CHAPTER II
The Question of Russian Membership
in NATO
Dr. Constantine Menges
We have an interesting array of views on the issue of Russian membership in NATO. There is some discussion of two forms of this -- Russian political membership in NATO, as suggested by several Russian officials in recent months, or Russia's full membership in NATO with the full rights and responsibilities of the alliance -- and some discussion of the timing, the relation to the current projected enlargement of NATO, and the further phases of enlargement after the first tranche.
Full Russian Membership as a bond to the West
Dr. Andrei Kortunov
President, Russian Research Foundation
I think that our panel has a major advantage over the previous one because we are not officials, so we can really say what we think.
Let me start by telling you an episode that I experienced here in this country. I was giving a talk on NATO enlargement in a Midwestern place. The audience was very receptive, and they asked a couple of questions. But there was something strange in the audience. For example, one of the old gentlemen sitting there got up and said, "Well, I think that we should rather expand to Mexico, and this is where our interests lie." I asked, "Why to Mexico?" And it turned out later that what he was thinking about was North American Trucking Association, not NATO.
I think that that would be somewhat typical also of a Russian audience, because no matter what politicians have to tell you, I think Russians are basically indifferent. Why should they care? NATO is so remote, so distant from immediate Russian concerns and Russian problems. Russians might be concerned about getting visas to go to Estonia or about customs introduced by Ukraine because it really affects their day-to-day lives, but NATO? No, not on their radar screen.
However, for political elites, it is important. But if you are consistent, if you're concerned about NATO, if you are a Russian nationalist, but a smart one, you should probably not only favor NATO expansion, but you should favor more and more countries to be included into NATO. Don't limit yourself to the Visegrad 3; get also Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, countries like that, because the larger NATO becomes, the looser it becomes.
The enlargement of NATO definitely complicates the decision-making process, as has already been referred to here. The enlargement of NATO will undoubtedly erode the credibility of American guarantees to Western Europe, and the credibility of these guarantees is already questioned quite a lot all over the place. The enlargement of NATO will definitely create additional financial burdens, and it is an open question whether the United States Congress and the U.S. taxpayers are ready to cover the bill. So that is something that has to be considered.
But here, I guess what we should keep in mind, at least from the Russian viewpoint, is that there is a clear distinction between NATO as a defense alliance and NATO as a body that coordinates foreign policies of developed Western democracies. If you take NATO as a defense alliance, its importance will probably go down. NATO will get looser; it will get more ambiguous. And if there is no clear threat looming on the horizon, probably the integrity of the NATO alliance will be questioned.
However, as the vehicle to coordinate foreign policies of developed Western democracies, NATO is still a very important institution. And I think for Russia, at least for liberals in Russia, it is extremely important to use any opportunity they have to tie Russia closer to the Western community of nations, to anchor Russia to some institutions that can put some constraints on the Russian behavior if there are changes in the domestic politics in the country.
Let me remind you that when there were discussions about Germany entering NATO back in 1955, one of the prime arguments for taking Germany in was the idea that if Germany is not anchored to the Western security system, if Germany is not a member of the club, the odds are that revanchism might get a chance in Germany. And, in a sense, I think it will be also correct to assume that Russia is no different.
Indeed, it would be a severe test for Russia to meet all the criteria that the West might have. But why don't you really try to test Russia? Let Russians face this test. If they fail to meet criteria, if they cannot make it, compete, let them be outside of NATO. But if it is something that can mold the behavior of Russian elites in the right direction, I think that these options should not be ignored altogether.
Let me give you one example -- the Council of Europe. Of course, it is no NATO; it is a less important institution. And for Russia it was not easy to join the Council of Europe. However, already now we can see that the membership to the Council of Europe does affect the Russian domestic behavior. Right now it would be much more difficult for Russians not to introduce the jury trial, for example, or not to drop the capital punishment, because Russia is constrained by its membership to the Council of Europe. I guess that this might be also true if we are considered for membership to NATO.
Of course, this membership will not come easy for the West, not only for Russia. It will require certain accommodations on the part of major NATO institutions, but on the other hand, it might also mean a new beginning for the alliance. And in this case, NATO at some point might really turn into the collective security mechanism in Europe.
It is a long road, it will be a very difficult road, but why don't we try to make the first step?
How Enlargement Should Proceed after the First Tranche
Charles Kupchan
Professor at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
Let me, before I address the question of Russian membership in NATO, give you a quick rundown on where I stand on the issue as a whole. I think that NATO enlargement is a very bad idea whose time has probably come. The arguments against it have been written in thousands of newspapers and I will not repeat them here. On the other hand, given the political capital that has been sunk into this issue, the fact that a date has been set for the NATO summit, and the disappointment that would exist in Central European countries if this were derailed, I think it is hard to stop. And I, as someone who has been fighting this for awhile, am just about ready to raise the white flag, admit defeat, urge others to do the same, and suggest that we should all start thinking about this as a policy that probably is now written in stone and that we should start thinking about how to make sure that it happens in as favorable a way as possible. So that is where I am coming from in the big picture.
