Overhauling an Alliance

An excerpt from Opening NATO's Door, the new book by Ronald Asmus that gives an insider's view of the course of NATO enlargement from cockeyed scheme to major U.S. foreign policy initiative. by Ronald D. Asmus 14 May 2003 In the early 1990s, Ronald Asmus was one of the first to advocate that NATO enlargement "was the logical continuation of the policies that the U.S. had pursued throughout the postwar period, and that it was necessary not only to stabilize Central and Eastern Europe but to ensure that NATO remained relevant and survived," he writes in his new book, Opening NATO's Door (Columbia University Press). Few took him seriously at first: "On more than one occasion, I was taken aside to suggest that I tone down my views lest I damage my career prospects."

That was soon to change as Asmus became involved in the key negotiations that led to NATO's decision to extend invitations to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1997, the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and finally, the U.S. Senate's ratification of the enlargement treaty. During President Bill Clinton's second term, he served as a top aide to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott.

Coming into office in 1993 with a promise to work on domestic problems, Clinton, like other presidents before and since, soon found himself mired in foreign affairs. Bitter fighting in Bosnia was making a mess of the post-Cold War "New World Order" proclaimed by his predecessor, George Bush. Meanwhile, Central Europe's young democratic leaders were growing increasingly nervous about their giant, unpredictable neighbor to the east.

This excerpt from Opening NATO's Door is taken from the beginning of Book II, "The Debate Begins."


NATO enlargement was undoubtedly one of the farthest things from Bill Clinton’s mind as he was inaugurated President of the United States on January 20, 1993. The governor of the small southern state of Arkansas, he had been elected on an agenda of domestic renewal after the end of the Cold War. Throughout the Presidential campaign, Clinton had focused like a laser beam on U.S. domestic weaknesses. “Putting People First” was his campaign slogan. The campaign’s infamous battle cry, “It’s the economy stupid!” was, at least in part, a criticism of President George Bush’s neglect of domestic issues and his focus on international affairs. Having won the Cold War, America seemed to be looking inward and ready to retreat from its international commitments, including in Europe.

If Europe was not a top priority when President Clinton assumed office, it soon became one. By the end of the President's first year in power the issue of the continent’s future was front and center on the Administration’s agenda. Bloodshed in the Balkans, growing instability in Russia, and the clear desire of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to anchor themselves to the West forced the Administration to confront some tough questions: what was America’s post-Cold War vision of Europe and the trans-Atlantic relationship? Were the U.S. and its allies prepared to go to war to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia? Was Washington willing to extend security guarantees to stabilize Central and Eastern Europe? How could the Administration reconcile its desire to secure Central and Eastern Europe with supporting democratic reform in Russia? Perhaps most important, what was NATO’s purpose in a world where communism no longer existed and Russia was increasingly a partner and not an adversary?

These issues led to a far-reaching debate within the ranks of the Administration. Its outcome was a set of policy decisions that, over the President’s two terms in office, led to some of the most far-reaching changes in the Atlantic Alliance since its founding more than forty years earlier. Rather than scale back the U.S. commitment to and engagement in Europe, the Administration extended NATO’s umbrella over Central and Eastern Europe--initially to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland but with the perspective of eventually covering all countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea--and reached out to build a new cooperative relationship with Russia, the Alliance’s former adversary.

In parallel to opening NATO’s door to Central and Eastern Europe, Washington and its allies updated the Alliance’s mission to embrace the security of the continent as a whole along with the need to address new threats that could come from beyond member’s immediate borders. Initially created as an Alliance between North America and Western Europe to deter the Soviet Union, NATO was being transformed into an alliance committed to building an undivided, democratic and secure Europe and protecting its members from the new threats of the post-Cold Ear era. The process of enlarging NATO’s membership and missions culminated at the Alliance’s fiftieth anniversary summit in the spring of 1999. In March the first former Warsaw Pact countries--Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary--acceded to the Alliance. That same month, NATO launched its air campaign in Kosovo and, at the Washington summit, adopted a strategic concept that set a new strategic direction by pointing to the need for the Alliance to confront new threats beyond its borders. Alliance leaders set a simple benchmark for the future: NATO must be as effective in dealing with future threats as it was in meeting the Soviet threat during the Cold War.

