“The Outlook for NATO Enlargement: The Debate in the U.S. Senate”
It is a pleasure and an honor once again to address the council. Last year in Washington, I spoke about our Bosnia policy. Tonight you have asked me to address a not-unrelated topic — the outlook for ratification by the United States Senate of an amendment to the Washington Treaty of 1949 to admit Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Before I examine this issue, however, I should note that earlier this fall the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held extremely detailed hearings on five key aspects of the enlargement question: the strategic rationale; costs, benefits, burdensharing, and military implications; the qualifications of the three candidate countries; the NATO-Russia relationship; and public views on enlargement. Among the witnesses were several council members who testified in favor of enlargement, and several who testified against it.
As a result of these hearings, I am more convinced than ever that if the three countries meet the rigid admission criteria, NATO enlargement will strengthen the alliance, further the cause of European security, and, therefore, will be squarely in the national interest of the United States.
Time does not permit me to go into detail about the reasons for this conclusion. I know that Mr. Danner is an opponent of enlargement. Perhaps he, or some of you during the discussion period, may wish to address individual issues.
Now, though, I’d like to turn to the main topic of this evening. The debate in the Senate has already been joined. In fact, I cannot think of another important foreign policy question in my twenty-five years in the Senate that has been publicly examined in such detail.
To spare you any suspense, I believe that the chances are very good that the Senate will ratify NATO enlargement early next march. I have heard about several head-counts that purport to put the definite votes for enlargement somewhere in the low-fifties– or roughly fifteen short of the necessary two-thirds super majority mandated fro treaty ratification by our Constitution.
Such exercises may have more to do with advocacy tactics than with science, and I take them with a grain of salt. Predicting the likely vote in the Foreign Relations Committee — to which the resolution of ratification will be referred — may be somewhat more reliable. There I fully expect an overwhelming vote for ratification on the order of somewhere between 16-2 and even 18-0.
With regard to the full Senate, I believe that momentum is on the side of the proponents of enlargement, but that I nonetheless expect a lively floor debate and a spirited fight.
In the coming weeks, of course, however, several things could go wrong to make ratification problematic. I will touch on those issues, although I doubt that they are insurmountable.
However, even if the Senate does ratify enlargement — as I believe it is highly like to do — I worry seriously about the continued American commitment to NATO in the coming years.
My reason for this conclusion revolves around several sides of the same issue: burden-sharing.
The first side relates less to sharing the costs of NATO enlargement than to continued NATO upgrading in the coming years, including the all-important issue of force-projection.
The second side, closely related to the first, concerns possible NATO missions outside of Europe and, in a broader sense, allied support for American out-of-area actions that clearly serve European security interests.
The third side involves sharing the military duties in Bosnia after June of next year.
And the fourth and final side of burden-sharing relates to the European Union’s ponderous pace on its own enlargement into central and Eastern Europe.
First the costs. In the coming days, NATO will make public its official cost estimate for enlargement. For weeks it has been clear that it will be substantially lower than the twenty-seven to thirty-five billion dollar estimate given by the Pentagon last february, of which nine to twelve billion involved the direct costs of enlargement.
First of all, we now know that the first round of enlargement will involve three countries, not the four envisioned in the Pentagon study. (Incidentally, I was the strongest proponent in the Senate of Slovenia’s candidacy, and I still believe that it is completely qualified for membership right now).
Second, NATO investigators have found the military infrastructure in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to be in better shape than anticipated.
Third, the official NATO study will probably factor out the ten billion dollars-worth of force-projection enhancements connected with the 1991 “strategic concept” that were included as enlargement costs by the Pentagon. More about that later.
The lowered total estimate will make an equitable sharing of enlargement costs more palatable to our West European allies. But many of my colleagues in the Senate have good memories, and not just the elephants– some donkeys too. President Chirac’s comment at the NATO Madrid Summit last July, which I was privileged to attend, that France would not pay an additional franc for enlargement did not exactly sit well on Capitol Hill. After all, no matter how individual American politicians felt about NATO enlargement, not a single one of my congressional colleagues or anyone in the executive branch threatened not to pay our fair share if enlargement were ratified.
I understand that the Europeans face a set of competing priorities. The eleven European NATO members who are also members of the European Union are currently engaged in painful budget cutting in order to meet the Maastricht convergence criteria for Economic and Monetary Union (E.M.U.) on January 1, 1999. But Americans must not be led to believe that Europeans will cut corners on NATO in order to fulfill European Union requirements.
While the likely reduced cost estimate, as I said, will ameliorate the immediate problem of financial burden-sharing, longer-term burden-sharing problems remain.
In order for NATO to remain a vibrant organization with the United States continuing to play a lead role, the non-U.S. members must also agree to pay for the power-projection capabilities mandated in the 1991 “strategic concept.” The flexibility afforded by these enhancements is central to NATO’s ability to carry out its expanded new mission — to defend its common ideals beyond the borders of alliance members, while it continues to carry out the core function of collective defense.