The question of whether NATO should open its doors to Russia seems to me to be somewhat premature. That question needs to be asked in a way that relates it to the questions that we now face. The best way to phrase it in my mind is that, assuming that there will be three or maybe four new countries admitted sometime before the end of this century, then what? Is this a policy that, as we heard from our representative from the State Department, is really going to move on down or is that just rhetoric to keep Russia happy and to keep the gray zone happy in a situation in which enlargement really is not going to go any further?
That question has not been answered. Nobody has really thought about it deeply because we have all been focused on this question of these three. What is going to happen? I think we need to start focusing on that question. There is a current conventional wisdom that is moving toward either "don't go beyond these three" or, "if you go beyond these three, don't do it for at least five to ten years." There is an influential document that is circulating now -- I think it was Sam Nunn, Bob Blackwell and Arnold Horelick that wrote it -- that says, basically, that we need a real pause.
The Russians may well like this because it gives them some breathing space, it does not move NATO any closer. The American administration will probably like it because it will mean that they do not have to go back to the Senate and ask them to ratify four, five, six more Article 5 guarantees to new countries. But I think it is an unacceptable way to proceed for three reasons.
First, it is going to leave in no man's land those countries that most need some sort of concrete security structure and reassurance -- Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltics, Ukraine. Yes, they are going to be given Partnership for Peace, plus they are going to be patted on the head, they're going to be told not to get discouraged, but the bottom line is that they are going to be in no man's land.
Second point, one of the main things that I think we should be thinking about here is not just how to keep Russia from going off the deep end, but how to get some influence over Russian behavior -- how it uses its forces, how it goes about peace keeping in the near abroad. And the way to do that is not to hold Russia at arm's length; it is to embrace Russia in as many networks and as many activities as possible. And so I think a 10-year pause sends a message to Russia that you now have 10 years to do more or less what you want do because you are not going to be embraced in this framework.
And third -- and this is to repeat something that others have said today -- I think that the view from Russia is already bad, and it is going to get worse. Sitting in Moscow, you look one direction and you see a China with incredible growth rates, a huge population, an Asia-Pacific that is probably more dynamic than any other part of the world. You look on the other side and you see NATO and the European Union coming slowly towards your borders.
This is not a very benign geo-political environment. On the contrary, if there is one thing that we know from the 20th Century that we want to avoid, it is a country that is going through the midst of difficult political economic transition that feels encircled. Countries in transition that feel encircled tend to go off the deep end. They tend to go bonkers. We saw Germany do that twice this century. We saw Serbia do it recently. We do not want to leave a Russia feeling isolated and alone in the heart of Eurasia. And it seems to me that we are heading in that direction if we let in three countries and say it is over, or maybe it is not over but we are going to wait another decade or two before we do anything else.
So that brings me to the topic that the panel is addressing, and that is: What do we do after this first accession? And do we talk seriously about Russian membership in NATO? I think that the answer is yes. I would make three comments on this front.
One is that, assuming that this first step forward on the enlargement of NATO goes forward, it is going to be time to start talking about a relationship with Russia that is not put in compensatory terms. Right now we are saying that we need to get Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic in, and then we are throwing some bones to Russia; we are compensating them with a charter, CFE, etc. But the bottom line is that Russia is the Big Kahuna. Russia is the country we most need to worry about. If we have a policy that has focused on matters which then, as an afterthought, make us ask "how are we going to compensate Russia," that says to me something is wrong with our policy. I would be much more comfortable with a policy that was focused on making sure that Russia gets integrated into the West and then we say, how do we compensate other countries that will be somewhat uncomfortable with that? That seems to me to keep the big picture in front. So, again, I think we have to stop thinking about compensating Russia and have to focus on concrete, not rhetorical ways of bringing Russia in a real sense into a European security framework.
The second point I would make is I do not think that this should proceed in a sequential West-to-East manner, because that basically means that Russia, if it gets in at all, gets in at the very end. And if that happens, I think we will end up in a situation where Russia, for one reason or another, does not ultimately want in because it is 30, 40 years down the road. Everyone else to its west is already in. That strikes me as putting Russia in that geo-political isolation that we definitely want to avoid.
The final point I would make comes to how I think we should address this issue. We should stop asking who gets in when -- that is what we have been asking for the last four or five years -- and we should start asking, what are they getting into? The reason that I think we have had so much trouble debating this is because we keep focusing on getting countries into a traditional NATO with Article 5 that is a collective defense organization that is going to require us to go to the U.S. Senate to ratify. I do not want the U.S. Senate to debate the future of NATO at this point in time. I think it is going to be bloody. I think it may lead to the worst outcome, which is that we move down this road and the people of Iowa and the people of Wisconsin stand up and say, "What's going on here? Why are we doing this?" That is going to be a bruising debate that we do not want to have, and we do not want to see it happen every time a new country comes in.
I think what we really need to do is to say that we need to have a vehicle that ultimately is open to Russia and in which Russia can comfortably join. That means it has to be something other than the current NATO, something other than a traditional military alliance focused on collective defense, because right now there is not an enemy. Collective defense is the wrong organizing principle. What I would argue is that, okay, let's get these three in because we are already way down the road. It probably hurts more to say no at this point than to let them in. But then we need to do what we should have done to begin with, and that is to get the vessel right, to create some sort of architecture that keeps NATO's infrastructure, integrated military structure, intact, but also eases the problem of bringing in other countries into an all-purpose multilateral military framework that is focused principally on peacekeeping and collective security and not on an alliance against an enemy that no longer exists.