Enlarging and modernizing NATO was not part of a preexisting grand design President Clinton and his national security team harbored when they entered office in 1993. Although the President had spoken of the need to update America’s key alliances during the campaign, few if any of Clinton’s top aides were focused on the issue or had a clear vision or strategy for NATO’s future, and the intellectual, political, and diplomatic path to these decisions were neither easy nor without controversy. Recasting NATO involved major, and at times dramatic, fights and negotiations with the Russians, our European allies, and within the U.S. where it produced a passionate debate over what the Alliance was for in the post-Cold War world. While it would take a number of years for the Administration’s policies to be fully developed, diplomatically implemented, and politically ratified by the U.S. Senate, the origins of those policies can be traced back to the debate that took place within the Administration during Clinton’s first year in office.

1. RUSSIA FIRST

During his Presidential campaign, Clinton had singled out two specific areas of President Bush’s European policy for criticism: Russia and Bosnia. Concerning Russia he had accused Bush of being too timid in supporting reform and squandering a historic opportunity. In office, the new President moved to turn that rhetoric into reality. “Upon his election, President Clinton decided that we should make an early, all-out effort to engage Russia’s reformers and support their efforts,” wrote Warren Christopher after he left the State Department. “Our assessment was that America’s national interest lay squarely in supporting the process of reform--and that this was the key payoff of the end of the Cold War.” Speaking in Chicago in mid-March 1993, Christopher described supporting Russia’s transition to democracy as the “greatest security challenge of our time.” If the great challenge after World War II had been integrating Germany into the West, he continued, the challenge facing the United States after the end of the Cold War was consolidating Russia’s democratic transition and its eventual integration into the Western community of nation states.

At a time when the President was devoting the majority of his time to domestic issues, Russia stood out as the Administration’s top foreign policy priority--and an area where Clinton was directly and personally involved. His first trip out of the country was to meet Yeltsin in Vancouver in April 1993. The trip’s goal, the President stated, was to establish a “strategic alliance” with Russian reformers. “Nothing could contribute more to global freedom, security and prosperity than the peaceful progression of Russia’s rebirth.” To back that up, the President fought--and won--an early battle on Capitol Hill to get a $1.6 billion package of assistance for the struggling Russian economy. At Vancouver, the two Presidents established the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission (GCC) to develop across-the-board American support for Russia’s democratic transformation. The scope and intensity of the effort were without precedent in U.S.-Russian relations.

The architect of the Administration’s Russia policy was Strobe Talbott, Ambassador-at-Large for the Newly Independent States (NIS). Clinton and Talbott were friends from their student days at Oxford where they shared a strong interest in Russia. Talbott had gone on to a successful journalist career with Time magazine, publishing several influential books on Russia and arms control issues. He had also lived in and traveled throughout Central and Eastern Europe. His first overseas assignment as a journalist was actually in the Balkans, an experience that he would draw on as the Administration wrestled with Bosnia and Kosovo in the years ahead. Both during the campaign and in the early months of the Administration, his expertise, zeal, and personal relationship with the President made him a driving force, making Russia the President’s top priority at a time when reform in Moscow seemed to hang in the balance.

On Russia, there was a strategy, an architect and, most importantly, a Presidential commitment. There was nothing similar when it came to Europe and NATO. Asked by Senator Joseph Lieberman in his confirmation hearings in January 1993 about his vision for NATO’s future, Representative Les Aspin, Clinton’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, candidly responded that this was “a very, very important and critical question for which I have no immediate answer.”

The European security issue where Clinton had staked out a clear public position was Bosnia. In the summer of 1992, Americans and Europeans woke up to the worst fighting in Europe in forty years. Horrors that most Europeans believed were gone forever returned as the world saw shocking film of emaciated prisoners in Bosnia looking through barbed wire fences--scenes reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps from World War II. An ugly new phrase entered the modern English political vernacular: ethnic cleansing. It was, in Richard Holbrooke’s words, “the greatest collective security failure of the West since the 1930s.”

