NATO: At 50, It's Time to Quit (Page 2)

Thus, in 1990 Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs James Dobbins--now ambassador and one of Madeleine Albright's closest advisers--explained America's post-cold war role in Europe. Testifying before Congress, Dobbins argued that "we need NATO now for the same reasons NATO was created." The danger, he asserted, was that without the "glue" of US leadership in NATO, Western Europeans would revert to their bad ways, that is, "re-nationalizing" their armed forces, playing the "old geopolitical game," and "shifting alliances." According to Dobbins, without the United States acting as the stabilizer, jockeying among the states of Western Europe would "undermine political and economic structures like the EC" and even lead to a resumption of "historic conflicts" like the two world wars. President Clinton has maintained NATO's central role, asserting that since the late forties the US-led alliance has prevented "a return to local rivalries" in Western Europe. More important, this thinking has impelled NATO's two most dangerous and controversial post-cold war actions: its eastward expansion and its interventions in the Balkans.

The argument that NATO's security umbrella must be expanded to Eastern (and now southeastern) Europe is merely an extension of the argument that the United States must provide "adult supervision" by leading in European security affairs. In the view of the proponents of NATO enlargement, if a US-dominated NATO demonstrates that it cannot or will not address the new security problems in post-cold war Europe (for instance, the "spillover" of ethnic conflict, refugee flows into Western Europe and the possibility that these could ignite ultranationalist feelings in, for example, Germany), then the alliance will be rendered impotent. Should that happen, policy-makers fear, the post-cold war continent will lapse into the same old power politics that the alliance was supposed to suppress, shattering economic and political cooperation in Western Europe.

So, as Senator Richard Lugar--the leading Republican foreign policy spokesman--has argued, since European stability is now threatened by "those areas in the east and south where the seeds of future conflict in Europe lie," the US-led NATO must stabilize both halves of the continent. The important point is that the logic of US global strategy does indeed dictate that the US-led NATO move eastward. While NATO expansion is often described as a "new bargain," it is in fact only the latest investment, made necessary by changing geopolitical circumstances, in a pursuit begun long ago. Since the logic of US policy won't allow America's Western European "partners" to assume responsibility for stabilizing their own neighborhood, US responsibilities must multiply. As Lugar explained, "The only mechanism capable of this task is NATO; not the European Community, not CSCE, not the WEU.... if NATO does not deal with the security problems of its members, they will ultimately seek to deal with these problems either in new alliances or on their own." This thinking leads inevitably to dangerously open-ended commitments.

Military involvement in Kosovo--or someplace like it--was foreshadowed by NATO expansion. As Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott stated in arguing the case for an enlarged NATO, "The lesson of the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia is not to retire NATO in disgrace but to develop its ability to counter precisely those forces that have exploded in the Balkans."

And as NATO's war against Serbia demonstrates, there is no logical stopping point for US commitments in Europe according to the calculus driving America's European strategy. For example, now that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been admitted to NATO, instability arising in the regions to the east of the expanded alliance will threaten those states and ultimately Western Europe, or so it will inevitably be argued. The need to defend already extant security interests will be invoked to support subsequent enlargement, thus incurring new strategic responsibilities for the alliance and entangling it even more deeply in a geopolitically volatile region. After all, Lugar argues that the US-led NATO must "go out of area" because "there can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery." Of course, to follow this logic means that the ostensible threats to US security will be nearly endless.

American policy-makers believe that perpetuating US hegemony in Europe (and globally) will enhance US security and maintain stability on the continent. But this belief rests on a misreading of history's lessons and betrays a naïveté about the nature of international relations. This is especially apparent with respect to Washington's relations with Moscow, which have been badly damaged by NATO expansion and by the US-led intervention in Kosovo. American policy-makers can tell Moscow that it should not perceive US policies as a threat. But in a "unipolar" world--today's world in which the United States is the only great power--it should come as no surprise that Russia (and others) assign more weight to America's unchecked power than to its assurances that it doesn't constitute a threat to any other state.

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