NATO

Exactly. To expand NATO is to advance the cause of freedom and to strengthen the West — to increase its reach, to lock in its gains, to deepen its influence. The enlargement of NATO to include the democracies of Eastern and Central Europe is the culmination of the events that began in 1989 with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. It is the logical follow-on to our long and successful struggle against Soviet communism.

Above all, it is the foundation for what can only be called an “American peace” in Europe. Europe without the United States simply doesn’t work. In the absence of American involvement and strong leadership, Europe is prone to division and bloodshed. This was true long before the Soviet Union imposed its occupation on Eastern Europe. Our departure from European affairs after World War I, when we looked to our own security between two oceans, was essential to Hitler’s rise and the ensuing world war. We did not make the same mistake in the late 1940s. Our leadership in Europe — indeed, our willingness to risk nuclear attack to deter Soviet aggression against our European allies — led to a victory over the Soviet Union that cost us not a single life in a European war.

The good news is that the sacrifices we will have to make to preserve the American peace in Europe are likely to be relatively small. The monetary price of incorporating new NATO members is expected to be less than a billion dollars a year. More considerable is the fact that we must be prepared to fight, if necessary, to defend our new allies. We will need both the political will and the military capability to make this commitment credible. But as the Second World War and the Cold War taught, a demonstrated willingness to fight for Prague, for Warsaw, or for Budapest is the best guarantee against our ever having to do so.

Even so, a number of influential Americans are mounting an effort to ensure that we squander this historic opportunity to extend the zone of peace and democracy.

The forces aligning to defeat NATO’s enlargement in the Senate next year are a motley crew. There are a few nationalist and isolationist politicians, like Patrick Buchanan, who still believe, as their forebears did in the 1930s, not just in “America First” but in “America Alone.” Then there are lots of foreign-policy intellectuals, mostly doves from the ’70s and ’80s. They don’t like military alliances, they don’t like U.S. military commitments, and they don’t like U.S. leadership, not to say preeminence, in the world.

In a recent letter to President Clinton, many of these high-toned opponents try to rally the American people against NATO enlargement. They warn of the ” high cost” of the new policy — as if a few hundred million dollars a year is too high a price for peace in Europe. They oppose extending American commitments to countries with border disputes or potential ethnic problems, as if it were better to ignore these problems than to defuse them early. And they complain that the enlargement of NATO will somehow “degrade its ability to carry out its primary mission.” Missing from their letter is any explanation of what that “primary mission” is. Perhaps they don’t know. For the rest of us, it is pretty clear that NATO’s primary mission is to keep the peace in Europe. That is better accomplished by bringing new members in than by leaving them in a geopolitical no man’s land.

There have been legitimate cautions about NATO enlargement — above all, that it could have inflamed nationalist passions in Russia, weakened the fragile democracy there, and created a new line of confrontation in Europe. We have shared these concerns. Unlike some proponents of NATO expansion, we are not Russophobes. Although the enlargement of NATO is a prudent hedge against any resurgence of Russian imperialism, there is little evidence of such a resurgence today. The new democratic Russia should be a friend and partner of the United States. Bolstering Russian democracy is crucial to preserving the American peace in Europe.

Happily, there is no real sign of a new nationalism or irredentism in Russia. Polls show that the Russian people are generally unconcerned about NATO. Meanwhile, Russia’s democracy seems, if anything, to be taking firmer hold. Even in the face of impending NATO expansion, Boris Yeltsin has fired hardliners and appointed moderate reformers and committed democrats like Boris Nemtsov to top positions in the government. In recent months, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have reached amicable agreement on the difficult issue of the Black Sea fleet and the ownership of naval bases in the Crimea.

The Clinton administration has worked closely with Russia throughout the process of enlargement. Indeed, the cooperative agreements reached between NATO and Russia in recent months would probably never have come about if NATO had not taken in new members. Most Russians understand that NATO enlargement is not directed against Moscow. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than an extension of American leadership in Europe in the interests of stability and democracy — interests that a democratic Russia should share.

In the coming months, critics of NATO enlargement will come up with a dizzying array of objections to the policy. They will try to make the issue appear maddeningly complex and hope that the American people get lost in the fog. But when the time comes for the Senate to vote, the question will really be quite simple: Will the United States proudly shoulder its responsibilities in Europe, as it has for the past 50 years, or will it turn away and let the peace we have so painstakingly constructed be eroded? There is no third option. The liberal intellectuals and retired policymakers who are fighting NATO enlargement may believe that a Senate rejection of the new arrangement is consistent with a continued U.S. commitment to Europe. It isn’t.

Let us be clear: NATO expansion is our most consequential foreign-policy decision since the Gulf War. If the Senate votes to refuse to admit new democracies to our alliance, that choice will be understood, both in the United States and in the world, as a victory for Buchananism. And rightly so. For the rejection of NATO enlargement would set the stage for a new era of American isolationism.

We close with a word to our fellow supporters of NATO enlargement, including the Clinton administration.

American leadership in Europe and in the world is not a divisible commodity. We cannot expect to help protect peace, stability, and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, for instance, if at the same time we abdicate our leadership in Bosnia. Some pro-NATO senators have worried that next year’s vote on enlargement will likely come at about the same time as a vote on maintaining the American presence in the Balkans. But we welcome this twin test of our willingness to preserve the American peace. For if we decide next summer to wash our hands of Bosnia and allow the brutal war to resume, a vote to enlarge NATO will be hollow.

Similarly, both the Clinton administration and the Republican-controlled Congress seem to believe that we can expand our commitments abroad while eroding our military capacity to honor them. Thus, as NATO expands over the next five years, our defense budget, locked in by the recent budget deal, will decline in real dollars. We will have fewer divisions, fewer aircraft and ships, and outdated weaponry — all to meet obligations that are greater than ever before. This mismatch of means and ends cannot last.

Next year, therefore, the Senate should vote decisively to approve NATO enlargement. The president and Congress should agree to keep U.S. troops in Bosnia beyond the June 1998 “deadline” if they are needed to preserve the peace there. And the Republican-led Congress should act to reverse the steep and dangerous decline of our military strength.

The enlargement of NATO, in short, is only one piece in an overall strategy of bolstering and extending America’s global leadership. We can help secure an increasingly peaceful and democratic Europe well into the next century. This is in Europe’s interest, America’s, and the world’s. The opportunity is ours. We should gladly seize it.