During the campaign, Clinton had accused President Bush of not standing up to aggression in Bosnia and being too timid in defending democratic values. In office, the Administration had to turn those bold words into policy. The President asked his national security team to review all policy options, including those previously ruled out of bounds by his predecessor. But the Clinton team soon found itself beset by the same divisions that had paralyzed the Bush Administration. Bosnia was what Secretary Christopher called “the problem from hell.” The Administration was ambivalent about the diplomatic approach on the table, the Vance-Owen Plan, which it believed to be unenforceable and morally flawed. But it was unable to formulate a better alternative allies would support. Whereas Clinton’s neo-Wilsonian National Security Advisor Tony Lake argued for intervention, Secretary of Defense Aspin and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell--a Bush Administration holdover--wanted to keep the United States’ military role as limited as possible.

As the spring unfolded, the violence in Bosnia escalated and the pressure on the President to “do something” increased. More and more, White House meetings ranged beyond the specifics of Bosnia policy and spilled over into a broader debate about the use of force and the U.S. role in Europe and beyond. One high-ranking official noted at the time: “It was group therapy--an existential debate over what is the role of America, etc.” Powell was less charitable. These initial meetings, he subsequently wrote, “continued to meander like graduate-student bull sessions or the think tank seminars in which many of my new colleagues had spent the last twelve years while their party was out of power.”

On May 1, 1993, Clinton decided to support what his advisors had dubbed the “lift and strike” option--i.e., a plan to lift the arms embargo to allow the Bosnians to arm and defend themselves while using Western air power to deter the Serbs from trying to take military advantage of Bosnia’s vulnerabilities in the short-term. The President and his advisors knew that European allies strongly opposed this proposal, but hoped that the public outrage over recent Serbian massacres along with the Bosnian Serb rejection of the Vance-Owen mediating effort might permit Washington to sell a more aggressive policy. But the President was not yet prepared to put his full authority and that of the United States on the line. Instead, Christopher was asked to go to Europe to sound out the allies on the approach: “You’ve been a great lawyer and advocate all these years,” he told Christopher, “now you’ve really got your work cut out for you.”

Christopher’s trip to Europe was a failure. There were no takers among the allies who quickly sensed that the Administration’s support for its own initiative was half-hearted. Ray Seitz, U.S. Ambassador in London, described Christopher’s meeting with British Prime Minister John Major, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind:

"Christopher pulled out his papers, tapped them carefully into order and started to lay out the American proposal. His words had all the verve of a solicitor going over a conveyance deed. I watched the faces of the three ministers opposite me, trying to catch the little flickers of disbelief as the plan unfolded. … When the presentation was over, the British sat in silence. There was some clearing of throats and a few sideways glances. 'Well, ah, yes …' Major, Hurd and Rifkind each asked two or three what-if questions. There were long pauses. Christopher had no real answers. After a couple of sterile hours, the meeting adjourned. … The atmosphere was downbeat and awkward. I suggested to the Prime Minister that he take Christopher aside and tell him straight that, leaving apart the wisdom of the American plan, he couldn’t possibly deliver his skeptical cabinet to such a risky proposal. It was, in the jargon, a non-starter. This the Prime Minister proceeded to do."

Christopher returned from the trip, as one colleague put it, with “bullet holes all over him.” He reported that the only way to get the allies to agree with Washington’s preference was to use “the raw power approach.” Not even the most vocal supporters of intervention in the Administration favored that. U.S. policy now shifted from intervention to containment--the latter being the European preference. The trip’s failure would contribute to the impression that the President was not fully engaged on foreign policy issues, that the Administration did not have a coherent European policy and, worst of all, that it could be rolled and would back down if faced with strong opposition. In late May, an unnamed senior Administration official, soon identified as Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff, defended U.S. policy on Bosnia by stating that the U.S. was not inclined to get involved in every conflict in Europe, a fact America’s allies would have to get used to. Christopher immediately moved to counter the impression that the Administration was disengaging from Europe. But commentators were starting to question America’s staying power in Europe and NATO’s future. James Chace, author of a prominent biography of Dean Acheson and NATO’s origins, claimed in The New York Times that “the dominant fact of the Administration’s foreign policy so far is the collapse of the Western alliance."

