Permanent Interests, Endless Threats: Cold War Continuities and NATO Enlargement
Author(s): Benjamin Schwarz
Source: World Policy Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall, 1997), pp. 24-30 Published by: The MIT Press and the World Policy Institute Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40209539 . Accessed: 01/06/2014 04:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Policy Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 107.212.213.167 on Sun, 1 Jun 2014 04:26:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Permanent Interests, Endless Threats Cold War Continuities and NATO Enlargement Benjamin Schwarz is executive editor of the World Policy Journal. Benjamin Schwarz Both its detractors and supporters charac- terize NATO expansion as a bold departure for American policy. Paradoxically, however, NATO's move eastward is at once the most radical extension of U.S. security interests since the late 1940s, and a move entirely consistent with the underlying meth- ods and aims of American global strategy for the last half century. This paradox indicates a wider paradox: since the end of the Cold War, foreign pol- icy commentators and officials have been try- ing to refashion America's global role for the post-Cold War era, but for all their talk about the need for a bold new vision, they take as a given the status quo, what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calls the "im- perative of continued U.S. world leadership." The Clinton administration's recently released Quadrennial Defense Review illus- trates this stasis. Since the United States spread its security umbrella worldwide os- tensibly to contain the Soviet threat, many hoped when the Soviet Union disintegrated that the U.S. defense budget could be re- duced substantially, freeing America's ener- gies, attention, and financial resources to meet long-neglected domestic needs. But af- ter months of analysis, the administration's defense planners have concluded that the es- sential features of America's Cold War secu- rity strategy - U.S. leadership of NATO and America's East Asian alliances and guardian- ship of U.S. allies' access to Persian Gulf oil - must remain inviolate. These are Amer- ica's "permanent interests." Those who call for a more modest for- eign and defense policy argue that American strategy seems to be extravagance born of paranoia, or of the defense establishment's anxiety to protect its budget. But in fact, given the way the makers of U.S. foreign policy have defined American interests since the late 1940s, these plans are prudent. And that is the problem. To assume that the Cold War's end al- lows for a sweeping reinvention of America's foreign policy is to misunderstand the broader purpose behind that policy. Amer- ica's Cold War defense posture and its globe- girdling security commitments always had a more fundamental aim than containing the Soviet Union. As even the fiercely anticom- munist Sen. Arthur Vandenberg said in 1947, in "scaring hell out of the American people," the U.S.-Soviet rivalry helped se- cure domestic support for Washington's am- bition to forge an American-led world order. The architects of American foreign policy realize today, no less than in 1947, that this world order will not go of itself. What Dean Acheson called the "hard task of building a successfully functioning sys- tem" has required nothing less than that the United States suspend international politics, which is in fact the purpose of American "leadership." In 1949, John Foster Dulles described one aspect of this "hard task," which contin- ues to dictate America's world role. The fu- ture secretary of state explained that to build what he considered a successful interna- tional economic and political community, Germany's integration with Western Europe was essential. The obstacle, he said, was that the West Europeans were "afraid to bring 24 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL FALL 1997 This content downloaded from 107.212.213.167 on Sun, 1 Jun 2014 04:26:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions that strong, powerful, highly concentrated group of people into unity with them." Similarly, as Dulles, Acheson, and other policymakers understood, a strong Japan was at once essential for building a prosper- ous and stable international order, and intol- erable to its neighbors. Since the 1940s, then, the fundamental challenge facing American diplomacy has been to foster a liberal political and econom- ic order within an international system char- acterized - as David Hume recognized 250 years ago while bemoaning the lack of eco- nomic cooperation among states - by "the narrow malignity and envy of nations, which can never bear to see their neighbors thriving, but continually repine at any new efforts towards industry made by any other nation." A draft of NSC 48, the National Security Council's 1949 blueprint of America's Cold War strategy in East Asia, nicely summa- rized the promise of and the threat to the U.S. vision of world order. Starting with the premise that "the economic life of the mod- ern world is geared to expansion," which re- quired "the establishment of conditions favorable to the export of technology and capital and to a liberal trade policy through- out the world" (a statement that could have been written yesterday), NSC 48's authors went on to warn that "the complexity of in- ternational trade makes it well to bear in mind that such ephemeral matters as na- tional pride and ambition can inhibit or pre- vent the necessary degree of international cooperation, or the development of a favor- able atmosphere and conditions to promote economic expansion." Forty-eight years later, the United States remains committed to the one successful means that it has found to check these forces inimical to the integra- tive and interdependent character of the world order it has pursued. Although the continuity and fundamen- tal goals of America's global role have been obscured by focusing on the containment of its enemy, they are illuminated by examin- ing the containment of its allies. Dulles's an- swer to the obstacle that inhibited European cooperation - and hence