----- Original Message ----- From: Miroslav Antic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: BALKAN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; SIEM NEWS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: NATO <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 10:36 PM Subject: Debate Over an Expanded NATO Is Beginning to Come Into Focus [STOPNATO.ORG.UK] STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Build a marketing database and send targeted HTML and text e-mail newsletters to your customers with List Builder. http://www.listbuilder.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Wall Street Journal February 21, 2001 [for personal use only] Debate Over an Expanded NATO Is Beginning to Come Into Focus By MATTHEW KAMINSKI Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL BRUSSELS -- The controversial big-ticket items on the trans-Atlantic agenda are America's proposed missile-defense shield and Europe's new military force, but the sleeper is who will be next to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The debate over how NATO will grow is just starting to come into focus, 21 months before the alliance tackles the issue at a summit in Prague. An expanded NATO was high on the agenda during a Tuesday meeting in Moscow between George Robertson, the alliance's secretary-general, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reiterated his opposition to the inclusion of any more former Soviet-bloc nations. Mr. Putin also voiced concerns about the U.S. aim to build a missile-defense system and proposed that Russia and other European nations create a system of their own. NATO nations haven't yet made a commitment to which new members they would welcome, or when. But positions are emerging, pitting proponents of a big-bang enlargement in Washington -- where the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is embracing an open-door policy -- against reluctant European powers wary of Russia's response to a move further eastward by NATO. While lacking the historic symbolism of NATO's acceptance of its first former Warsaw Pact members in the mid-1990s, the alliance's next expansion will change the European security environment. For starters, it may clarify the European Union's role in military matters. It will certainly set the tone for future relations with Russia. And the decision-making process will likely test trans-Atlantic ties at a time when the U.S. and the EU aren't seeing eye-to-eye on Washington's commitment to building a national missile-defense shield or on Brussels' commitment to a building a European defense force. The nine NATO aspirants are quite different from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, the former Warsaw Pact nations now among the alliance's 19 members. Except for Romania and Bulgaria, the candidates are all small, with populations of five million or less. None has a vocal immigrant lobby in the U.S., and none would bring much military heft or size to the party. Slovenia and Slovakia, snubbed last time, are the least-contentious choices. But three others are controversial: the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose democratic credentials and economic reforms make each a virtual shoo-in for membership in the EU, but whose NATO aspirations send shivers down Russia's spine. As Mr. Putin told Mr. Robertson, the "expansion of the defensive union to the borders of Russia cannot be explained by anything else than a threat to Russia." Germany, France and the U.K. -- the leading European members of NATO -- believe that the price of the Baltic states' membership would be too high in terms of the likely setback in relations with Russia, according to European officials familiar with the thinking of those governments. But Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have boosters in Denmark, Poland and, most important, in the U.S., which European leaders fully expect to be the leading voice in promoting the trio's applications. "This time, if the U.S. said give it a pass, nothing would happen," says Robert Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO. In his confirmation hearings last month, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, while not committing to any firm policy, said the U.S. "should not fear that Russia will object" to NATO's welcoming the trio, adding that he supports enlargement -- in principal -- "because it is in our interest." In a recent speech, Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican and chairman of the U.S. Senate foreign-relations committee, explicitly backed inviting all three Baltic republics next year. Citing those comments, the supporters of enlargement in Washington sense that a robust approach may be in the cards from the new Bush administration. "I think there'll be a push here for a bigger round -- including at least one Balt, probably Lithuania," says Jeff Gedmin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who also serves on the U.S. Committee for NATO. The proponents of a more ambitious NATO in the U.S. and in some European quarters argue that the alliance's enlargement plans complement the EU's. Bruce Jackson, president of the U.S. Committee on NATO, a Washington group that fought for the first eastward expansion, adds that the alliance is still needed in order to finish the job of reunifying Europe. "Without NATO the EU becomes a lot harder to pull off," he says. Many Europeans don't draw the connection between the two Brussels-based institutions so explicitly. Paris and Berlin spend most of their time thinking about how to build up the EU. France in particular wants the EU to be able to stand apart from the U.S., the dominant player in NATO. "The more NATO enlarges, the more it signals the centrality of NATO" in European security, says Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute for International Relations. Some Europeans are privately raising a possible trade-off: admit Romania and Bulgaria, which won't be ready for the EU for many years, to NATO to stabilize the Balkans, and offer the Baltics quick EU membership with an implicit security guarantee. This idea suggests the EU feels confident about offering itself as a worthy alternative to NATO. The EU recently approved plans to create by 2003 a rapid-reaction force of 60,000 troops that can act apart from the alliance. In comments directed specifically at the Baltic countries, Friedrich Merz, the chairman of the opposition Christian Democrats in the German Bundestag, told the annual Wehrkunde defense conference in Munich earlier this month that the EU "has not only a political and economic dimension, but also a security dimension." The message wasn't lost on the Baltic officials in the room, but for now they're not buying it. Estonia's foreign minister, Toomas Ilves, challenged the German legislator: "How do you expect the EU to provide security for the Baltic states when it's clearly not enough to provide security for the rest of Europe?" In the end, the enlargement issue could yet wind up entangled with missile defense. U.S. plans to develop a system to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles already make most European countries nervous, in part because of Russian objections. If the missile issue isn't resolved when NATO officially takes up enlargement, it could undermine any U.S. push for the Baltic states by presenting Russia with a double-whammy. "We sometimes get the impression that the U.S. wants the Baltic states in NATO only to demonstrate they don't care much for the Russians," said Hans-Ulrich Klose, the chairman of the foreign-affairs committee in the German Bundestag and member of the ruling Social Democrats. "For us, this is our immediate neighborhood. We can't imagine a security order without including the Russians." Of course, the Baltics could always be turned away, for now, on the technical grounds of military preparedness, or lack of it. A senior NATO diplomat suggested this might be a face-saving way out for the alliance. Those countries spend little on defense as is, and built up their militaries from nothing on gaining independence in 1991, helped by donated hardware. On the other hand, every previous enlargement wound up being a purely political decision. Miroslav Antic, http://www.antic.org/SNN/ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