Informal Russian membership on the NATO Council
Honorable Jonathan Dean
Union of Concerned Scientists, former United States Ambassador to the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction negotiations
These days, when I look at NATO enlargement, I have the sensation of looking at an express train rushing at high speeds toward a point where the track suddenly runs out. This train has two engineers. One of them wears ear plugs that prevent him from hearing the many warning shouts from onlookers. The second engineer has duct tape stuck over his mouth preventing him from giving advice on what to do to prevent a disaster.
No new facts have been developed in the last three years of discussion of the enlargement project which would change the conclusion that it is a serious error with lasting negative consequences. The security of the three candidate states likely to be designated at the NATO Summit next July is not threatened by anything, except by the long-term consequences of enlargement itself. These consequences include creation of an enduring irritant in Western relations with Russia, undermining the effort to define a productive relationship. They also include the creation of an unstable zone between NATO and Russia, as Charles Kupchan has said. These negative effects, unless we do take a different course, will be kept alive for many years to come as countries like the Baltic states, Romania, and probably also Ukraine press their candidacy for NATO membership.
Because of the negative impact of enlargement on Russian political opinion, the START II Treaty is in jeopardy in the Duma. As a result, we may be condemned to long continuation of a dangerously high level of nuclear weapons in Russia. This impasse will also block efforts to bring the nuclear weapons of China and the three threshold states into a nuclear-controlled regime. Russia's defense minister has made it clear -- the foreign minister also -- that it is not practical for Russia to attempt to stop NATO enlargement by military force or other means, and I expect no short-term violent Russian reaction if enlargement proceeds. But the Russian memory is long. And Russians have many more years of domestic misery before them that they can and will blame on a new Western Versailles policy.
Despite all this, the first formal step of enlargement will probably take place this coming July with designation of successful candidates. By spring of 1999, NATO's 50th anniversary, the first tranche of enlargement may be a fact. In the meantime, if the summit meeting between President Yeltsin and President Clinton scheduled for this March does take place, President Yeltsin will have an opportunity to describe for President Clinton the adverse consequences of enlargement for Western relations with Russia. But this meeting may not take place.
One of the problems of the enlargement project which strikes me as being most grave is that, right at this crucial period, Russia has been without leadership for the past year, given first the presidential election campaign and Yeltsin's illness, with no one at the top to deal with this issue to make Western leaders take seriously the consequences of this project and to propose serious alternatives. That is why I see the Russian engineer in the cab of the runaway locomotive with duct tape covering his mouth.
I continue to believe that a short-term solution of the problem, not a long-term or a real one, could be found in an invitation from the NATO Council -- as a matter of controlling its own procedures -- for Russia to participate in all the sessions of the Council. With a voice, but with no veto, at least Russia could convince itself that the deliberations of NATO and its decisions were not directed against it.
If that cannot be done, in the absence of a Russian interlocutor, I suggest that the United States itself should take the initiative to fill out the content of the proposed charter. Some months ago when this was first mentioned, I was told by the State Department that Russia would be asked to provide its ideas of what should be in this new charter and this new arrangement. Well, there is not anyone in Russia today who either can or dares to engage in a serious dialogue on this subject.
So I suggest the United States itself should take the initiative to fill out the content of this charter. It should visibly upgrade the enterprise by creating a new organization with a title, a resounding title, like "Commission on European Security" to implement the charter. The commission should be highly institutionalized with a joint permanent secretariat that itself can take the initiative to bring about repeated meetings and systematic consultations on security issues between NATO and Russia. I think what we can all foresee is that there will be some formal charter which will not be used actively at all.
There should be a specific prospect in this agreement that, in the unspecified future, NATO and this commission on European security would be melded into a single organization. Parallel to this, we should meet the repeated Russian proposals to upgrade the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, and in doing so should also meet the need for improved decision-making in that organization.
Russia wants assurances that NATO will not seek military advantages from enlargement. Some Russian experts have expressed the worry that if a conflict breaks out between NATO and Russia, NATO could gain decisive advantage by launching an attack against Russia's strategic nuclear weapons with its modern combat aircraft using guided conventional munitions, first deploying these aircraft forward to fields in Poland and Hungary. To meet these concerns in the course of the CFE review, it should be possible to negotiate new limits on the size of forces of member states, including the NATO candidate states, and including a decrease in the number of their combat aircraft.
In the Vienna document on confidence-building measures, there are agreed constraints in the size of peacetime out-of-garrison activities and the force components that can be involved in them. This measure might be expanded to cover air forces and transfered to an amended CFE Treaty to provide greater assurance.
As regards nuclear weapons, the NATO Council has given assurances against the eastward movement of NATO's tactical nuclear weapons. If Russia wishes to supplement these assurances with further bilateral agreements, NATO might propose a freeze covering the location and the numbers of tactical or sub-strategic nuclear weapons in the CFE Atlantic-to-Urals area. If a freeze agreement like this were in effect, it could be developed later into an agreement to reduce or ultimately to eliminate all sub-strategic nuclear weapons in the area.