The NATO enlargement issue first appeared on Bill Clinton’s radar screen in conjunction with the budding crisis over Bosnia and growing doubts about the Alliance’s future. When he attended the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington in late April 1993, the parallel between the Holocaust and the ethnic slaughter in Bosnia was on everyone’s mind. After the Second World War, a generation of Western leaders had said “Never again!” pledging that they would never again stand aside as a people was singled out for destruction on racial or religious grounds. At the dedication ceremony of the museum, Elie Wiesel turned to Clinton and said: “Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep remembering what I have seen. As a Jew, I am saying that we must do something to stop the killing in that country. Something, anything must be done to stop the bloodshed there. Mr. President, it will not stop unless we stop it.”

Many of the heads of state of Central and Eastern Europe were in town. The Holocaust had also taken place on their soil and they were there, too, to mark the opening of the museum. The Museum’s opening served as a potent reminder of Europe’s past demons and the dilemma of being smaller nations located between Germany and Russia. It only added to the sense of urgency these leaders felt in terms of anchoring their countries to the West. While the museum opening was a private event, many Central and East European leaders had asked to see the new American President. Few if any had established meaningful high-level contacts with the incoming Administration.

Over the course of the next two days the President met the leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary--Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Arpad Goncz respectively. It was their first and perhaps best chance to make their case on NATO enlargement. They had a common view. Their countries were vulnerable. They still feared Russia. They did not trust the major West European powers. They trusted America. They wanted to join NATO to ensure that their countries would never again fall victim to the twin evils of nationalism and geopolitics that had produced so much tragedy in their part of Europe--and that were rearing their ugly heads in the Balkans.

The White House, as often was the case in the early months of the Administration, was running notoriously behind schedule--on so-called “Clinton time.” When the leaders finally did get to see the President, they put diplomatic niceties aside and underscored the same message: they wanted to join the West. Havel was the first to meet with Clinton on April 20. “Our main problem is that we feel as if we are living in a vacuum,” he told Clinton. “That is why we want to join NATO. In addition, in our values and spirit, we are part of Western Europe.” All of Central Europe was debating how best to integrate with the West, he continued. “The issue is not that we are faced with imminent threats. Rather, we are in the process of undergoing an image transformation--a reshaping of our identity.” By securing democracy in Central Europe, Havel concluded, the West would set a powerful precedent that would allow reform to spread eastward. “Entry into NATO and the EC is central to expanding democracy, not just to Central Europe, but also to the NIS.”

The next day Walesa was blunter. “We are all afraid of Russia,” he told the President. At times, Walesa continued, he was afraid to turn on the radio for fear of what the most recent news from Moscow might be. “It is important to remember that this is the first time in history that the Soviet army has withdrawn from territory peacefully,” Walesa continued, “If Russia again adopts an aggressive foreign policy, that aggression will be directed against Poland and Ukraine.” Poland was also scared, he continued, “by the prospect of having a powerful Germany on one side and a powerful Russia on the other.” It was an illusion to think that the West could reform Russia without stabilizing and integrating Central Europe first. Success in Central and Eastern Europe would spread eastward, Walesa insisted, not the other way around. The problem was that Western Europe was not willing to open its doors to Central and Eastern Europe. The West, Walesa argued, had achieved “the biggest victory in history” by winning the Cold War, “but we are not capitalizing on it. Only the United States could change that,” he concluded.

None of the delegations came away from those meetings sensing they had a major impact on the President’s thinking. But they had. Afterward, the President would turn to his National Security Advisor, Tony Lake, and comment on how impressed he was by their desire and commitment to join NATO. According to Lake, President Clinton asked: “Tony, why can’t we do this?” As Sandy Berger, Lake’s Deputy at the time and eventual successor as National Security Advisor recalled: “The issue of enlargement was first sharply posed to the President during the opening of the Holocaust Museum in April 1993. Both Havel and Walesa took the President aside and made a very strong pitch for the opening and enlargement of NATO to their countries. Today we think of both the EU and NATO as magnets for these countries. At that time, however, there was only one magnet for them--the NATO magnet. It was the number one, two and three priority of all of these governments. Being in NATO was not only a security issue for them; it was also about being part of the West. That began the discussion.”

