Fifteen years ago, on March 12, 1999, in Independence, Missouri, the first three post-communist countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, joined the Atlantic Alliance. Three years later they were joined by Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. At the time, the idea of NATO enlargement found not only many supporters but quite a few detractors. Some felt the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were not ready, politically and economically, to join and contribute to the allied operations. Some were concerned about the costs of enlargement at a time when most member countries started drawing the peace dividend. Most, however, feared antagonizing Russia at a time it was struggling on its way to democracy and market economy. The Clinton administration, which spearheaded the first wave of enlargement, did not take the objections lightly. The candidate countries and their armed forces were made to go through the paces to prove their credentials, their civilian oversight capability, and their military capacity and interoperability. The enlargement took place without adding any significant costs to the existing NATO budget. No NATO troops or bases were to be deployed in the new member countries. The NATO-Russia Council was created to boost confidence and to oversee areas of cooperation between Russia and the alliance, for the first time giving access to the NATO headquarters in Brussels and the military headquarters in Mons to Russian officials and Russian officers, respectively. The objections of the enlargement’s foes could be understood and some of them even given credence at the time. Fifteen years later, however, the fruits of the process are there for all to see. The new NATO member countries, with the total population equaling the European population of Russia and a with a comparable aggregate GDP, embody a zone of stability, democracy, rule of law, and relative prosperity in the region. Their troops have significantly contributed to peace and stability in southeastern Europe and brought sacrifices in Afghanistan, side by side with the US and other NATO nations. The countries that would not or could not join, however, continue to be plagued by instability, political turbulences, authoritarian leaders, and economic malaise, haunting many an observer from the stable zone in Central and Eastern Europe with the thought: “There but for the grace of God—and NATO accession—go I.” (It would be unfair not to include the EU enlargement as a stabilizing factor, but that admittedly came five years later.) One would surmise that rarely has a natural experiment in the form of a policy had so clear-cut effects. Yet some of the early opponents of the enlargement, such as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, choose to disregard the evidence on the ground and continue to claim that the enlargement was “one of the dumbest things we’ve ever done and, of course, laid the groundwork for [Vladimir] Putin’s rise.” Really? One could think of dumber things. And of course, there is not a shred of evidence that the enlargement had anything to do with Putin’s rise, which was occasioned by purely domestic factors such as the disastrous war in Chechnya and the need to impose some semblance of order, i.e., the “vertical of power,” on the increasingly violent Russian kleptocracy without necessarily destroying the lucrative practice. It is sad when Russia continues to blame its many problems on the nefarious designs of the West. It is ridiculous when this kind of paranoia is subscribed to by people outside of Russia who should know better. NATO history of the last fifteen years is patently not a story of antagonizing Russia but rather of a series of failed attempts to bring Russia closer. The NATO-Russia Council failed to achieve that. The Obama administration’s sincere attempt at the reset of the relationship with Russia reset exactly nothing. The replacement of the Bush era missile defense plan by Obama’s conspicuously nonthreatening Phased Adaptive Approach did not perceptibly soften the Russian attitudes. The pivot to Asia may have inadvertently created a perception of a vacuum in Europe, which Russia strives obligingly to fill. The people who blamed the NATO enlargement for Russia’s uncooperative conduct yesterday, blame the EU today for having dared to offer an association agreement to the independent nation of Ukraine. The problem then is not with NATO or the EU but rather with the way Russia perceives itself and the rest of the world. One of the most consistent features of the Russian foreign policy is its zero-sum game character with respect to the West, as evidenced in former Yugoslavia fifteen years ago, in Syria last year, or in Ukraine today, making any attempt at a cooperative strategy extremely difficult. When a few years ago several Western officials, including Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, former NATO Military Committee Chairman Klaus Naumann, and former German Minister of Defense Volker Rühe, broached the possibility of Russia joining NATO, they received an answer from the Russian representative to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, that summarizes the country’s thinking in a nutshell: “Great powers don’t join coalitions, they create coalitions. Russia considers itself a great power.” You do have to be a little dumb not to get the meaning. Michael Zantovskys blog
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 08:42:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015