When President Clinton and other leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization meet here in January, it is a fairly safe bet that Bosnians will be dying in large numbers because of cold, starvation and Serbian shelling.
Since NATO nations have shown no stomach for doing anything about that, it hardly seems a propitious time for a summit that is supposed to decide just what mission NATO is to perform, now that the Soviet threat has vanished.
The summit will have to say something about the war in former Yugoslavia. If it merely reaffirms its unwillingness to intervene, or issues more empty threats, NATO’s credibility may begin to look even more questionable than it does now.
“NATO will not do more nor less than the 16 sovereign nations that are its members call upon it to do,” a Western diplomat in Brussels said. “The problem is in the national capitals. The problems are with the driver, not with the car.”
The NATO driver always has been the United States, and the other alliance members will be looking to Clinton for ideas on NATO’s role in the post-Cold War world. But some Europeans fear that the U.S. administration, preoccupied abroad with Russia, Somalia and Asia, and more preoccupied still with domestic issues, is not focusing its attention on this question.
Last spring Clinton decided in principle to use NATO forces to strike against Serb artillery in Bosnia, then sent Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Europe to consult with the allies. Christopher drew a rebuff that some sources say was partly self-inflicted.
NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner was eager to see NATO involved in Bosnia and offered to call a meeting of the NATO Council so Christopher could present his case, these sources said. But Christopher declined the offer, confined himself to bilateral talks and found Europeans reluctant to get more heavily involved.
The sources said the U.S. should have used its influence to steer the Europeans toward the course it had charted rather than bowing to their hesitations.
“The Clinton administration has got to come to grips with the question of when and how you become engaged, not whether,” a diplomat said.
Simon Lun, deputy director of the North Atlantic Assembly, the NATO body representing parliamentarians, said this was a question not just for the U.S. but for all member nations.
“Until countries are willing to put their forces on the ground in substantial numbers and face their electorates, and their public opinions are willing to see soldiers lose their lives, then NATO will continue to have its hands tied behind its back,” he said.
The European setting after the Cold War is one marked by ethnic conflicts in Bosnia, parts of the former Soviet Union and other areas of Eastern Europe, such as Romania.
The Bosnian conflict remains the most dangerous. Some diplomats are convinced it will spill over into the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo. If that happens, a general Balkan war could be in the offing.
But today there is not only a lack of will by NATO members to get involved in the various ethnic conflicts; their ability to do so has been reduced as NATO military forces have been drastically slimmed down over the last three years.
Should a peace agreement be achieved in Bosnia, peacekeeping forces will be needed to make it work. But American participation in such a force is by no means certain, and without the U.S. no one believes that it can be put together. Other NATO members together cannot supply enough troops.
Despite such problems, few people who have been involved in establishing and maintaining collective security through NATO are willing to concede that the organization no longer may have a role.
“If there is an arsonist in the neighborhood, and he is captured, you don’t cancel your fire insurance,” one diplomat said. “There are other ways for fires to start, and brush fires spread rapidly in Europe.”
He said one of NATO’s continuing achievements was preventing “the renationalization of defense” in Europe. Through NATO’s integrated command structure, the members work together to perform what each nation otherwise would have to duplicate individually.
Thus Germany, which precipitated two world wars, finds itself embedded in a common military structure-an achievement that should not be forgotten, this diplomat argues.
He also noted that Greece and Turkey, two NATO members who long have been in conflict over Cyprus, at least are able to talk to one another in NATO and not in any other forum. “Only this has kept Cyprus from becoming a full-scale war between them,” he said.
Some European nations, led by France, have tried to promote the 10-nation West European Union as a European defense organization separate from NATO. But the Persian Gulf war and other events have demonstrated to them that collective security without the U.S. is not feasible.
“They have realized that only the U.S. has the strategic lift, communications and intelligence needed for large-scale operations,” one source said. “The resources are not there to recreate all this. If you are going to undertake operations, and put force together, some things have to be NATO based. There is no other option.”
France’s attempts to promote the West European Union caused hard feelings between Paris and Washington. But Lun, of the North Atlantic Assembly, said the war in former Yugoslavia helped convince the French that NATO was indispensable for operations in that kind of conflict.
The other principal issue that will come before the NATO summit is the desire of Eastern European nations liberated from communism to join the organization. The U.S., with support from its allies, already has in effect rejected that, proposing instead a vague “Partnership for Peace” that involves the Eastern Europeans in greater military cooperation with NATO while remaining outside it.
NATO’s reluctance to expand has been widely explained as due to its desire not to offend Russia and to its unwillingness to commit itself to aid any Eastern European nation that is attacked.
But NATO was concerned over the degree of civilian control of the military in Eastern Europe and over the fact that Eastern military leaders are not accustomed to an approach that is basically defensive in nature.
Before these nations can join NATO, diplomats said, they will need to bring their military forces up to NATO standards, achieve the ability to operate in conjunction with existing NATO forces and adopt NATO doctrines.
“We can’t define what it takes to be eligible, but we will know it when we see it,” one diplomat said.
Lun called the Partnership for Peace concept “pretty incoherent,” and said it merely would intensify a level of military cooperation that already is under way.
“It won’t keep the East Europeans happy,” he said. But he said they might be relatively satisfied with a statement from the summit that holds out the promise of membership, even if that is not likely to be achieved for many years to come.