The President would often refer back to the strong and positive impression these Central and East European leaders had made on him. Asked in mid-June whether NATO’s inability to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia hadn’t shown that the Alliance was obsolete, Clinton responded that his meeting with the Central and East European Presidents had given him “the clearest example I know … that NATO is not dead.” He added: “When they came here a few weeks ago for the Holocaust dedication, every one of those Presidents said that their number one priority was to get into NATO. They know it will provide a security umbrella for the people who are members.” Shortly thereafter the new Dutch Ambassador to Washington, Adriaan Jacobovits, presented his credentials to the President. He told Jacobovits that he had been thinking about the security of Central and Eastern Europe ever since these leaders raised NATO expansion with him at the Holocaust Memorial Museum opening. He admitted that U.S. policy was not yet formed but that this was an issue he was interested in actively pursuing.

President Clinton did not decide to enlarge NATO in April 1993. But he displayed a positive predisposition and an open mind. “It was not so much a policy as an attitude,” as Lake subsequently put it. NATO enlargement resonated with two of Clinton’s core convictions--a commitment to expand and consolidate democracy and his belief in the importance of modernizing America’s alliances in a globalized world. As a “New Democrat,” Clinton believed expanding democracy should be a key foreign policy priority--a position Lake elevated to a central tenant of the Administration’s foreign policy in the fall of 1993. Clinton frequently talked to visitors about the unique historical chance to build a Europe that was democratic, secure, and undivided. Bringing the eastern half of the continent into the institutions that had created peace and prosperity in the western half of the continent, including NATO, flowed from this vision.

Clinton also saw NATO enlargement as a way to re-anchor the U.S. in a new partnership with the old continent for the future. He was not wedded to the traditional theology of the trans-Atlantic relationship and at times impatient with the advice he received from traditional NATO hands whose cautious views on Alliance reform had been shaped by the Cold War. The President wanted to update and modernize NATO to assume new roles that the American public could relate to and support, thereby insuring its future relevance. Using NATO to help consolidate democracy and a new peace in Central and Eastern Europe was one of those. Stopping ethnic conflict beyond the Alliance’s borders was another. Toward the end of his term, the President increasingly pointed to the growing threat posed by weapons of mass destruction as well as terrorism as a challenge that NATO had to start to confront as well. In short, Clinton saw an enlarged and modernized NATO as the natural adaptation of the Alliance to a more globalized world in which the United States and Europe formed a natural coalition to meet these new threats. Locking in peace and stability in Europe once and for all would allow the U.S. to focus its attention on other issues and areas of the world knowing the continent was secure and with a greater likelihood that European allies would now be willing to take on new responsibilities further afield. The President’s thinking was often well beyond the conventional wisdom of experts in or outside the government. As Tony Lake put it to his staff in a meeting during Clinton’s early months in office: “He thinks differently than you” on these issues.

Unlike many conservatives, however, Clinton did not back NATO enlargement as part of a policy of neo-containment toward Russia. On the contrary, building a new cooperative relationship with a democratic Russia remained a leitmotif for him throughout his tenure in the Oval Office. While he certainly recognized the potential for Russian reform to fail, he did not consider Russia a near-term military threat and remained firmly committed to supporting democratic reform in Moscow throughout his years in office. Assisting Central and Eastern Europe on the one hand and Moscow on the other was not something he viewed in zero-sum terms. Instead, he saw them as parallel tracks in an effort to build a unified Europe that could eventually include Russia as well. And he wanted a strategy that would allow the Alliance to enlarge to consolidate democracy on the continent, support democratic reform in Moscow, and lay the basis for addressing the new threats of the post-Cold War world.