Enlargement without Russia yet
Honorable Bruce Weinrod
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO, 1989-1993
Let me begin with basics. Obviously this whole discussion depends upon the assumption that NATO itself is still relevant and needed. That is the basic question that will have to be addressed. It will be part of the debate when we do reach the point in debating the enlargement of NATO. Some people will ask, well, do we even need to keep it, let alone enlarge it?
Let me just say that not only is NATO still relevant and still useful and still needed, but, regardless of what I think, the fact is that all the current 16 members continue very strongly to want NATO to continue. And many other countries are beating on the door. That is the sign, I would say, of a fairly healthy organization.
I might point out that historically this is really rare -- that an organization remains in existence after the major threat that caused the alliance to be formed in the first place has gone away.
Let me point out one role of NATO that I do not think has been brought out. Whether formally or de facto, there may not be an enemy at this point, but we found just several years ago in the Persian Gulf that a threat emerged rather suddenly and significantly that affected our interests and those of many other countries, including those in Europe. While NATO as an institution did not formally get involved, its resources, its assets, its experience and all of the things that it had been trained to do were all involved very directly in the response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
I can say very confidently that the ability to respond quickly at minimal cost was largely due to NATO's already being in existence. If we had any similar situation in an area of common interest, NATO could play a very significant role -- whether or not NATO as an institution formally got involved, which it may or may not. So for this reason, if for no other reason, I would say that a NATO with significant military assets is still very much needed.
The second question is enlargement itself, and again I think it should be debated in public and in the Congress and the Senate. It should not be done surreptitiously. We need to have everybody in the country who is at all interested think this through very carefully. It is a significant development. The most fundamental reason is that this is an historic opportunity to expand the sphere of the democratic community of nations for the indefinite future, and to expand the sphere of the democratic security culture as well. That in itself is important enough to justify doing this
That brings us to the Russian dimension. There are some in our country who would say that maybe Russia has really not changed much at all or that it constitutes, even today, a renewed threat to the U.S. or to Western security. I do not think that's accurate at all. There have been significant positive changes, and there is the real potential for continued positive developments in Russia. Under the current Russian leadership, I think not only is Russia not a threat to Europe security as such, but basically I think the leadership does want to bring Russia into the Western and democratic community of nations. Bilaterally and multilaterally, NATO and the NATO nations should do all they can to encourage the emergence of a stable, free and peaceful Russia.
However, having said that, the fact of the matter is that Russia's fate is still uncertain. In truly stable democracies, there is no question that the next election will be held as scheduled, and it can be fairly clearly understood what the successor leadership to the current government leadership would likely do. Unfortunately, neither of these criteria holds true for Russia today. Indeed, there remains within Russia a faction which is fundamentally hostile to the West and to the democratic ideal. We should also remember that despite its military problems -- and they are significant -- Russia still has significant military capabilities and potential.
Based on these uncertainties, my conclusion is that current NATO membership or moving that process along really just is not in the cards. I am sympathetic to the way it was put by Mr. Kortunov, but I think realistically that, because of all these factors that I have described, it will not happen. In fact, I do not think it would be fair to say that a single NATO member at this point would be ready to proceed in that way. So, as a practical matter, it will not happen.
The next point is the reaction in Russia to NATO and to NATO enlargement. It seems to me that, as was said, this is at the moment not a high priority issue for most Russians; it certainly is in the elite to some degree, and it could be more so if there is a political dynamic involved here in terms of a struggle for leadership. But I do find it interesting that a politician who might have the most to gain by outflanking the current government and being ready to pounce on any seeming Russian move towards acquiescing or cooperating in NATO enlargement -- Aleksandr Lebed -- has said fairly calm things, if not positive things, about NATO enlargement.
In that sense, at least so far I do not think the dangerous political dynamic has developed. Also, it is clear to me without any hesitation that those in Russia who are true genuine democrats understand that actually NATO being strong and even expanding is in the interest of democracy in Russia; it increases the likelihood that the democracy and pluralism will be consolidated in the area nearby. That in turn will help reinforce those in Russia that are trying to consolidate Russia within the country. In other words, when we talk about Russia, are we talking about a democratically oriented, Western-oriented leadership or are we talking about some other leadership?
The last argument is that somehow NATO enlargement will cause the Western-oriented leadership to be undermined. Everybody has to draw their own conclusions, but mine is that I do not think this will be such a significant issue, that in and of itself it can really change the political dynamics within Russia. If it is going to change, it will change because of a lot of other factors, not because of NATO enlargement. I do not think we should also be too alarmed or concerned by statements that seem to convey the impression that the Russian government is fundamentally opposed to enlargement.
We have evidence in the last several years that Russia at one point said it was opposed to Partnership for Peace and would not enter it, but did. There have been statements back and forth on NATO enlargement over the years. I think we ought to just move ahead on the assumption that there is an acceptance that this will be a process that is happening and that the issue is how can it best be done in a way that at least tries to accommodate or work with Russia to the maximum extent possible within the framework of requirements for NATO's security interests.
So that brings me to the last area, which is that NATO should indeed make good-faith efforts to address professed Russian concerns with respect to NATO expansion. There are things that can be done. NATO does not need to do some of the things at this point that it might have needed to do in the Cold War, certainly not in the areas that might be brought into NATO. At the end of the day hopefully there will be some understanding, but if there is not, NATO should in fact move forward. No country, including Russia, can be allowed a de facto veto in terms of expansion itself or the timing of the admission of new members. The process of discussion of a charter should not be delayed so much that it, in effect, is a de facto veto of the expansion process.
