Time for New Tools

It is a great tragedy that the United States did not seize upon the opportunity opened by the collapse of the Soviet Union to explore new models for European security. President Clinton's determination to expand a U.S.-dominated military alliance up to the very boundaries of Russia is guaranteed to provoke the worst kind of Russian nationalism and, over the long run, create precisely those military tensions we are most interested in preventing.

While the Soviet Union was totalitarian in 1945, brutally repressive, and ruthless in installing puppet regimes in Eastern Europe, the Soviets never possessed military superiority over the West. Only late in the Cold War, long after NATO and the Warsaw Pact had been established, did the Soviets come close to achieving military parity, when its missiles might have been able to do to us what the U.S. Air Force had been able to do to the Soviets from the beginning-wipe out the cities in the heartland.

What the Soviet Union represented was more a political threat than a military one, as it positioned itself as the leader of world revolutionary forces. (This was the position laid out by George Kennan, who, as the Cold War went on, became increasingly critical of the Western obsession with the military aspect of the struggle. Today Kennan is a leading voice in opposing Clinton's policy of expanding NATO.) The West, not able or willing to deal with the political aspects of the situation, found it much easier to define the problem as a military one, and proceeded to do so.

THERE ARE FOUR REASONS that can be advanced for the expansion of NATO. First, and this has been talked about openly in Europe but hardly at all in the U.S. media, the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic will play well with ethnic voters in the United States.

Second, the nations that are coming in will have to be refitted with new military equipment, at a cost of many billions of dollars. This will be money in the pockets of the U.S. military industry. It doesn't matter that Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary have vast unmet social needs where the money would be better spent-they want to come into NATO and are willing to buy those weapons, even if Washington has to loan them the money to make this possible.

Third, if you've lived in Eastern Europe, and suffered under either the Nazi or Soviet occupations, you might also think of NATO as a shield. The reality of small nations next to large and powerful ones is that either they learn the skills of diplomacy (Sweden, Switzerland, Finland), or they make an alliance with a nation they hope can offer protection. For the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, NATO seems to offer a protection that can last well into the next century. But rather than providing protection, the expansion of NATO encourages Russian nationalism, which means the expansion of NATO will trigger instability.

It is, one has to be fair, much easier for an outsider from the safe distance of New York to say this (and to see it) than for someone in Prague or Warsaw to understand it. Russia has been, for much of this century, a brutal bully to these nations and people can't be blamed for wanting security.

Fourth, we are told NATO was needed to resolve the Bosnian crisis and this shows the value of NATO in maintaining stability in Europe. Unhappily, the Bosnian crisis has not been resolved: Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia are all more hostile to each other than they were before the conflict started-all the NATO occupation has done is keep a lid on. Unless the defenders of NATO are willing to argue for a permanent military occupation, we will see, once the NATO forces withdraw, that the military was not a solution.

Michael Mandelbaum, professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, referred to the expansion of NATO as being "a bridge to the 19th century." If foreign policy is left to presidents, we shall get what we are getting now-a foreign policy of expediency, designed to protect short-term U.S. business and political interests. But if what we want is a foreign policy that is a bridge to the 21st century, then we need to think about frameworks of mutual security where our national interests are protected by lowering the level of weapons, and where Europe is able to feel secure because of such mutual disarmament.

So long as the United States remains, militarily, vastly stronger than any possible combination of "enemies," there is a temptation to use the military. "If your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails." If we want a world where security for all is achieved by mutual disarmament and the creation of a sense of international community as opposed to domination by military powers, then it is time to look for new tools.

DAVID McREYNOLDS has been a member of the staff of War Resisters League in New York City since 1960.