The Clinton Administration has publicly recognized that the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Netherlands are making strides in improving the deployability and sustainability of their forces, but neither the forces of those four allies, nor those of the rest of our European partners, are as yet fully deployable.
Unless that situation is fully remedied, the United States, with the only fully deployable and sustainable land and air forces in the alliance, would be cast in the permanent role of “the good gendarme of Europe” — a role that neither the American people, nor the Senate would accept.
It is true, as many of you know, that the alliance will begin a revision of the “strategic concept” next year. Here we may encounter another aspect of burden-sharing: the unwillingness of many of our European allies to consider using NATO for out-of-Europe operations, such as in the Middle East. This mind-set stems partly from differing perceptions of Arab-Israeli relations, but also from a fear of somehow enhancing the already preponderant American global power position.
It is true that in the immediate future, Middle East military actions are likely to be “coalitions of the willing” of the Desert Storm type, rather than formal NATO operations. But in the current confrontation with Iraq we see French behavior that hardly resembles that of an ally, to put it mildly.
It is difficult for me to see how Congress will continue indefinitely to appropriate more than one hundred billion dollars per year for NATO activities when many of our NATO partners manifestly do not share our view of security elsewhere — and even actively oppose our positions.
Thus, in that context, if in the revised “strategic concept” our European allies would insist on scaling back the power-projection doctrine — for budgetary or for ideological reasons — I would fear a serious erosion of support for NATO in the Congress in the future.
Above and beyond enlargement and force-projection, unless our European allies significantly upgrade their militaries, a “strategic disconnect” between a technologically superior United States military and technologically outdated Western European militaries will make it impossible for NATO to function.
My sentiments have been voiced by several of my colleagues, including some who do not share my passionate commitment to continued American involvement in Europe. They have also been voiced by many leading uniformed European military.
The third aspect of burden-sharing is a dark cloud looming on the immediate horizon of European-American relations: post-Sfor Bosnia.
As it now stands, the U.S. will pull out its ground forces after June 1998, and our European Nato allies will follow suit, repeating an “in together, out together” mantra. This despite a U.S. offer to make air, naval, communications, and intelligence assets available to a European-led follow-on force, with an American rapid reaction force on standby alert “over the horizon” in Hungary or Italy. In short, a C.J.T.F. (Combined Joint Task Force) — the solution officially proposed by the U.S. Senate in the fiscal year 1998 Defense Authorization Bill.
Many of my colleagues, mindful of the repeated calls by some European NATO members, led by France, for more European leadership in the alliance and a sturdier “European pillar” within NATO, see in the European refusal to maintain troops in Bosnia unless we stay on the ground, evidence of inequitable burden-sharing or — worse still — are having their doubts about the worth of NATO reinforced.
The French position on Bosnia is — if you pardon the pun — particularly galling, considering their insistence on European command of allied forces southern europe (”AFsouth”) in Naples.
As you know, AFsouth is the home of the U.S. sixth fleet. No matter how Paris tries to dress it up, Senators perceive this demand as a gratuitous poke in the eye. Aside from the fact that it’s a non-starter of an idea, it contributes to poisoning the atmosphere, particularly since some of the other European allies have at least formally supported the French.
The final matter concerns the enlargement of the European Union. From the early 1990’s the E.U. firmly proclaimed that NATO enlargement had to precede E.U. expansion (the accession nearly three years ago of Austria, Finland, and Sweden excepted). I am well aware of the complexity of melding the political, economic, and to some extent social systems of divergent countries into — in E.U. language — “an ever closer union.”
But many observers — and not a few of my colleagues — suspect that to some extent the E.U. has yielded to domestic pressure groups like farmers and has used NATO enlargement as a convenient way to postpone the admission of Central and Eastern European countries. To put it crudely, for now NATO should serve as a “poor man’s E.U.”
The situation was somewhat improved last july when the European commission recommended that the European Union begin accession negotiations with Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Estonia. Cyprus was already on the list.
I recognize that Poland’s large agricultural sector makes its early admission to the E.U.’s famed “Common Agricultural Policy” (C.A.P.) difficult. The Czech Republic’s and Hungary’s low industrial wages also may cause lengthy adjustments before they are admitted.
But Estonia and Slovenia — both very small countries with agricultural sectors that would not ruffle the C.A.P. — pose no such problems. And the rapid admission of Estonia to the European Union — a move against which Russia has no objections — would go a long way toward stabilizing the security situation in Northeastern Europe.
Slovenia, which already has a higher per capita G.D.P. than a few current E.U. members, would similarly fit in quite easily, just as it will fit into NATO in the next round.
The Senate debate on ratification will be lively, occasionally raw, but necessary. As I have already indicated, I think that in the end it will be very difficult for most of my colleagues to vote against admitting the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians.
But, I repeat, I also believe that unless we quickly come to a satisfactory burden-sharing understanding in all its facets with our European and Canadian allies, the future of NATO in the next century will be very much in doubt.
I hope these thoughts will provoke some questions from this distinguished audience, and I thank you for your attention.