As the process of these discussions move forward, it is reasonable not only to consider what carrots NATO might offer to Russia, but also what NATO might ask of Russia. In other words, it seems to me that there could be discussions about what Russia is prepared to do or not do in the context of whatever accommodation that NATO might offer to Russia as well. It need not be a one-way street.
In the shorter term, since Russia will not be a member, but it should be brought closer. I believe that insufficient attention has been given to the North Atlantic Coordinating Council, the so-called "NAC-C," which is an adjunct of NATO created several years ago. It includes Russia and has already been involved in various discussions in a political-military dimension and could be enhanced in various ways to give Russia an opportunity to be directly involved.
Also, NATO should work with Russia, as it already has, in an ad hoc way in specific issues where it makes sense -- peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, et cetera -- and gradually develop this process over time. This brings me to the final point,
None of this rules out the possibility of an even closer relationship between NATO and Russia over the longer term. If Russia does consolidate its democracy and pursues constructive international policies over a period of time, then the possibility of a formal Russian role in NATO can be reviewed. Indeed, should the day come when Russia is truly a part of the Western democratic community of nations, then the entire geopolitical equation in Europe will have changed in a fundamental way.
Then, it seems to me, we would want to ask what really would NATO be at that point if Russia were brought in. what would that mean? We would be talking about something different than NATO today. Would we want to have commitments to Russia's eastern borders? This has not been brought up, but it seems to me that this is not something that would be very widely accepted. So we would have to have a different kind of arrangement, but that would be okay because if we had a democratic Russia, then we would have an entirely different Europe, as I said -- a much better one. I might also add that none of this precludes closer relations between Russia and the EU, and also an increased role for Russia in the G-7 and making the G-7 an even more important part of the international political community.
Russia's role in the fourth generation of the Atlantic Alliance
Dr. Ira Straus
United States Coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO
I hope we will not underestimate the people we have heard from. The introductions may not do them full justice. We have had some of the important makers of the thinking in policy in recent years on both sides, Russia and America, here.
In Mr. Kupchan, we have the person who was a coordinator of the Council on Foreign Relations study on this subject. He has played a part in shaping this debate. He may not have won all the battles, but he has not only helped shape the debate in the past, he has also defined here how the debate will have to evolve in the future.
In Mr. Kortunov, we have one of the people who has shaped foreign policy thinking in the new Russia ever since 1991 and even earlier -- shaped it well, I think. He is one of the people who we should be responding to seriously, because he tells us what is important. And he is not alone in his thinking.
His thinking might not be as widespread as it was in 1991 when it was very fashionable to be pro-Western in Russia, but it is still the same basic idea that is shared by Ivan Rybkin, the head of the Security Council of Russia, who has said several times that Russia should join NATO as a political member of the alliance. It is the same idea that has been expressed by the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, many times.
It is the same idea that Viktor Chernomyrdin, the prime minister, has stated several times in the last several days with great urgency, which is that Russia must become a full and equal member of the North Atlantic Council, that is, the top political body of NATO. He might say, "accept no substitutes," like the advertising slogan -- because the substitutes will not be sufficient. And the substitutes that are being proposed are much too complicated, too cumbersome. They are worse for NATO itself, as well as being worse for Russia.
In that sense, I am in one point of friendly disagreement with the panel, having agreed with everything else that has been said. My disagreement is that this is not just a matter for the future, that we are not just setting the agenda for the future. This issue is before us here and now -- not in the form of full membership for Russia in the integrated military structure of NATO, but the precise form of the political link between Russia and NATO as NATO expands.
If NATO expands without a sound political link to Russia, then it expands to the exclusion of Russia. No substitute will suffice for an adequate political link in which Russia is a participant inside the NATO process. The only substitutes are to give Russia a veto, which is rightly unacceptable to the West, or just to give Russia mere consultation, which is rightly unacceptable to Russia.
We have heard from the Central Europeans here that we need to make more of a generous commitment to Central Europe, and they are right. We also need a more generous commitment to Russia. We have heard that from the Russians. They are also right. We have needed a more generous commitment to all these countries since 1989.
When the issue of joining NATO was first raised on the official level, it was by Gyula Horn, now prime minister of Hungary; in February 1990, foreign minister. He included Russia in his scenario for those who could join NATO. He was not excluding Russia. That was true of all the Central European countries in 1990, and for all the Eastern European countries when they invented NATO expansion in the year 1990 on the official level.
I say "on the official level," because I take some pride in the fact that I also invented it on the private level and passed around the idea ever since 1985, and was publishing articles about it all throughout the late 1980s. I was very glad when all the Central and East Europeans took me up on the idea, and they rightly included Russia as a country to be brought in. They did not have the idea of drawing new lines and starting a new Cold War.
It was only late-comers at the end of 1993 and in 1994 who did that. I should name only Henry Kissinger, leaving many others unnamed, who never said a thing in favor of NATO expansion before that. In his first article on this, Kissinger actually wrote that he was not sure if he favored NATO expansion. He was only sure of one thing: He wanted to exclude Russia and was against the Partnership for Peace. After that, he filled in the argument rhetorically; now he does favor including other countries in order the better to exclude Russia.