Clinton’s views on NATO enlargement were also shaped by the broader political battle in the U.S. over the future of American foreign policy. He had come to power at a time when the pressures on the U.S. to scale back its international commitments were considerable, and he considered NATO enlargement a litmus test of whether the U.S. would remain internationally engaged and defeat the isolationist and unilateralist sentiments that were emerging in the U.S. Meeting with Italian Prime Minister Carlo Ciampi in the White House Oval Office on September 17, Clinton told him: “The U.S. cannot signal a withdrawal from Europe. NATO looking eastward will help explain the need for NATO to our domestic electorates. I believe that the U.S. must lead, but we must do so by reasoning with our allies and finding a common position,” he told Ciampi. “Because of our economic problems, a peculiar isolationist strain is emerging in the U.S.” He was determined to fight it. “We have learned the hard lessons from the 1920s and ’30s. Others in the U.S. say that we should go it alone and lead through unilateral actions. But this will hurt NATO, the UN and other institutions. The challenge is for me to sell to our people and to Congress the need for our engagement in the world. The U.S. will lead, but through a partnership. This is a very big challenge. We need a common position at the NATO summit.”

Critics would claim that Clinton’s support for NATO enlargement was driven by the domestic desire to court voters of Central and East European origins. But there is little hard evidence that such considerations were either the catalyst or the driving force in his thinking. The President’s interest in enlargement came early in his first term before reelection was on the horizon. Neither of Clinton’s two key pollsters during this period--Stan Greenberg and Dick Morris--conducted polling on NATO enlargement. Both of Clinton’s two national security advisors, Tony Lake and Sandy Berger, insist that political considerations were not central in this decision. “What drove this was the President’s sense of the transformation of Europe and the integration of Central Europe into the West--his vision of the opportunity to create for the first time in history a Europe that was free, democratic and secure,” Berger claimed. “NATO enlargement would have happened had there not been one ethnic American of Central and East European origin in the Midwest.”

But politics were not completely absent in the debate either. As Lake later put it: “The politics of NATO enlargement were like sex in the Victorian age: no one talked but everyone thought about it.” The President and his advisors were well aware there also was a domestic constituency that favored enlargement--and which was vocal in making its views known vis-a-vis the White House and Capitol Hill. At a time when Administration policy was not yet fully settled, the growing pressure from conservative Republicans in the summer of 1994 to support NATO enlargement undoubtedly reinforced the hand of those in the Administration who favored enlargement. It was a clear incentive for the Administration to move forward and not to waver or backslide on this issue, and increasingly so, especially as the 1996 Presidential elections approached.

More broadly, Clinton was under pressure to prove his and his party’s foreign policy credentials. Not only had the Democrats been out of power for twelve years, but also they were still viewed by the public as less competent than Republicans on national security issues. Clinton’s critics repeatedly portrayed him as weak on foreign and defense policy. U.S. leadership on NATO was a traditional benchmark by which an American President’s foreign policy stature was measured, and Democrats were keenly aware of Republican efforts to paint the Administration as mismanaging the Atlantic Alliance. All of these factors and pressures combined to make NATO enlargement a highly political issue, which both sides attempted to exploit for their own purposes.

President Clinton’s early interest in NATO enlargement was initially not widely shared in the U.S. government. Tony Lake was perhaps the only person among the President’s close advisors who supported it from the outset. He faced strong opposition from the State and Defense Departments, and from his own senior staff. There were several reasons. A number of key Clinton advisors considered building a new strategic relationship with Russia--a goal Clinton had just declared to be his top foreign policy priority--a more pressing and important national security concern. NATO enlargement was widely seen as threatening to undercut those objectives by playing into the hands of anti-democratic and anti-Western forces in Moscow. That view existed in the upper echelons of the State Department as well as the Pentagon.

Before entering office a number of senior Democratic defense officials, who subsequently assumed key positions in the Defense Department, had developed a new concept of “cooperative security” for Europe in which military cooperation with Moscow was a key part. Security in post-Cold War Europe, they argued, should be built by de-emphasizing old alliances and instead expanding institutionalized collaboration with former enemies. Such cooperation was to be at the cutting edge of transforming political relationships across the continent. “Our new links to the Russian military were crucial to realizing an undivided Europe. Russia’s empire and war machine were much reduced, but it still had the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and a power and position in Eurasia that made its participation in the emerging European security system essential,” Bill Perry and Ash Carter subsequently wrote. “Our objective was to promote common action between our militaries where Russian and American interests converged, building a foundation of cooperation that would survive the inevitable differences.”

