Congressional Documents
[Page S1152] Mr. CRAIG Mr. Thomas [Page S1153] Foreign Affairs; Madeleine's Folly Mr. CRAIG [Page S1154] Mr. Chafee Mr. CHAFEE Mr. CHAFEE Mr. CRAIG Mr. CHAFEE Mr. CRAIG Mr. CHAFEE Mr. CHAFEE Mr. Frist
[Page: S1152]
Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, today I come to the floor of the Senate to visit with my colleagues about NATO and NATO expansion.
Of all the responsibilities the Senate is called upon to exercise under our constitutional system, none is more momentous--and, in most cases, as irrevocable--as our advice and consent to the ratification of treaties and treaty revisions. One of the treaty questions the Senate will be facing in the near future is whether the North Atlantic Treaty--the NATO alliance--should be modified to include the former Warsaw Pact states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Our decision on this matter will set the structure for security in Europe and the American role in it for years, perhaps decades, to come.
I would like to commend the distinguished Chairmen of the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Relations for the thorough and thoughtful hearings they have held on this matter. However, in my discussions with a number of Senators, particularly those who, like myself, are not members of those committees, it is clear that many Senators have only begun to focus on the many interrelated issues that touch upon the matter of NATO expansion. Indeed, some of the issues--our relations with our allies, relations with the Russians, the implications for weapons proliferation, our policy toward Iraq--are shifting every day.
For example, this week the distinguished Majority Leader spoke forcefully about his misgivings about the agreement reached between U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Our entire policy in the region has been put on hold. It is well known that both France, a key NATO ally, and Russia, the obvious object of NATO expansion, strongly welcome this outcome. Will Saddam Hussein live up to this agreement? Many of us consider it unlikely. Will the United States return to the military option in a few weeks or months? I don't think any of us really yet know that. How will the Iraq crisis, what ever its outcome, affect our relations with both our allies and Russia? We do not yet know the impact of the realities of these events. How will the outcome affect the larger task of stemming the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and missile technology? We do not yet know. Not knowing the answers to these questions, are we prepared to make an irreversible decision on NATO expansion? I think not--at least not yet.
In considering the implications just of the Iraq crisis, I bring to my colleagues' attention an op-ed by Mr. Thomas L. Friedman that appeared in the New York Times on February 17, before the Annan/Hussein deal. Mr. Friedman wrote:
The U.S. should be doing everything it can to work with Russia, not only on Iraq but to shrink Russia's own nuclear arsenal, which is the greatest proliferation threat in the world today. Attention shoppers: Russia has thousands of weapons of mass destruction. It has hundreds of unemployed or underemployed nuclear scientists. And it has only the loosest controls over its nukes and nuclear materials, and it has a signed nuclear arms reduction treaty with the U.S. that has not been implemented. But instead of dealing with this problem, the Clintonites are making it worse. They are expanding NATO to counter a threat that doesn't exist--a Russian invasion of Europe--and thus undermining America's ability to work with Russia on the threat that does exist--Russia's loose nukes. `Halting the proliferation of nuclear materials, missiles and technology is clearly our number-one foreign policy challenge since the breakup of the Soviet Empire,' says former Senator Sam Nunn, who was the expert in the Senate on this issue.
`But because it is number one, we should be measuring all other policies by how they affect proliferation. Not only does NATO expansion not help us deal with Russia on the issue, it is counterproductive.'
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have Mr. Friedman's essay be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the essay was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
[Page: S1153]
With a U.S. bombing of Iraq now increasingly likely, the question being raised by those uneasy with such a strike is: What is the endgame? Is America just throwing its weight around to punish Saddam Hussein?
The answer is really very simple. It comes down to two words: weapons proliferation. If Iraq--already a repeat user of poison gas--is able to snub its nose at the U.N. weapons inspectors, then the world's ability to fight the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction elsewhere would be fundamentally compromised. Libya and its friends would all be less afraid to develop germ weapons and nukes. We would all end up in a much more dangerous world. That's why Saddam has to be stopped.
But it is precisely because stemming weapons proliferation should be the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy in the post-cold-war era that the Clinton Administration's policy of NATO expansion is so stupid. The U.S. should be doing everything it can to work with Russia, not only on Iraq but to shrink Russia's own nuclear arsenal, which is the greatest proliferation threat in the world today. Attention shoppers: Russia has thousands of weapons of mass destruction. It has hundreds of unemployed or underemployed nuclear scientists. And it has only the loosest controls over its nukes and nuclear materials, and it has a signed nuclear arms reduction treaty with the U.S. that has not been implemented.
But instead of dealing with this problem, the Clintonites are making it worse. They are expanding NATO to counter a threat that doesn't exist--a Russian invasion of Europe--and thus undermining America's ability to work with Russia on the threat that does exist--Russia's loose nukes.
