Expanding NATO

The enlargement of NATO, which the U.S. government is pushing assiduously in the face of Russian opposition and European coolness, is to serve two purposes. First, by stopping dead in its tracks the European Union plan to develop an independent military capability, it will prevent the emergence of a rival superpower in Europe. Second, by expanding NATO to within a few hundred miles of St. Petersburg, the U.S. hopes to provoke conflict between Europe and Russia, which, as dishonest broker, it can then mediate.

The EU is already the largest market in the world. Its version of capitalism, despite the high levels of taxation and welfare, is at least as productive as that of the United States. If the Europeans were now to have Russia's vast mineral wealth at their disposal?the "strategic partnership" that Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered?the EU could soon surpass the United States in sheer economic power.

The Bush administration has no higher priority than to stop this from happening. The mechanism to ensure permanent European subordination to the United States is NATO. Anything that strengthens NATO tightens the U.S. grip on Europe. In 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO. Next year in Prague, a further nine countries may be invited to join, including such stalwart adherents of democracy and "human rights" as Albania and civil war-torn Macedonia.

The expansion of NATO is an outrageous violation of solemn pledges made by the United States at the time of German unification. "There would be no extension of NATO's current jurisdiction eastward," Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev in February 1990. Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock has admitted that when the Russians "say that it is their understanding NATO expansion would not happen, there is a basis for it."

NATO expansion happened because the rational alternative?NATO dissolving itself?was something the U.S. military-industrial-media complex would not countenance. So NATO had to be reinvented. Expansion went together with its transformation into an aggressive alliance. In its 1991 Strategic Concept NATO was still belching out standard "defensive" pap: "The Alliance is purely defensive in purpose: none of its weapons will ever be used except in self-defense? The forces of the Allies must?be able to defend Alliance frontiers, to stop an aggressor's advance as far forward as possible? The role of the Alliance's military forces is to assure the territorial integrity and political independence of its member states." There was as yet no mention of NATO expansion.

NATO's recently published handbook reads chillingly differently, however. Gone is talk of an "attack on one is an attack on all." NATO is the one that will do the attacking. "The most likely threats to security," the document drones, "come from conflict on Europe's fringes... As a result, NATO must now be ready to deploy forces beyond Alliance borders to respond to crises." Future military operations, it goes on, "will probably take place outside Alliance territory; they may last for many years." There is much talk of "operations involving the participation of nations outside the Alliance?[of] improving NATO's ability to deploy, at short notice, appropriate multinational?forces matched to the specific requirements of a particular military operation." NATO must have "the ability to deploy forces quickly to where they are needed, including areas outside Alliance territory," not to mention "the ability to maintain and supply forces far from their home bases and to ensure that sufficient fresh forces are available for long-duration operations."

Here then is a military alliance that arrogates to itself the right to bully countries that are not even members of the alliance into taking part in its operations. It deploys its forces "far from their home bases" for extended periods of time whether anyone likes it or not.

NATO expansion thus has nothing whatsoever to do with offering security guarantees to small countries terrified of the return of the Russian bear. The handbook does not even bother to take a supposed Russian threat seriously. To be sure, for propaganda purposes NATO still wheels out its useful idiots to rhapsodize about the Western "values" over which NATO supposedly stands guard. The ever more ridiculous Czech President Vaclav Havel who, these days, devotes most of his energies to resuscitating anti-Soviet cliches, recently declared that NATO's territory "extends from Alaska in the West to Tallin [Estonia] in the East." But not farther East. Albania belongs to the West, but not Russia.

The Russians must realize, he went on, "that if NATO moves closer to Russia's borders, it brings closer stability, security, democracy and an advanced political culture, which is obviously in Russia's essential interest." The "advanced political culture" is a particularly nice touch. Communism Czech-style, as he well knew before becoming a hack, was for many years considerably nastier than the version practiced in Moscow. In any case, if NATO will have such a beneficial effect on the Russians, why not go all the way and invite them to join? Havel summarily rejects such a notion. Endless expansion of NATO, he explained, would render it toothless. So Havel, like his masters in NATO, wants his military alliance to have sharp teeth.

The purpose of this NATO with sharp teeth is to establish forward bases on Russia's periphery from which it will then unleash ethnically based guerrilla armies on the Russians. One objective will be to exhaust the Russians in fighting endless secessionist wars. An enfeebled Russia will then be only too eager to sign away mineral concessions to the rapacious multinationals hovering behind NATO.