New Functions made possible by an Extended NATO

An Extended NATO would make possible a number of major new functions, which will be elaborated as options in Sections III-V of the main part of this paper:

• A multilateral nuclear force.

• An extended COCOM to control external arms sales.

• A NATO agency to organize arms reductions, standardize armaments, open up trade and procurements of armaments among the allies, and integrate defense industrial bases.

• Joint defense against missiles from stray countries (Yeltsin’s proposal on strategic defense).

• A joint intelligence effort.

An Extended NATO will thus open up vast new areas for “functionalist” cooperation. The reason for this is that it will have major new military, industrial and intelligence resources from the former Soviet bloc to incorporate in a cooperative structure. Incorporation of these resources will be both a matter of necessity – in order to stop them from becoming centrifugal forces – and a tremendous opportunity. Moreover, these resources and countries will give NATO a balance that will be better fit for functionalist structures than was to be found in the old Euro-American stand-off.

NATO has already accepted in principle a huge new function: peacemaking and peacekeeping in the former Soviet bloc, preferably at the request of CSCE or the UN. This new function has been widely seen in NATO as the new mission of the alliance and its salvation from irrelevance. NATO will be able to carry out this new mission well only when the Easterners are inside of NATO. Eastern members are needed for providing legitimacy for NATO missions in their vicinity, and for supplying local knowledge and local resources for implementation of the missions.

However, in the absence of an extension of NATO membership and a reform of decision-making, NATO’s new mission has not as yet been very successfully carried out. It has been too slow to deal with the pace of actual wars. In 1992, it was only able to make the preliminary decisions in principle to undertake such missions in the former Communist areas. In 1993, these decisions-in-principle dropped by the wayside for the former Soviet areas, and NATO only began to inch toward piecemeal involvement in Bosnia. The NATO overflights of Bosnia became something of a joke while the killing continued on the ground, and did more to discredit NATO than to save it. Russia, feeling itself still much too far removed from the NATO planning and decision-making process, opposed any UN or CSCE mandate for serious NATO action in the former Yugoslavia. At the beginning of 1994, after three years of killing in which the situation had deteriorated permanently, NATO took its first active measures against the Bosnian Serbs. This raised Russian hackles. Russia responded by independently interposing its own peacekeeping forces around Sarajevo, which in turn raised Western hackles. Nevertheless the Western and Russian measures served to reinforce one another. It was a symbiotic partnership: an unstable situation, pregnant with dangers of an explosion, but nevertheless a step toward peace and toward a functioning partnership.

There has been much discussion since 1989 about the need for a more political NATO. At first this was focused on emphasizing non-military cooperation, as in the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article II on political and economic cooperation. As such, this was viewed in some quarters as a threat to NATO’s military cooperation. Later the idea came to include conflict resolution, conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacemaking, rapid-deployment forces, multinational units, etc.

The military function of the alliance is itself a political function, joining the nations for mutual peace and cooperation in the military sphere, quite apart from ancillary political functions. This needs to be restated forcefully for non-cold war circumstances, and in terms that emphasize its internal pacifying uses more than its external defensive uses. Since there will inevitably be extensive protocols and high-visibility public ceremonies accompanying Russian and Eastern European entry, this would provide an occasion to assert NATO’s military-political purposes in a forceful way, with more substance and commitment than in the old Article II.

The Basic and Permanent Purpose of NATO

The underlying purpose of NATO is, the permanent unity of the democratic allies, beginning with the democracies that emerged on the two shores of the Atlantic out of the enlightenment, and extending to include those among their neighbors who used to be ruled by anti-Western tyrannies and have now escaped and want to join the side of democracy.

This unity serves a number of vital needs: peace among members, deterrence against outside attack, mutual support and non-undercutting in policy efforts, mutual prosperity and other benefits of a vast area of open and secure economic intercourse, and stabilization of democracy in those member countries where democracy is not the main national tradition.

The specific meaning of this underlying purpose in the present period is: to integrate the military forces of Eastern Europe and Russia as far as possible with the West under a Command structure rooted in NATO. The primary reason for this is simply so that Russia and the West never become enemies again. As a by-product, it should help to pacify the entire region and relieve Russia’s small neighbors of their fear of Russian forces. Only when this is done are the former imperial and subject nations likely to be able to rebuild intimate cooperative relations, such as the West keeps urging them to do on their own.