`Halting the proliferation of nuclear materials, missiles and technology is clearly our number-one foreign policy challenge since the breakup of the Soviet Empire,' says former Senator Sam Nunn, who was the expert in the Senate on this issue. `But because it is number one, we should be measuring all other policies by how they affect proliferation. Not only does NATO expansion not help us deal with Russia on this issue, it is counterproductive.'
The Clinton team has never had an integrated foreign policy. It treats Iraq and NATO expansion as if they were totally disconnected. One day Secretary of State Albright gives a speech telling Russia that NATO is moving right up to the Baltic-Russian border. The next day she complains that Russia isn't being helpful on Iraq. Gosh, I wonder why not?
`Thanks to NATO expansion, we have convinced the Russian political elite that they are not our partner and that their security is not as important to us as the security of the Czechs,' says Jack Matlock, President Reagan's Ambassador to Moscow.
We are already paying a price for this. NATO expansion has prompted Russia's Parliament to stall its ratification of the Start 2 nuclear arms reduction treaty, which would shrink Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals from around 7,000 apiece to 3,500 apiece. That's 3,500 fewer Russian nukes pointed at us. But the deal has been frozen by NATO expansion. If the Clinton team loses the Start 2 treaty, in order to add the Czechs to NATO, it will go down as one of the greatest blunders in the history of U.S. foreign policy: Madeleine's folly.
As Mr. Matlock notes, the more we expand NATO, `the less willing Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy is to work with us on cooperative measures' to keep its atomic scientists constructively employed--so they don't end up in Iraq and Iran--and the less willing Russia's military is to let us in to help it better control and destroy its nuclear materials.
Moreover, if Ms. Albright is serious about extending NATO to the Baltic States, the only way NATO can possibly defend them is with nukes. Baltic membership in NATO will, therefore, only encourage Russia to continue altering its defense doctrine--moving to a greater reliance on nuclear weapons for defense, on more of a hair trigger, because the closer NATO gets to Russia's border the less warning time Moscow will have. But don't worry, sleep well, Latvia will be in NATO.
The Clintonites are rightly ready to go to war with Iraq to halt the spread of weapons in the Middle East. But their expansion of NATO will only increase the threat of proliferation in Russia--where there are a lot more weapons, under a lot less control, and all pointed at us.
Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, in the same vein, one of our colleagues, the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Gregg, made the same point on the floor February 12, and I thought it was worth noting, especially because it came, again, before the Annan-Hussein agreement:
But in the area of Russia, for example, this administration appears to think that they can go to the [Russians] and demand that Russia follow our policies in Iraq and insist on their support on Iraq, but at the same time this administration proposes an expansion of NATO. You have to recognize, if you were a Russian leader, you would find a certain irony in a request that was coupled in that terminology. Because, of course, an expansion of NATO, especially to Poland, is an expansion that can only be viewed in Russia with some concern and possibly viewed by some as an outright threat . . . So you can understand that Russia might view a push to expand NATO at the same time as we are asking them to support us in Iraq as being inconsistent and a bit ironic. And it reflects, unfortunately, I think, this administration's failure to understand the linkage--and linkage is the right term--between working with a nation like Russia and our capacity to do things in the Middle East and moving forward with the NATO expansion at the exact same time. Yet, if you were to listen to the leadership of this administration, they will tell you that there is no relationship, they have no overlap on those two issues. Of course, that is just not true, and that is one of the main reasons we are having problems with Russia [today].
In case anyone in this country has missed it, the Russians have not. They understand the linkage, even if the Clinton administration does not seem to understand it. On February 24, Vladimir Lukin, Moscow's former Ambassador to the United States and now the chairman of the Duma's Committee on International Affairs, commented:
It would be a big mistake if the United States was offended by Russian policy toward Iraq or another country . . . Russia's policy toward Iraq is not only Russia's policy--we coincide with many other countries, including U.S. allies . . . The problem is whether Russia is considered part of the Atlantic community or not.
Now remember, I am quoting the Russian chairman of the Committee on International Affairs of the Duma.
He says, again:
The problem is whether Russia is considered part of the Atlantic community or not. Russia will have to decide how it is being considered--as an equal partner or as an outsider. NATO enlargement is isolating Russia. What is the choice for us? Only to be an outsider.
He also goes on to say:
Not a hostile outsider, but still an outsider. It is a danger. We will become stronger, and we are still a nuclear power. It is a danger to us and a danger to you--
Meaning the United States.
A few years ago there was the idea of partnership, now there is a strong hesitation in the United States.
Mr. President, that's the linkage you are missing, that's the linkage many of us are concerned about as it relates to current policy.
The point here, as I have noted at some length, is just one ongoing aspect of this very complex issue which we have hardly begun to assess. This is just one aspect, but there are others, no less troublesome, which I will only mention briefly.
