BASIC PAPERS

November 1997 • NUMBER 23UK • ISSN 1353-0402

NATO Enlargement

Testimony before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, it is an honor to testify before you today on the Council’s behalf and to submit written testimony for the record.

Consideration of the desirability of expanding NATO should begin with the security needs of Europe today. There is no conventional military threat to NATO or to Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, thousands of nuclear weapons could, despite President Clinton’s assurances, destroy this country in an hour. The risk today is of accident and human error.

We must reduce and eliminate Weapons of Mass Destruction and further reduce the likelihood of any conflict to the East and South, through the aggressive pursuit of arms control and non-proliferation measures. NATO enlargement is at best irrelevant to these policy requirements it appears to be slowing them down.

There has indeed been a revolution in military, indeed human, affairs brought about by the invention of nuclear weapons. For the first time humanity has the power of self-destruction. This necessitates a change in strategy which has yet to take hold amongst the great powers. This is not unusual, revolutions in thought do not happen quickly. In this case though the challenge to the human mind may be too great. The mass use of violence in war may remain attractive until it is too late. The future can only lie in global cooperation accompanying the global market.

Even before the invention of nuclear arms the leaders and peoples who fought two world wars realized that a system of military alliances always produces war and that these are increasingly destructive. As a result we had first the League of Nations and now the United Nations. The first failed and the second is faltering. This is happening now for the same reason as in the 1920s; the great powers are returning to the belief that they can rely upon their own military power alone.

We would do well to recall the words of the Atlantic Charter of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who, in the desperate days of August 1941 declared that, "they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force." They further outlined the need for reductions in armaments leading to the creation of a system of general security. It is becoming commonplace to deride disarmament and arms control as ineffective and unverifiable. This is the worst form of defeatism. For if it is impossible to create effective disarmament measures then nuclear war will be inevitable.

Fortunately, there is a great tradition of disarmament to be pursued: Ronald Reagan‘s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s INF and START Treaties.

Not long ago the confrontation with the totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe made progress extremely difficult. Today for the first time in history there are no significant cross border conflicts in Europe.

According to NATO’s own assessments, the Russian Army barely exists and would take a generation to rebuild. NATO has conventional military supremacy against any combination of adversaries to the East and South. There is no significant modern defense industrial base we and our allies do not control. In this uniquely favorable setting, we can do no less than those who worked in far more difficult times.

Mr Chairman, there is a dangerous illusion at the heart of the pro-enlargement argument. NATO is said to offer a security guarantee. It does not. President Clinton made this clear in a letter to members of the Senate. President Clinton explained the commitment in Article V of the NATO Treaty this way: "Article V states that members will consider an attack against one to be an attack against all. It does not define what actions would constitute "an attack" or prejudge what alliance decisions might be made in such circumstances. Member states acting in accordance with established constitutional processes, are required to exercise individual and collective judgement over this question."

Contrast this case by case interpretation with Secretary Albright in Prague last July 17th. "Above all, it [NATO membership] means you will always be able to rely on us and we will always be able to rely on you…If there is a threat to the peace and security of this country, we will be bound by a solemn commitment to defeat it together. For this reason, we can be confident such a threat is far less likely to arise."

The weakness of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty has been long understood by officials in Europe. It is often contrasted with the clearer language of the West European Union which states; "If any of the High Contracting Parties should be the object of an armed attack in Europe,…the other High Contracting Parties will afford the Party so attacked all the military and other aid and assistance in their power.Article V WEU Treaty.

The confrontation with the Soviet Union ensured that no one, except the French, raised this matter in public. In any case, it was assumed that any war would rapidly become nuclear in which case documents would not be relevant.

Extending these commitments today is a very different matter. It is reckless of the Administration to talk of guarantees in Eastern Europe but of loopholes when talking to the Congress. The Hungarian people are soon to be asked to vote on whether they want a security guarantee from NATO. No one has shown them the small print.

