An interesting article from IBD :
NATO AT 50: BIRTHDAY OR FUNERAL? Alliance Struggles With 'War By Committee'
Investor's Business Daily
Monday, April 26, 1999 Author: Brian Mitchell
Investor's Business Daily
It was supposed to be a birthday party, but it looked more like a wake - somber faces, unspoken doubts, predictable praise and brave words about carrying on in difficult circumstances.
NATO's war with Yugoslavia cast a pall over its 50th anniversary summit in Washington, D.C., which started Friday. The alliance won the Cold War, but even many supporters think it has stumbled in the Balkans.
The air campaign has fueled criticism that NATO lacks clear purpose. It has also raised doubts about U.S. leadership and involvement.
''From the standpoint of American interests, NATO is not merely irrelevant, it's dangerous,'' said Ted Carpenter, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.
''It's now become a mechanism to get us entangled in a variety of obscure, murky disputes that have little or nothing to do with our own security interests,'' he said.
Bruce Jackson disagrees. Jackson is president of the U.S. Committee on NATO, a bipartisan group formed in 1996 from members of both the 1996 Clinton/Gore and Dole/Kemp campaigns.
Jackson describes NATO as the ''military expression of a community of shared values.''
''People say our national interests aren't at stake (in Kosovo). Yes, but our values are at stake, which is even more important, and from that you can derive that our interests are at stake,'' Jackson said.
Critics charge that the confusion of values with interests is the source of NATO's troubles. Values, unlike interests, are not limited by geography.
They say casting NATO as the champion of Western values has made it a meddlesome giant, poised to interfere in the internal affairs of nonmember countries within its reach.
That's a far cry from NATO's original mission as a mutual defense pact.
NATO was founded in 1949 to ''keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down,'' in the words of its first secretary-general, British Gen. Hastings Ismay.
After the ravages of World War II, Western Europe was ill-prepared to fend off a Soviet assault. Many countries also worried about the recovering Germany.
Europe wanted the U.S. involved in NATO to counterbalance Soviet power and provide a stable environment for economic recovery, free of old continental rivalries.
NATO was created as a temporary response to a tense situation. Dwight Eisenhower, then Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, even remarked, ''If 10 years from now American troops are still in Europe, this will have been a failure.''
Was Ike right?
''The goal wasn't to turn Europe into a permanent American protectorate. (NATO) was clearly designed to give (the Europeans) breathing space to get back on their feet,'' said Christopher Layne, visiting scholar at the University of Southern California's Center for International Studies.
Before long, though, U.S. interests in the alliance expanded beyond the fear of a Soviet invasion. The U.S. feared that Europe, on its own, would be intimidated - or ''Finlandized'' - by the Soviet Union, claiming its independence, but in fact fearful of crossing the Soviets.
The U.S. would then be left alone to fight world communism.
NATO kept Western Europe active in the Cold War, long after the fear of Soviet invasion faded. NATO also helped maintain American dominance in world affairs, especially since the Cold War ended.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. cut its troops in Europe by more than half and at first sought closer ties with Russia. Later, the Clinton administration shifted the focus from partnering with Russia to expanding NATO.
''Russia wasn't showing signs of stabilizing,'' said George Grayson, professor of government at the College of William & Mary and author of ''Strange Bedfellows: NATO Marches East,'' an account of NATO's post-Cold War expansion (University Press of America, 1999).
Expanding NATO wasn't popular in the State Department or the Pentagon, which feared that expanding NATO would antagonize Russia.
''The Pentagon was extremely opposed to expanding NATO,'' Grayson said. But it was overruled by the White House.
Expanding NATO fit the prevailing view in the Clinton administration that as the only remaining superpower, the U.S. owed the ''international community'' its leadership. By expanding NATO membership, the administration also greatly expanded its mission.
The original NATO treaty provided for the use of military force only in the event of an ''armed attack'' upon a NATO member ''to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.''
Last year's Senate resolution on NATO expansion approved ''other missions when there is a clear consensus among its members that there is a threat to the security and interests of NATO members.''
The collective defense of NATO members remained only as a ''core purpose.''
A Senate staffer said the language changing NATO's purpose went ''virtually unnoticed'' in the debate over membership.
''The purpose debate followed the membership debate,'' said Jackson, whose U.S. Committee on NATO was formed to lobby for expansion. ''There is probably a burden-sharing debate that is still to come,'' he added.
Currently the U.S. supplies NATO with most of its military might, including more than 70% of the aircraft engaged in the Yugoslav campaign. Yet the combined economies of NATO's European members exceed that of the U.S.
Jackson likens NATO's involvement in Kosovo to the United Nations' involvement in the Korean War. He expects the war to forge a consensus on NATO's role in the world.
But many NATO backers fear the war is a terrible mistake.
''The war in Kosovo will either be NATO's salvation or its ruination,'' said Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. ''I was against starting it, but once we've started it, we've got to go and win it. NATO will be sunk if it loses.''
Grayson, who supported NATO expansion, believes that even victory could doom the alliance. As the costs of the war mount, support for both the war and the alliance will likely dwindle, he says.
''Sending ground forces in would spell the end of NATO,'' he said.
The Clinton administration gets most of the blame for the war.
''These people have blundered into a war,'' Layne said. ''They had no idea what they were doing. They very cynically lie, frankly, about the war's origins and their expectations of how this policy will unfold to cover up what are some really gross strategic and political miscalculations.''
Before NATO launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia, the ''agreement'' U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered the Serbs at Rambouillet, France, included a little-noticed provision granting NATO forces ''free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).''
What country would agree to that without a fight?
Grayson blames Albright for NATO's predicament.
''She sees things through the prism of the allies failing to stand up to Hitler,'' he said. ''But Serbia simply isn't Germany in 1938.''
In 1938, the Europeans tried to appease Hitler at Munich by giving him part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. Grayson believes Albright's Czech heritage influenced her thinking.
Carpenter of the Cato Institute believes the fault is more general and is shared by many internationalists, who have adopted the crusading views championed by President Wilson at the time of World War I.
They tend ''to portray every struggle in moralistic terms and to demonize one's opponents,'' Carpenter said. ''It leads to serious trouble in international affairs because it makes negotiation almost impossible.''
Weak U.S. leadership may lead Europe to eventually sour on NATO. For example, the French have long resented what they consider U.S. arrogance. The late French President Charles de Gaulle once said, ''America's will to power is cloaked behind a mask of idealism.''
But if not the U.S., who will lead NATO? The Europeans don't know, and that, too, may doom it.
''If we have an alliance, we have to have an alliance leader,'' said John Bolton, assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs in the Bush administration. ''The way NATO has taken to war by committee just doesn't work.'' |