Nevertheless, as long as most people think of NATO as merely a cold war instrument for containment of the USSR – due to NATO’s inadequate discussion about its integrative functions – it will be easy to argue that NATO “ought to” disappear with the disappearance of the Soviet threat. For this reason, NATO needs a new statement of its security functions, independent of any concern about a residual Soviet threat. The preparations for entry of Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, if done with some panache, would provide the occasion for that statement. Here is how it might read:

The purpose of NATO is to provide the participating industrial democracies with unity and security, and thereby to provide the entire international system with a nucleus of order. Its place lies within the network of international organization for cooperation and peace, serving as a strategic core and an underpinning for the cohesion of the other institutions.

The central task facing NATO for the next decade is the integration of the formerly Communist countries into the Western democratic order. This is a necessary task today, just as it was necessary to integrate the ex-fascist countries into the Western democratic order after 1945. For the present task, the institutions of the Atlantic Alliance must be extended and restructured, just as they had been extended and restructured in the years after 1945.

Decades ago, NATO, along with the EC, brought an end to mutual war – and to the very idea of mutual war – in Western Europe. Today NATO, along with CSCE, must bring an end to the idea of mutual war in the entire CSCE area. The permanent purpose of the common military structure of NATO, above and beyond deterring external attacks and meeting external threats, is to ensure such integration of the military forces of the member states and of their military planning that war among them becomes inconceivable. We do this for our own sake, and for the sake of the peace and prosperity of the entire world.

An Enforcer Arm for the UN and CSCE

NATO has already begun to seek a role of enforcer arm for the UN and CSCE. It has hoped to get a UN or CSCE mandate for interventions or peacekeeping operations. Thus far this has yet to work effectively, however. The liaison has not been good enough, and the unit-veto system has gotten in the way – in the UN and CSCE as well as NATO. In two years of arguing over Yugoslavia, NATO has found neither a meaningful authorization from the UN or CSCE nor enough will to act on its own. NATO has sought a “hot line” with the UN to help with this. East European and Russian membership in NATO would also help remedy the situation, along with streamlining of procedures in all three institutions.

A formal NATO-CSCE link might be established, leading to eventual merger if all went well. Eastern memberships in NATO would point to a convergence of the memberships of NATO and CSCE. An actual merger, however, should be done in such a way that it combines the capabilities of the two organizations rather than nullify them. What matters is not the name of the resulting institution, but whether it incorporates NATO’s full capabilities without subjecting them to an even more onerous unit-veto than the one that already exists in NATO. If CSCE were to find its way out of the unit-veto faster than NATO, then merging NATO with CSCE would mean placing NATO’s functional military capabilities under CSCE’s more efficient political capabilities. If not, then the merger would need to be done on condition of relaxation of CSCE decision-making procedures for the direction of the military structures inherited from NATO.

If NATO is to act as an enforcer for the UN, the UN will have to be able to decide on rules of engagement that NATO military forces can live with. NATO will also have to be able to make meaningful and timely decisions – more so than it has been able to do in two years of debating on Yugoslavia. Expansion of membership should go hand-in-hand with a reform of decision-making, as discussed in Section XI below, to allow more flexible official use of NATO instruments to back up “coalitions of the willing.”

An Extended NATO could become the main enforcer arm for the UN in three major fields:

• peacemaking operations (i.e. pacification efforts that go beyond peacekeeping),

• IAEA and other anti-proliferation efforts, and

• repulsion of aggression.

NATO would be a unipolar enforcer, acting with the sanction of the UN majority, to repel or roll back aggression and enforce the rules of “collective security”. This would have very different results than the old League and UN scheme of multipolar collective security: it would create capabilities faster than commitments, whereas pure multipolar collective security creates commitments faster than capabilities. Most international relations scholars have regarded collective security (in the old multipolar sense) as unworkable and self-defeating for the very reason that it creates such extensive commitments while developing so few cohesive and organized capabilities. A unipolar NATO enforcer would reverse this situation; it would provide heavy-duty, well-organized, cohesive capabilities. And unlike the idea of the U.S. acting as a unipolar enforcer all by itself, an Extended NATO would have the resources – moral, psychological and economic – to bear the full burden of world leadership.