That was when NATO expansion got turned into something anti-Russian. In that sense, it is not really right to say that the idea is inherently anti-Russian. It is the distortion of the idea, the way the idea has come to be distorted since 1994, that is anti-Russian. The idea itself is not at all anti-Russian. It is for a greater commitment to all of the post-Communist countries, Russia included. Fortunately this is still the official NATO and United States doctrine. Perhaps it is unfortunately only an official doctrine in the sense of being a footnote in the press release. But it is the legal doctrine of our governments, and it could be given substance.
There are two major questions involved regarding Russia in NATO -- all the other issues are secondary, the sort of arguments involved in admitting any country, which we could resolve easily. The first major question is an issue to be resolved; the second is a psychological barrier to be overcome.
The issue to be resolved is decision-making. The psychological barrier is to adjust to the thought of NATO being something different than anti-Russian.
The decision-making issue is substantial but not intractable. We have heard it stated today that NATO operates on a basis of unit-veto. That is often true in practice, but that is only a habit within the North Atlantic Council. It has no legal foundation whatsoever.
I learned this first when I talked to the person who did the most to write the North Atlantic Treaty, Theodore Achilles, a few years before he died in 1986. I started with the assumption that there was a veto in NATO. That was what everyone was saying in NATO in those days -- that consensus, in the sense of unanimity, is the basis of everything in NATO. That was the attitude in NATO during the era of stagnation -- the stagnation from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, which NATO and the West went through parallel to the stagnation in the Soviet bloc. Nevertheless, decision by unit-veto was not the original idea in NATO. Achilles assured me the NATO Treaty was written up precisely to leave the decision-making flexible and open, so that the NATO Council can make decisions without veto, as it needs.
Two of the early secretary-generals of NATO, Paul-Henri Spaak and Dirk Stikker, were strong advocates of decision-making by weighted voting and no veto in NATO. In his memoirs, Dirk Stikker devoted several pages to refuting the idea that there is any right of veto in NATO.
At present, NATO is talking in any case about increasing the flexibility of the alliance. Unfortunately, this is being done almost solely on the administrative level, through combined joint task forces. It is a worthy business, but it needs to be done on the political level as well. Then the issue of new memberships will become much easier to manage flexibly.
The people who say that admitting the Central or Eastern Europeans or anyone else would screw up the decision-making are absolutely right. They are just as right as the people who say that letting in Russia would screw up the decision-making. In fact, they are more right. Can you imagine a dozen countries not creating trouble? I do not care how many criteria for good behavior they have met. It is the nature of countries, like people, to create trouble. You need a process that can accommodate them. It has to be a more flexible political decision-making process.
Once we understand this -- and this is needed for NATO already, for its flexibility in operations in the new era, as well as for taking in new Central and Eastern European members -- we have also solved the basic problem of how to include Russia in NATO. If we do not solve it, we will screw up the alliance by including more members without making the decision-making more flexible.
We might actually do better to start with the issue of Russian membership, because then we will know that we have to solve this problem. There will be no illusion that we can hold Russia down to such good behavior that it will never make trouble in the decision-making.
On the psychological side, how can we put aside the focus on an enemy, the idea that NATO exists to oppose Russia? This is a question that Bruce Weinrod has raised. There is an answer.
The problem is that many people are thinking of NATO as something that began only in 1949 and always existed only to oppose Soviet Russian power, and the new NATO as simply the second generation of NATO. We should remember that NATO has a pre-history. NATO was already the third generation of the Atlantic alliance. Generation one included France, the historic enemy of Anglo-Saxon powers. The World War II alliance also included France. The enemy was Germany. Russia was an outside ally of ours, not the enemy. The Cold War alliance, the third generation, included Germany, the former enemy, Italy, a former enemy, and indirectly, Japan as well. In the fourth generation, it is only natural to include Russia, another former enemy.
In the third generation, we created an institutionalized West, with the Marshall Plan, NATO, OECD, European Union and Group of Seven. The West was no longer just a group of powers often operating by a balance of powers; it was institutionalized and capable of integrating former enemies. After the third generation, with the end of the Cold War we naturally come to the fourth generation, where we are again integrating former enemies. When I say enemies, I mean countries whose governments used to be enemies; I am not saying the countries were inherently enemies. It is the nature of Atlanticism to draw upon its reserves of strength in order to turn former enemies into permanent friends.
We are already talking about including the countries of Central Europe, which were on the other side of that divide not too many years ago. Why, then, is there the idea to exclude Russia? Why is there the idea that Russia is inherently the enemy? All kinds of bad arguments have been invented for this. For example, "We've had 500 years of Russian expansionism in opposition to the West." This is just not the case. There have been 500 years of Western and European expansionism all over the world, including Russian expansionism, which was mostly coordinate with that of the European powers. Russia sometimes conflicted with European powers, as they all conflicted with one another. We had a Soviet Russian enemy for a certain period; this is a particular incident in history, not the essence of 500 years of history. In fact, Russia has more often than not been allied with the Western powers against some Central European powers.
The Atlantic idea is the idea of an open nucleus of democracies that can absorb former enemies. Ultimately its founders meant it to save liberty and bring an order based on liberty to the entire world. Like the alliance itself, the idea has gone through several generations.