Opposition to enlargement was not limited to Russia hands or arms control experts, however. It was also widely shared among senior State Department officials responsible for European and NATO affairs. In their view, NATO was the “crown jewel” of U.S. policy in Europe, an elite club whose cohesion needed to be protected--above all at a time of trans-Atlantic strain over Bosnia. Enlargement was seen as extending NATO’s responsibilities, but without adding the resources needed to fulfill those commitments. America’s European allies were seen as largely unsupportive. Its political viability at home was not clear either. Were Americans truly prepared to go to war for Warsaw or Budapest? Would the U.S. Senate expand the U.S. defense pledge to Europe when there were very real pressures to scale back America’s overseas commitments? As Christopher prepared for his first visit to NATO headquarters in late February 1993, senior State Department officials made sure it was not mentioned as an issue the Secretary needed to address.

The U.S. military, too, had its reasons for being wary. With the collapse of the Soviet threat, they viewed their posture in Europe as a waning asset. Secretary Aspin had launched a review of U.S. global force commitments. Entitled the Bottom-Up Review (BUR), it barely mentioned Europe and instead shifted U.S. defense planning toward a greater focus on the Persian Gulf and Asia. The U.S. military was looking for ways to reduce its engagement in Europe--not to increase it. Talk about using NATO to project stability did not sound like a real military mission to many senior uniformed officers. Given the weak military capabilities of those countries seeking NATO membership, the prospect of enlargement was seen as yet another unwelcome burden for the U.S. military at a time when their forces and budgets were being reduced.

Thus, when the President asked “why not enlargement,” senior U.S. officials felt confident they could list very real reasons why the answer was “no” or at least “not now.” When [NATO Secretary General Manfred] Woerner suggested to NATO Ambassadors in early June that enlargement might be a topic of discussion at an upcoming NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Athens, he was told that the issue was too controversial. In a letter to his NATO counterparts, Christopher made it clear that Washington also opposed raising the issue: “As we intensify our efforts at NATO outreach, we need to be clear about our objectives. While we should keep open the perspective of eventual membership, we do not believe that opening public discussion of possible expansion would serve a good purpose at this time. Raising this possibility for specific countries can only imply a less favored position for others. Eventual expansion of NATO, to which the U.S. is open in principle, needs deliberate study within the alliance at the appropriate time. Let us not force the pace, and let us avoid raising public expectations that cannot be met.”

Christopher’s speech in Athens laid out a five-part agenda for NATO reform, but enlargement was not part of it. Instead, he focused on the crisis of the moment--Bosnia--and proposed several initiatives to strengthen the Alliance’s peacekeeping capabilities. While he addressed the need for “continent-wide security,” his emphasis was on strengthening the NACC. “At an appropriate time,” he stated in public, “we may choose to enlarge NATO membership. But that is not now on the agenda.” His talking points for the Foreign Ministers lunch were blunter. While noting that some allies wanted to discuss expansion, they stated: “Our view is different. We are concerned about the destabilizing effects if we begin an early debate, or an early process of expansion. … We can begin to sort through them privately out of public exposure. But the less said about this in public, the better. We should not even say that NATO is studying this.”

But the Athens meeting was a mess. NATO was still reeling in the wake of the Bosnia crisis. Christopher’s reform proposals came across as half steps that tinkered with the status quo, a Band-Aid offered at a time when the Alliance was in danger of hemorrhaging. During a press conference the Secretary was peppered with questions about why the Administration had gone back on its previous tough rhetoric on Bosnia, whether its subsequent proposals on Bosnia were “spineless,” and whether the Clinton team had the moral authority and capacity to lead the NATO alliance. Christopher knew he had to do something--and soon--if Washington was to regain control of the Alliance. He called Lake to get his agreement to announce a Presidential trip to Europe and a NATO summit. When the National Security Advisor said that the Administration did not yet know what it wanted from such a summit, Christopher replied that the best way to get a policy was to schedule a summit as an action-forcing event. Lake acquiesced and Christopher announced that Clinton planned to make his first trip to Europe around the end of the year.

Excerpted with permission of Columbia University Press.
Footnotes deleted.