The administration’s plan is not newly minted; it has its roots in two strands of policy identified by the Bush administration as the cold war came to an end. The first was Bush’s “Don’t Gloat” rule, the premise that nothing would more endanger world peace than for the West to isolate Russia and rub its nose in its own defeat. The second element can be called the “Big Brother” policy, the perception that America has a special responsibility for the wellbeing of the new democracies in Eastern and Central Europe. Ever since the revolutions of 1989, the leaders of these democracies have been trooping to Washington, often encouraged by domestic lobbies of hyphenated-Americans, to ask for a guarantee of their new freedom.
These strands came together in last week’s proposals, to which Bill Clinton assented the night before Christopher left for Europe, and which he will advance at a special NATO summit in January. The plan is wonderfully Clintonian; everybody gets a prize. The centerpiece is a new attitude to extending NATO to the East, a matter with which the administration has been grappling since the summer. Squashed uneasily between Russia and the smug democracies of Western Europe, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary all want to join NATO.
One school of thought in the administration, led by Lynn Davis, under secretary of state for international-security affairs, pressed what one European diplomat calls a “maximalist” approach. This would have held out the promise of admission to the NATO club for those countries. The maximalist position was consistent with the Big Brother rule. But it had two drawbacks. First, the Pentagon brass didn’t like it; they are hugely proud of NATO, a multinational military alliance that actually works. They feared that to bring into NATO East European armies, with their distinct traditions and weaponry, would dilute the alliance’s capabilities. Second, maximalism risked breaking the Don’t Gloat rule; it could have been construed by the Russians as “neo-containment.”
True, on a trip to Warsaw in August, Boris Yeltsin appeared to bless Poland’s application for NATO membership. But the Russians–and not just prickly Russian generals–soon “clarified” their position. When Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, visited America in September, he made plain to the administration his concern that NATO enlargement would be destabilizing. Russia, says one State Department official, has warned the West: “Do not discriminate against us; do not leave us out of the new arrangements.”
Within the administration, the man charged with playing the Don’t Gloat card is Strobe Talbott, ambassador at large to the countries of the former Soviet Union. The eventual American proposal bears his stamp. All members of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council–which includes NATO countries and the members of the old Warsaw Pact–will be able to plan and train together for peacekeeping and crisis management. Additionally, the Americans have offered the prospect of eventual membership of NATO–date as uncertain as possible–to any of those countries.
The upshot is that Don’t Gloat trumped Big Brother, and the proof came in Yeltsin’s reaction to the plan when Christopher presented it to him in a dacha outside Moscow. On hearing the news, according to a senior American official traveling with the secretary of state, Yeltsin said, “Terrific.” The Russians are also pleased with the news that Clinton will pay them a visit in January; that should help Yeltsin supporters in December’s parliamentary elections.
The Central European states are less than delighted with this handiwork. They have not got what they most wanted–the coverage of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which makes an attack on one signatory tantamount to an attack on all. But in truth, they were never going to get it. In the present domestic climate, Congress would never contemplate sending troops to defend borders in Eastern Europe.
But a puzzle remains. Why should military security be the most pressing concern of the new democracies in Europe? And the answer is: it isn’t. The first stop on Christopher’s trip was Budapest. As Hungary takes to capitalism like a duck to water, what it really needs is not a better-trained army but the ability to sell its goods in the rich countries of the European Community. So beneath the blather, the real story is this. What Eastern Europe needs from the West is better markets for its butter; what it has been offered is better marksmanship for its guns.
