interest to Polish and Eastern European voters in key areas of the Midwest. Faced by this possible attack, the Clinton administration preempted it and took the subject of NATO enlargement as its own cause. President Clinton's only foreign policy speech of the 1996 presidential campaign was on the NATO issue; it was given in Detroit in October 1996. Senator Dole's subsequent charge that the administration was not doing enough for NATO enlargement had no impact.

What Next?

NATO remains an indispensable organization for coordinating the security policy of the world's richest and most powerful countries in North America and Europe. It should be retained. NATO's capacity for organizing peacekeeping missions, attested in Bosnia, should also be retained. Moreover, there is a residual need for NATO as a defensive alliance to insure against possible Russian misbehavior. But, as the miserable performance of the Russian military in Chechnya showed, it will take a decade or more before Russia!s conventional forces can become any threat to far-superior NATO. Now, the main risks and dangers from Russia are in the nuclear field. But the U.S. is in a position to deal with these risks bilaterally, preferably through further mutual disarmament. There is no need to enlarge NATO for this purpose.

Of course, now that it has embarked on a policy of NATO expansion, it will be tough for the United States to pull back. But if Clinton wants to avoid the trap fallen into by previous presidents like Lyndon Johnson -- who, for fear of losing face, failed to pull out of Vietnam even when it became apparent that the United States was losing the war -- Clinton should take the courageous step of placing NATO enlargement on hold while an alternative is considered. This alternative would consist of an improved Partnership for Peace program, already underway, of the Charter relationship between Russia and NATO, recently signed in Paris, and of return to enlargement of the European Union as the main means of integrating Eastern European countries into Western Europe. Negotiations for enlargement of the European Union are beginning. They will take a long time to come to fruition. But there is plenty of time for them. Despite the administration's claims, there is no crisis in Eastern Europe.

If, despite the fact that this alternative program represents a safer, more constructive course, invitations for a first group of candidate states are extended in July this year and the enlargement is, in fact, ratified by the legislatures of the 16 NATO countries, the administration should do some serious homework. It should develop a credible, detailed, 20-year program for the admission to NATO of all eligible European states, including Russia. This approach should provide realistic prospects of NATO membership to excluded candidates like the Baltic States and to Ukraine. It would give time for the Russian polity to settle down while keeping open a convincing, real prospect that NATO will ultimately become a truly all-European organization for European security.