Collective Security and Collective Defense

NATO made a big point in early 1990 of how much better for peace its “common defense” is than the “collective security” of the CSCE, which it compared to the old and failed League of Nations system. It was entirely right about this. Unfortunately for some time it made this point in a polemical and negative way, counterposing the two rather than seeking out ways in which they could strengthen one another. The new reality is that collective security and collective defense are allies not enemies. The key to holding onto collective defense and all its accomplishments is by expanding it to include the new aspirant allies and linking it to their new needs of collective security.

There was an old assumption, inherited from the Brezhnev era, that any “Common European Home” or any institutionalization or strengthening of CSCE would be at the expense of NATO and would be aimed at dividing Europe from America. This assumption lost its logical relevance in the late 1980s, but its influence lingered. The East Europeans kept pleading with NATO to understand that their plans for CSCE were not directed against NATO and that actually they hoped that NATO would become the military substratum of CSCE. In the summer of 1990, NATO reluctantly reconciled itself to the institutionalization of CSCE, but only in watered-down form. Since then it has gradually noticed that CSCE does not undermine NATO but provides supplementary political links and capabilities, and has begun to regret that CSCE is not stronger. It has sought a growing linkage with CSCE, thus gradually catching up with the original East European idea of NATO as the military substratum of CSCE.

The growing linkage between NATO with CSCE has meant an implicit reconciliation of “common defense” with “collective security.” It suggests that it is time to move beyond the mere polemical counterposition of the two systems and pay more attention to the ways in which they both need each other.

Common defense is more effective than mere collective security, but it needs to be linked to purposes of collective security in an era in which there is no one clear-cut enemy. Collective security is a noble goal, but it needs a coherent enforcer arm not just a militarily unorganized commitment to defend all against all as in the League of Nations and in the CSCE thus far. Ultimately this enforcer arm should draw upon contributions from all of the nations involved, but in order for it to be coherent and to draw on a real commitment, it needs to grow out of the common defense efforts of a reliable core group of nations.

The idea of a core, reliable, committed group goes all the way back to the founding of the League of Nations. In 1919, it was intended that the collective security system of the League would be supplemented by the Anglo-American Treaty of Guarantee to France, which would have transformed the wartime Atlantic alliance for common defense into a peacetime strategic core of the League. If this approach had been pursued more enthusiastically in the U.S. and the Treaty had been ratified by the Senate, the League would have worked much more effectively for European security; the re-alienation of Germany and the Second World War might have been avoided.

But, for all the reasons that Arnold Wolfers pointed out in Britain and France Between Two Wars (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), not enough people (apart from the French) were ready to see the logic of combining the collective security of the whole group with the common defense of the core group. Too many people saw only the polemical contradiction between the two; in America, “collective security” was being sold as the exact opposite of an “entangling alliance.” Decades were lost and a terrible price was paid for the failure to reconcile these two different facets of internationalism. In the interwar years, leading Atlanticist writers, including Lord Lothian (who had been in the British delegation at the 1919 peace conference, and as Ambassador to Washington in 1940 was a major architect of the second-generation Atlantic alliance) and Clarence Streit, made the theoretical reconciliation of the two. The reconciliation finally began in practice in 1949, with the formation of NATO under the provision of the UN Charter for collective self-defense. A full reconciliation became possible only after 1989, when NATO gained a unique opportunity to transform itself into the military core of the CSCE and of the UN as well. NATO’s polemic against CSCE delayed and damaged this opportunity. NATO is only now beginning to rise to the occasion. The further steps needed for making good on it have been indicated in the text of the present report: closer institutional links with the CSCE and UN, expansion of NATO membership, and streamlining of the decision-making of all three institutions on peacekeeping issues. If these steps are taken, the great “game plan” for a New World Order, which for long decades has lain dormant in the unratified treaties of 1919, will finally be brought to life.