It did not start out with NATO; it started out with the idea of English-speaking union at the turn of the 20th century, which reconciled Britain and America after they had been enemies for 100 years. It moved on to the World War I alliance and the idea of a union of all the Western democracies. A book called Union Now pioneered the idea of a union of Western democracies as a nucleus for other countries to join, especially former enemies. The enemies in those days were Germany, Italy and Japan. The idea moved on with NATO, which began to carry that program into practice, and which is open in its charter to all European countries, Europe construed broadly to include Turkey and now Russia.
That is what the Atlantic idea means. That is what the NATO idea means. There is nothing inherently paradoxical in including Russia in it. On the contrary, it is the fulfillment of what the original idea really was. If it has yet to be fulfilled in practice, that is due to all kinds of historical accidents, mainly accretions in the era of stagnation, when we got used to things as they were while the Cold War dragged on and on and on decade after decade. We in the West forgot what the original goals of NATO and the Atlantic community were all about. It has been the easterners who have reminded us of these goals. The eastern Atlanticists -- including the Russian Atlanticists -- have provided the missing fourth generation of the Atlantic idea, the one that has been needed to prepare the fourth generation of the alliance itself.
I hope that in this period, when the issue has become very much alive, we will start listening to the people in that engine room that Ambassador Dean talked about and we will hear their proposals. The proposals on the Russian side are far from absurd. Not all of them are good, but if our people only listen to the negative parts and we never pay attention to the positive parts, we will never be able to steer the train correctly. In this period, as people realize they have talked themselves into a corner on this issue, maybe we will finally start listening to the serious proposals on the Russian side and engage them.
Discussion
Political risks in changing NATO
Q I am Will Baker from Congressman David Obey's office. My question in no way reflects any policy of Mr. Obey. A lot of things we have heard about today involved a restructuring of NATO. I would be very interested in hearing the panel's opinions on the kind of political risks that this incurs, especially in terms of having the U.S. in its current political environment essentially recast its commitment to Western and Eastern Europe.
DR. KUPCHAN: Political risk, did you say? I am always struck when we have these debates that some of the people in favor of very limited enlargement say, "Well, we cannot go beyond that because then it would change NATO, because then we would actually have to have something new." My view of this is, if you do not have something new, then you have got the problem wrong, because this is a new world and you cannot take an organization whose mission and fundamental internal structure was cast during a certain geopolitical era and assume that you can just have it continue on without fundamental change. And I think that unless that change takes place, the United States is probably not going to stick around in NATO.
When I travel around the country, and I do sometimes outside of Washington and New York, and tell people that this debate is going on and that they will soon have to pledge their lives to defend countries they have never heard of, they look at me like I just got off a space ship from Mars. I still think there is a debate coming on this issue. And unless the nature of the commitment is changed, the nature of the decision-making inside NATO is changed, there is an alteration towards collective security and away from collective defense, I think NATO is cooked.
So you get two opposing opinions. Some people say it is cooked if you try to change it. I think if you do not change it, you are finished.
MR. WEINROD: May I add something? NATO has changed -- I think you know that -- in a lot of ways since the end of the Cold War. The number of U.S. troops in Europe is down by two-thirds. The amount we are spending is down. The NATO forces have been reconfigured. It is involved in peacekeeping, whether you are for it or against it, in Bosnia. Spain is now going to be a full military member. France has said in principle it is coming back in. A lot of things are going on, such as combined joint task forces.
I think there is a strong case for keeping the essence of NATO in the sense of the kinds of thing that it could do now. It is tough in some ways to explain why to bring in the new members, which, in fact, would not change any of what we are just now talking about. It would add some things. It might even take away, temporarily. It is really a question of whether we are going to take a historic opportunity to bring these countries really full square in every way, political, economic and security, into the Western democratic community of nations.
There will be a debate; there should be. I think actually it may be on the scale of the League of Nations debate in some sense. It could go either way. But historians will look back one way or the other and say this was a turning point.
Regression to Cold War relations?
Q Lindsay Mattison from the International Center. I particularly aim this at Dr. Kortunov. I have the sense that we are going to pay a price, maybe lose the START treaty, and there may be some other consequences to sort of what's happened. I look back to a period where the Soviet Union changed, a period where much interesting was happening, and I had the sense that Europe was safer without NATO. As a participant in all of that, what is your feeling? I have the sense we are like space capsules kind of receding, that you are disappearing over the horizon back in some place very far away. Do you have that feeling? What price are we going to pay?
DR. KORTUNOV: It is an open question. One can argue that Russian politicians are bluffing, that they do not have political will to react in a strong way. You know, I would probably buy this argument, but I am concerned about the more general framework. Suppose we had a boom in Russian-American trade, say, with major U.S. investments in the Russian oil business. Or suppose we had progress on the strategic arms limitation front. Then probably this NATO expansion and this agreement on the particular mode of enlargement would be a minor issue, given all other things put together.
However, what I am concerned about is that there is practically nothing that can compensate for this possible crisis in the relationship. I think that if you have the NATO enlargement and put it on top of START II problems and disagreements about Russian policies towards CIS countries and absence of any significant economic relations, the two countries are simply drifting apart. I think that this is not in the interest of Russia or the United States. A lot is still at stake. If the strategic collaboration between Russia and the United States will fall apart, at least for the time being there is nothing to replace it in the world. So we are entering a period of much less stability and more considerable risk of proliferation and regional crises.