Bosnia is a critical case. The US was and is reluctant to commit troops. We are lead to believe that this reluctance would not exist were Bosnia or any other country to be in NATO. Yet the answer given by President Clinton to Senator Hutchison indicates in the clearest possible way that the NATO Treaty does indeed contain an escape clause permitting another Munich or Sarajevo. We should recognize that there is not much difference between the commitments already given in PfP and the NATO Treaty itself.

Mr Chairman, all the arguments that one nation can put forward for inclusion in NATO can also be put forward by its neighbor, which produces a chain of commitments leading through Russia to the borders of China. The Administration is explicit that the door is open to all states in the Partnership for Peace.

If NATO enlargement continues, we are just embarking on expanding NATO across Eurasia. The Administration is creating a massive new unfunded mandate. Former Secretaries Warren Christopher and William Perry believe that all nations within the Partnerships for Peace should be built up to the same military level as NATO members.

If the process of enlargement is halted, we will again draw a new dividing line in Europe. That is to say do we leave out Russia or do we leave out Poland?

The better and more modern approach would be to develop our political interest in a non-military institution. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has to operate on a budget of just $55 million for its work in mediation, arms control and elections. The creation of a greater pool of skilled personnel for these tasks is an international priority. The OSCE has some advantages for the US because it has the potential to involve it in European economic policy--a long standing and unfulfilled US goal. Certainly the OSCE is out of fashion, but this is because the US has shown little interest in it.

Mr. Chairman, there are additional negative consequences of the enlargement policy.

We have betrayed our promise to Russia and are needlessly recreating conflict. The diplomatic record has been made clear by those who negotiated the end of the Cold War. The Russians were given commitments by the United States during the negotiations on Germany that NATO would not expand. NATO with Mrs Thatcher’s leadership, issued the ‘Declaration of Turnberry", in which we offered Russia a "Europe whole and free." There is no intention now of treating Russia as an equal partner, even though its has embraced both democracy and the free market economy. For hundreds of years Russia has been one of the powers of Europe. Despite suffering under absolute monarchy and communism its people played a positive role in European history and helped save Europe from the tyrannies of Napoleon and Hitler. To exclude them now from decision making is a clear return on our part to sphere of influence politics. Russia certainly pursues policies we do not like but so too do other states with whom the United States has good relations such as Japan and France. This is no reason to refuse to treat either these countries or Russia as genuine partners.

NATO enlargement is likely to increase tensions and misunderstanding between those who join and those who are left out. The increased credit worthiness that membership of the Alliance brings will be more than offset by the drain on capital resources of increased military expenditures and the negative impact on excluded neighbors. The US is already diverting funds for economic assistance into military programs. The hundreds of millions of dollars which United States taxpayers are already devoting to improving the armaments of Eastern Europe would be far better spent in building the civil sector or in reducing the tax burden in the United States.

Military relations are now so dominant that threat and risk reduction strategies have been neglected. The Alliance has no proposals for further reducing armaments in Europe although vast quantities remain. The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty was an enormous achievement of the Reagan and Bush Administrations. We need to see a follow-on and more emphasis on preventing weapons proliferation. Much of the flow of illegal small arms onto world markets comes from Eastern Europe. NATO agreed at the Lisbon OSCE meeting to consider reductions in new types of weapons, which should include small arms and new technologies. It has failed to follow through. The alliance and the Partnerships for Peace should have an active program to destroy surplus weapons and shut down the factories supplying rogue nations and groups.

The enlargement of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group is nuclear proliferation. South Africa and other states have pointed out that the expansion of NATO will bring more countries to rely upon nuclear weapons, is in contradiction of the objective of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States rightly went to enormous effort to de-nuclearize Belarus and Ukraine. But now Belarus and Ukraine are to border a state whose officials will take part in NATO nuclear planning. This contradiction illustrates how misguided the enlargement policy is.

It common to say the train has left the station, we must go on. But this is exactly what was said at the outset of the First World War.

Testimony by Daniel T. Plesch, Director, British American Security Information Council, before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, November 5^th 1997, am Dirksen SOB R.419

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