The ultimate extent of NATO

What countries might NATO be proximately open to?

Our concern here is with Eastern Europe and Russia. More precisely, our concern is with the group defined by NACC plus CSCE.

NATO has already defined this as its “universe” for intimate relations and thus for potential expansion. It has done this by forming the NACC and by linking itself more and more closely to CSCE. The Clinton Administration’s “NATO Partnership” plan has wisely chosen this same universe for its eligible countries.

The North Atlantic Treaty defines the universe for NATO as its original members plus any additional “European” states. The admission of Turkey in 1951 showed that a broad definition of “Europe” was accepted virtually from the start. In the last century, the “Concert of Europe” included Russia. Today CSCE provides a definition of “Europe” that includes the entire former Soviet Union.

For the purposes of present policy prescription, that closes the matter. The reader who so wishes may move directly on to the next heading.

For those who are interested, we will look briefly here at a more general, long-term perspective, going beyond the NACC and CSCE groupings.

The natural universe for selection of NATO members consists of: all industrial democracies. These are the countries for which there is the best reasons for strategic integration and the best prospects for sustainable strategic solidarity.

If one were to try to find a group of countries such that it was in the true interest of each country to be united with the others across a wide range of policy issues (defense, trade, technology, security), and such that they could afford to be united even more deeply (for example, by free movement of people or by having common authorities for some matters of common business) if this became necessary for the unity on policy issues, then the industrial democracies would form such a group. This indicates that the societies are compatible or “compossible,” i.e. capable of being put together into a coherent composite whole, and that there is no implied danger to their societies in putting them together for some particular functional purpose such as common defense. The industrial democracies are all “compossible” and very nearly immediately compatible.

The countries in the former WTO area are not quite precisely “industrial democracies” at this time, but are well on their way to this status. They are rapidly democratizing; many of them are already democracies at present. Economically they are industrialized but in a severely distorted way, and are trying desperately to restructure their economies. They are not immediately compatible with the NATO countries in the socio-economic sphere, but they are prospectively compossible with the NATO countries in a foreseeable future in the socio-economic sphere. This provides an additional assurance that it is safe and wise to act meanwhile on their much more proximate compossibility with NATO in the security area.

Fortunately these countries – the industrial democracies and their near cousins – also form the core of such world order as there is. The larger the group of such countries that exists and that is effectively united, the more stable the world order.

At the moment this group – the group of countries which should be welcomed in NATO – consists of: CSCE + OECD. In other words, beyond Eastern Europe and Russia, the door should be open to Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

In fact, these Pacific basin countries are in many respects more immediately “qualified” than the former Warsaw Pact countries. They are already mostly directly compatible with the NATO countries, not just “compossible” or capable of being put together with the Atlantic countries over some gradual period of time.

During the cold war, Japan stayed out of NATO and limited itself to a bilateral alliance with the U.S. Recently Japan has become associated with CSCE. Japan might more easily be nudged to become a full or associate member of an Extended NATO that is converging on CSCE than of the old NATO.

This would open up some further “accessory options,” such as:

• NATO might take over from the EC and the G-24 the task of coordinating economic assistance to its former enemies (and new members) to the East.

• OECD and the G-7 might, like NATO, extend their membership to the East. They have both made a beginning on this. NATO might eventually take over the Development Assistance Committee from OECD, and might commit itself to promoting economic development and well-being in the Third World, in order to present more than just a military face of armed intervention to the Third World.

• There might be a goal of a formal link between a number of these extended Atlantic organizations – NATO, CSCE, OECD, G-7... – even a merger of them.

The split-level structuring of the Atlantic Community, with issues shuffling between NATO, OECD, G-7, COCOM, the Australia group, NAA, NACC, CSCE, and so on and so forth, has been a source of procrastination on the policy level and confusion and apathy in the public. Just as, when the three European Communities were merged into the European Community, this made them more meaningful to the public and somewhat more efficient, so today merger of the Atlantic institutions could be an act of invigoration of the Atlantic community spirit, by making manifest the fact that that all these institutions serve one and the same community.