MR. DEAN: If I could just add. The timing is really all off here. This decision is going to be made in July on the enlargement. It will take place, beyond much question, and there will not be any START ratification prior to the decision, as far as I can see, and there will not be any rapid ratification after it. And the possibility of NATO enlargement to include Russia, which I would support, is a project which obviously is going to take many years. But in the meanwhile, this train that I speak of is going to continue down the track. By April 1999, there will be three more members in NATO, and the issue of the second tranche will be acute. The question of Russia's relationship with that expanded NATO, in my opinion, probably will still not be resolved, in part because of what one might call leadership vacuum in Russia, and in part because of an absence of creative thinking on the Western side.
This is a fairly serious situation that is confronting us even if NATO enlargement does take place as planned.
Orientation of the Russian military
Q I am with the Political Science Department at George Washington. My question is, what is our intelligence assessment of the Russian military's pro-Western orientation? Turkey, a NATO member, has a heavily pro-Western military, which, irrespective of its current elected government, which we know right now is not necessarily pro-Western, ensures a pro-Western military strategy. To what extent is the Russian military heavily pro-Western, so that regardless of who wins the next election, we can ensure cooperation with NATO?
DR. KORTUNOV: If you are asking about the U.S. intelligence sources, of course, I cannot speculate.
But, first of all, I think that the only test that we have is Bosnia, and the test is positive in the sense that we were able to avoid major conflicts and problems in military cooperation.
Second, I think that exactly in order to ensure a more cooperative approach from the Russian military, they should be co-opted and involved in some larger multilateral frameworks. One of the reasons why Turks are pro-Western is because they have a long-standing record of participation in multilateral Western enterprises. Many of them got their education in U.S. colleges. Many of them had spent considerable time in Brussels and in other NATO places. I think that is exactly what is needed -- to make sure also that the Russian military is anchored to a broader security framework, that the Russian military does not feel that it is insulated, ostracized, or perceived as a potential enemy. I mean that, bluntly, it has to be domesticated.
DR. STRAUS: I should add one note and a reference to a publication called Problems of Post-Communism, which George Washington University's Elliott School helps to put out. There was an article of mine in the first number about NATO and the identity problem of the Russian military. Dr. Kortunov has made the point very well. The Russian military's identity is up for grabs. It must define a national strategic identity for Russia. Either the West allows it to do that together with the West, or else it is forced to do it separately.
The initial enthusiasm in the Russian military for the West in 1991 has worn off, but still basically the Russian military reflects the Russian population, which is more pro-Western than anti-Western. If we put it in an adversary position, that can still be reversed. If you look at Turkey and imagine what it would be today if it was not a member of NATO but with its current president, you can imagine what is at stake. The alternatives are apocalyptic in scale.
Q I guess the problem is, what guarantees do we have, if we incorporate Russia within NATO, that a government that is not pro-Western may actually capitalize on that presence to our detriment?
Overextension of commitments?
Q STANLEY KOBER, Cato Institute. This is a question on how we make good on our commitments. Bruce is in favor of expanding NATO but notes that our forces have been reduced to one-third of what they were before. If that is the case, how do we extend the security commitment to a country like Hungary in those circumstances unless we intend to respond using nuclear weapons? And similarly to Ira, in your committee's draft Protocol on NATO Expansion, footnote 5 on weighted voting, it says the U.S. will still have over 20 percent of the total vote. I put it to you, if we have 20 percent of the vote, we are not going to contribute more than 20 percent of the budget. And if that is the case, what is going to be left of NATO to provide an effective guarantee?
DR. STRAUS: We contribute less than 20 percent of NATO, actually, in terms of forces involved in NATO in Europe. Do not go with the myth that all the forces here in the United States are really NATO forces. When people calculate $100 billion being spent on NATO, they're counting practically the entire military in the United States as being NATO. It is Germany that puts up the most actual NATO forces, and then other European countries.
As to your other question, which is very real: If we are intending to extend NATO to defend these countries against Russia, we are overcommitting based on our current force postures. If we view such a conflict as a very dim, distant possibility and we are extending to include Russia, then there is no threat nearby that could possibly threaten the NATO members, and we are not overextending at all. The idea that there is a problem defending Russia's eastern border is mind-boggling to me. Russia can defend it perfectly well itself. It is like asking NATO to defend our border with Mexico. Who worries about that?
MR. WEINROD: At the moment Russia does not pose a military threat to Europe. It is not a security threat. It would take some time for it to reconstitute its capabilities. If it were to do so, there would be significant warning time so that the West -- the other countries in Europe and the U.S. -- if they perceived that threat and had the will to respond, could build up at the time. They do not need to do it now. So it is not really an issue at this point.
Let me stress, there are some people, I am sure, in this debate, in the ultimate debate, who say that Russia already is a threat again, there is resurgent imperialism, et cetera; but the consensus is that a lot of people think that we want to encourage Russia to be a part of the democratic community of nations. It is moving in that direction. There are tactical differences about exactly what the best approach is at this point in terms of NATO enlargement, but it is within that framework. I think that should be highlighted.