The Baltic States: What is the nature of our commitment to admit these States? What are the ramifications?
Our European partners: Why are we so passive to our allies' bald insistence that they intend to bear very little of the costs of expansion? As our distinguished former colleagues Howard Baker and Sam Nunn raised the matter in their recent essay in the New York Times:
Advocates and skeptics of NATO enlargement alike agree that the transformation of Europe's security structure should be related to the transformation of the economy. As James Baker, the former Secretary of State, has testified, European Union membership `is just as important as membership in NATO for the countries involved,' and `we must make clear that NATO membership for the countries of Central Europe is not a substitute for closer economic ties to the European Union.'
So then, why are we taking the first step in a reintegration that is not primarily a question of security--since there is no credible threat--while our European allies, who together have greater resources to help their neighbors than the United States, continue to play what can only be said to be a secondary role?
The `New NATO': Republicans, in particular, should be very concerned about the words of President Clinton upon signing of the Founding Act in May of 1997. He says:
We are building a new NATO. It will remain the strongest alliance in history, with smaller, more flexible forces, prepared to provide for our defense, but also trained for peacekeeping.
As we know, peacekeeping, in some people's eyes, can be considered offensive actions.
I go on to quote:
[Page: S1154]
It will work closely with other nations that share our hopes and values and interests through the Partnership for Peace. It will be an alliance directed no longer against a hostile bloc of nations, but instead designed to advance the security of every democracy in Europe--NATO's old members, new members and nonmembers alike.
Mr. President, I certainly hope this doesn't mean what it sounds like it means--the end of NATO as a defensive alliance and its transformation into a regional peacekeeping organization. Will the `new NATO' exist to protect its members--or to engage in many Bosnia-like missions all over Central and Eastern Europe?
Now let me speak briefly of costs. To say the least, there is a great deal of skepticism over the question of how much this is going to cost the American taxpayer and whether the very low estimates now being given by the administration are, in any way, credible. I note that we have not even begun to discuss how much of the costs accruing to the new allies will end up being billed to the United States. For example, in May of 1997, ABC News quoted the American Ambassador to Hungary to the effect that the American share of buying new planes for the Hungarian Force `will be perhaps 20 percent to 25 percent' of the cost of that `at most.'
How about 30 percent or how about 40 percent? We don't know. That hasn't been negotiated. But what this administration is saying is that we will play a substantial role in the diversity of military equipment for these new partners in NATO.
So how much is the real cost? And, again, shouldn't we know before we are asked to vote?
In closing, Mr. President, let me emphasize that I do not believe we are yet ready in this Senate to give this matter the full debate that it deserves and that we must hear on this issue. If we had to vote on NATO expansion on the basis of the information we now have, I would vote no, and I know that there are many others in this body who would vote no.
I look forward to a full, detailed and lengthy debate on the issue at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the Senate is fully knowledgeable on the issue of NATO expansion as they take up one of their most important constitutional responsibilities: the advice and consent on these critical issues. I yield the floor.
Mr. Chafee addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, I commend the Senator from Idaho for his thoughtful comments. He started his comments by saying
that this is a matter to which many of the Senators have not given very thorough consideration, and I think that is accurate. I certainly fall into that category.
I am not on either of the major committees that deal with the expansion of NATO. Like all Senators, I am busy with this or that. It seems to me very wise that we all give this matter some thorough consideration. It is my understanding that the majority leader is anxious to bring up the NATO expansion legislation quite soon.
I just want to say, speaking for just this Senator, I certainly haven't concentrated on it. I look forward to reading the op-ed piece--I believe it was an op-ed piece--that Senator Baker and others worked on.
All I can say is, I am grateful for the comments that the Senator from Idaho made, because it is wise for all of us--I personally haven't made up my mind on this. I am astonished that I haven't been lobbied, not that my vote is a key vote on it, but on this matter, the former Senator from New Hampshire came by to see me. He is very concerned. I am speaking of Senator Humphrey, a former Senator from New Hampshire. He is very concerned about the expansion of NATO. I think he presented some good arguments on it. Perhaps he has also spoken with the Senator from Idaho.
Again, I thank the Senator for his thoughts.
Mr. CRAIG. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. CHAFEE. I certainly will.
Mr. CRAIG. I thank the chairman for those comments. One of the measurements I always use on issues of this gravity and importance, and especially if I do not know a great deal about them, is when there are men and women on both sides of the issue whom I respect, it demands that I begin to review it in great detail. That is what I am hearing from the Senator, that when you have the likes of Howard Baker, and a former Secretary of State, and you have Sam Nunn and a good many others on the other side of the issue who are certainly knowledgeable, I think it is time for the Senate to focus and for our colleagues to begin to try to deal with this issue, and that is why I am here. I thank the Senator for his comments.
Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Frist). Without objection, it is so ordered.
END