However, as yet the Pacific democracies do not seem anxious to join NATO. It is the former WTO area that is the live question. There are strong reasons for this: the intensity of strategic interdependence in Europe; the desire in Eastern Europe and Russia for a common security system; the will to become a part of the West; the cultural proximity and attraction; and the pace of political change in the WTO area, which needs clear-cut strategic expression. And then there is the provision in the North Atlantic Treaty specifying that new members would be “European.” This has helped to shape expectations, although it need not be a permanent constraint: there could be a broad interpretation of what is “European,” or new protocols of accession (as when the protocols for Turkey’s accession made adjustments in the geographical area of the Treaty). Australia and New Zealand are just as “European” as the U.S. and Canada. Japan has to a large extent “Europeanized” itself. Eligible countries in the future may be expected to be at least as “Europeanized” as Japan is today.

In any of the potential groupings for an Extended NATO in this era – NACC, OECD, CSCE – the stable Western democracies would have a firm majority of the total population. As long as the Extended NATO was reasonably well-organized to reflect this majority weight (see Part B, Section XI for the options on this), NATO would itself be stable.

In a subsequent stage of history, the small NICs (Newly Industrialized Countries) might join NATO. Whether NATO would want them would depend partly on their further democratization, but primarily on the diplomatic complications they bring with their huge neighbors, i.e. whether they would add to or detract from Atlantic security.

Maybe someday the whole world will become “NICs” and will also become democratic and join NATO. That would add billions of people to NATO. Even if, in the interim, the “base” of stable democracies in NATO grew substantially larger than at present, nevertheless the day might come when the stable democracies no longer had a majority. In that case, more complicated formulas might have to be found to assure a predominance of forces making for stability in NATO. But that day seems distant.

For the present, the NACC-CSCE area provides a meaningful target for a renewed NATO. Fortunately it is also sufficient as a cornerstone for a stable world order.

Should NATO be renegotiated and reconstituted from bottom up?

Should – as is sometimes proposed – the North Atlantic Treaty be completely renegotiated between the willing old member countries and the new countries that want to join, instead of just amended with protocols accompanying admission of new members? Should NATO change its name, since it will include many members who do not border on the Atlantic?

The disadvantages of starting from scratch are far greater than the advantages.

Advantages: Clear public demonstration of basic change. Opportunity to place everything on the table and adapt fully to the new era. The negotiation is among the willing countries; the countries that don’t want NATO to go anywhere cannot veto or obstruct as effectively. A change in name would reduce the remnants of visceral enmity to NATO.

Disadvantages: Discontinuity with NATO. Interruption of the tradition and commitment that have gone into NATO. Probable loss – in the course of new negotiations, with America in a less internationalist mood than in 1940s, and with the West no longer facing a mortal threat – of some of the strength of treaty commitments and organizational structures that already exist. Possible inability to agree on any meaningful new structure at all, leading to the break-up of the negotiations and of the alliance.

If these were the only options, then it would be better to leave the North Atlantic Treaty untouched except for protocols of accession for new members.

However, there is a way to get the advantages of a new negotiation, while avoiding starting from scratch or risking what has already been achieved. The way is to negotiate, among the willing countries, a new treaty – but on the premise that it would inherit the entire patrimony of NATO.

This is a device that has been proposed in the EC when some member countries become too obstructionist. There were two reasons why it was not done in the EC in the past – for fear of detracting from the image of cohesion during the cold war, and because the economic intertwining of the EC countries would make it very messy for a major country like Britain to drop out – but neither reason applies to NATO today. The most likely drop-out country from NATO, France, took its military out of the Integrated Command of NATO way back in the 1960s, so if it left the North Atlantic Council today, this would not disrupt the Integrated Command any further. Legally the device of a successor treaty would be easier to apply in NATO than in the EC, since NATO, unlike EC, has a provision for renunciation of its founding treaty. If any obligations were still owed to members of NATO who might refuse to join the new structure, these matters could be dealt with by supplementary or bilateral arrangements.

The optimal course, therefore, would be:

A Conference of all willing NATO and NACC countries, to negotiate a treaty of restructuring for a restructured and extended NATO, on the following conditions: that this would not be a replacement of the North Atlantic Treaty but a supplement to it and to the agreements that have been made pursuant to it over the years; and that the entire patrimony or “acquis” of NATO institutions, instruments and obligations would be inherited by the new structure, except only those that are explicitly renounced in the new treaty.

