This week the United States Senate, which counts among its major accomplishments this year renaming Washington National Airport for former President Reagan and officially labeling Saddam Hussein a war criminal, takes up the matter of enlarging the 20th Century’s most successful military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The Senate just spent two weeks arguing over how to slice up the pork in the $214 billion highway and mass transit bill. It will, if plans hold, spend only a few days on moving the NATO shield hundreds of miles eastward to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
The reason is simple. As Sen. Connie Mack of Florida, the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, told me while trying to herd reluctant senators into a closed-door discussion of the NATO issue last week, “No one is interested in this at home,” so few of his colleagues think it worth much of their time.
It is a cliche to observe that since the Cold War ended, foreign policy has dropped to the bottom of voters’ concerns. But, as two of the veteran senators who question the wisdom of NATO’s expansion, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Republican John Warner of Virginia, remarked in separate interviews, serious consideration of treaties and military alliances once was considered what the Senate was for.
No longer. President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, has pressed Majority Leader Trent Lott to get the NATO deal done before Clinton leaves Sunday on a trip to Africa. When Warner and others said the matter should be delayed until the Senate has time for a full-scale debate, Lott refused. He pointed out that a Senate delegation had joined Clinton at NATO summits in Paris and Madrid last year (no sacrifice being too great for our solons) and that there had been extensive committee hearings.
Wrapping the three former Soviet satellites in the warm embrace of NATO is an appealing notion to many senators, notwithstanding the acknowledgement by advocates that the Czech Republic and Hungary have a long way to go to bring their military forces up to NATO standards. As the date for ratification has approached, successive estimates of the costs to NATO have been shrinking magically, but the latest NATO estimate of $1.5 billion over the next decade is barely credible.
The administration, in the person of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, has steadfastly refused to say what happens next if NATO starts moving eastward toward the border of Russia. Moynihan points out that if the Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, which are panting for membership, are brought in, the United States and other signatories will have a solemn obligation to defend territory farther east than the western-most border of Russia.
Moynihan and Warner are far from alone in raising alarms about the effect of NATO enlargement on U.S.-Russian relations. The Duma, Russia’s parliament, on Jan. 23 passed a resolution calling NATO expansion the biggest threat to Russia since the end of World War II. The Duma has blocked ratification of the START II nuclear arms agreement signed in 1993 and approved by the Senate two years ago.
George Kennan, the elder statesman who half a century ago devised the fundamental strategy for “containment” of the Soviet Union, has called the enlargement of NATO a classic policy blunder. Former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, until his retirement last year the Democrats’ and the Senate’s leading military authority, told me, “Russian cooperation in avoiding proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is our most important national security objective, and this (NATO expansion) makes them more suspicious and less cooperative. . . . The administration’s answers to this and other serious questions are what I consider to be platitudes.”
To the extent this momentous step has been debated at all, it has taken place outside the hearing of the American people. Too bad our busy Senate can’t find time before it votes to let the public in on the argument.