Minimal and Optimal Goal. Danger or Opportunity?

The natural, optimal goal for NATO – the “vision thing” – is a NATO extended to include all the countries of CSCE (and OECD), restructured in its functions and instruments so it has legitimacy and effectiveness when it tries to deal with the security problems of its new members and fill the security gap in their region, linked with the UN and CSCE, and serving the purpose of consolidating its vast territory into a common democratic strategic zone and the core of world order.

A minimally acceptable outcome would include the following:

NATO is kept in existence – the Organization as well as the Treaty. Europe and America remain allied structurally and spiritually.

Conflict in the East is contained and kept the exception not the rule.

Eastern Europe remains democratic or democratizing. Russia remains in a pro-democratic, pro-Western orientation.

Europe, America and Russia cooperate strategically more than they compete for influence – in Eastern Europe, and around the world.

These minimal goals require more than a static continuation of a pro-Western orientation in the East: they require a dynamic process and expectation of (a) entry into Western strategic structures and (b) interim filling of the security gap. Otherwise, an expectation of permanent exclusion would impel the Easterners to draw up separately-oriented security plans and thus undermine even the minimally acceptable outcome. As long as any major Eastern countries are kept out of NATO, it is necessary to convince them, by adoption of the goal and a serious program of steps toward it, that NATO will proceed in a timely fashion to bring them in.

Thus, the minimal outcome must – if it is to be sustainable – also include:

Enshrinement of the optimal goal as an official goal of NATO.

Adoption of a plan of transitional steps serious enough, and completion of enough of them, to convince most people that this goal is to be taken seriously.

Steps toward filling of the security gap sufficient to avert a further slide toward separate efforts and orientations toward filling the gap.

In other words, the main way to get to the minimal goal is to strive pragmatically for the maximal goal, which makes sense in itself, not to strive solely for a collection of minimal goals which lack coherence. Alliance – which is, spiritually, a partnership, albeit a limited and imperfect one – needs hope and vision; without this it stagnates and becomes hopelessly mired in its internal contradictions. It is no prophetic exaggeration to say that, where there is no vision, alliances perish. Piecemeal progress can on occasion be made without vision, but not nearly enough to fill the space in a period of fundamental change.

There are risks in any change. But it is far better to run a small risk of destroying NATO by transforming it drastically, than to sit on this asset and run a much bigger risk of losing it through decay of its political base. The political base of NATO has always been uneasy and imbalanced. Transformation of NATO for the post-cold war world offers a chance for the first time to place the alliance on firmer grounds.

As the Clinton Administration has pointed out, we need to think first of all about opportunity, not threat. It is only if we fail to make good on the present opportunities that new threats are likely to emerge – a Europe in chaos, an abandonment of NATO, a new German problem, a return of Russia to an anti-Western orientation. Then we might have to recreate NATO in much worse circumstances.

The worst mistake would be to let the opportunities wait and sit passively with our eyes fixated on the potential new threats. Then the fear of potential threats would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of the Defense Department’s list of the four main dangers facing American defense planners, three of them – regional conflicts, weapons proliferation, and reversal of democratic reform – are bound to grow much worse if not enough is done to make good on the opportunity for extension of NATO. If thinking in terms of opportunities and change requires a certain de-Bushification of the spirit, then so be it; that was the promise of the new Administration.

The Chinese character for “crisis” contains both Danger and Opportunity. This is often mentioned to make the point that where there is a Danger there is also an implied Opportunity. The converse is also worth noticing: where there is an Opportunity there is also an implied Danger.

When a great opportunity opens up, it means that the situation is unstable. There is a space in which large-scale action can be taken, a space which represents Opportunity but also Vacuum. The space will be filled one way or another. If the positive outcomes are not realized on a scale commensurate with the space and the opportunity, then other outcomes will rush into the vacuum. We have seen this since 1989. The greatest danger is to neglect opportunity, minimize it, delay it, and whittle it down to inadequacy.