that stymied the in- ternational order believed necessary for America's, and the world's, prosperity and security - was, of course, that the American- led NATO, and not an exclusively European security system, had to guard the Continent: The Germans would be too strong for the comfort and safety of our European allies.... The Germans can be brought into the West //the West includes the United States. They cannot be safely brought into the West if the West does not include the United States. The Atlan- tic Pact will superimpose upon the [West European] Brussels Pact another western unity that is much bigger and stronger, so that it does not have to fear the inclusion of Germany.1 By providing for Germany's (and Ja- pan's) security and by enmeshing their mili- tary and foreign policies with alliances that it dominated, the United States contained its erstwhile enemies, preventing its "part- ners" from embarking upon independent foreign and military policies. This stabilized relations among the states of Western Europe and East Asia, for by controlling Germany and Japan, the United States - to use a current term in policymaking circles - "reassured" their neighbors that these powerful allies would remain pacific. The leash of America's security leadership thereby reined in the dogs of war; NATO (and the U.S.-Japan alliance) by, in effect, banishing power politics, protected the states of Western Europe (and East Asia) from themselves. Thus the great story of American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War is not the thwarting of and triumph over the So- viet "threat" but the successful effort to im- pose an ambitious vision on a recalcitrant world. Freed from the fears and competitions that had for centuries kept them nervously Permanent Interests, Endless Threats 25 This content downloaded from 107.212.213.167 on Sun, 1 Jun 2014 04:26:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions looking over their shoulders, the West Euro- peans (and East Asians) were able to cooper- ate politically and economically. As Secre- tary of State Dean Rusk argued in 1967: "The presence of our forces in Europe under NATO has also contributed to the develop- ment of intra-European cooperation. But without the visible assurance of a sizeable American contingent, old frictions may re- vive, and Europe could become unstable once more." Recognizing, then, that Europe (and East Asia) could not be left to its own devices in the postwar world, Washington pursued not balance and diversity (George Kennan's preferred European policy aim) but hegemony. America's Remarkable Consensus What the foreign policy community now calls "the danger of ^nationalization" has for the past 50 years presented two distinct threats to Washington's vision of a global or- der. The first has been the "renationaliza- tion" of regional politics. According to American logic, a Europe no longer "reas- sured" by the United States would lapse into those same old bad habits that the U.S.- led NATO has prevented - nationalist rival- ries and their concomitant, autarky. A Europe divided into small, constricted national markets would carry dire conse- quences for world economic efficiency and growth and would inevitably lead (accord- ing to U.S. policymakers' favorite foreign policy guide, "the lessons of the 1930s") to war among the Europeans. The other, almost opposite, threat has been the "^nationalization" of world poli- tics, a threat that has been, ironically, accen- tuated by Washington's various efforts to promote regional economic integration in Western Europe and Northeast Asia. This integration, Washington has feared, could lead to the economic and security nightmare of these rising regional powerhouses form- ing independent regional economic blocs, shattering international economic interde- pendence, and engendering a dangerous multipolar world of autonomous great pow- ers jockeying for power and advantage. To realize and protect its global order, then, America has had to pursue two often conflicting goals, both of which have been served by the double containment strategy of restricting its allies' military and political independence: the United States must nur- ture economically strong and politically co- hesive "partners," while also constraining these same "partners" - which has amounted to the imperative, in historian Melvyn Lef- fler's words, that "neither an integrated Europe, nor a united Germany nor an inde- pendent Japan must be permitted to emerge as a third force." Thus, for instance, as Henry Kissinger succinctly noted, U.S. policy to- ward Europe "has always been extremely am- bivalent: it has urged European unity while recoiling before its consequences." So, while there is much talk about the need to articulate a new foreign policy vi- sion, a new set of interests and priorities, and a new international role for the United States in this "new era," post-Cold War policy- makers have not found any really new global role possible or desirable. The significance of the "debate" concerning what America's "new" foreign policy should be is that there is, in fact, no argument. There is a remark- able consensus concerning the maintenance of America's fundamental world role and of the instruments that sustain it. The Bush Pentagon's January 1993 re- vised Defense Planning Guidance, for instance, defined the creation of "a prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's economy" - not the victory over Moscow - as "perhaps our nation's most significant achievement since the Second World War." In turn, that docu- ment defined the "reassurance," "stability," and "precluding] of destabilizing military rivalries" as the sine qua non of this global capitalist order, making the maintenance of U.S. leadership of its Cold War-era alliances America's "most vital" foreign policy prior- 26 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL FALL 1997 This content downloaded from 107.212.213.167 on Sun, 1 Jun 2014 04:26:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ity. Since this required retaining "meaning- ful operational capabilities," according to the revised Planning Guidance, the same pur- poses, the same means, and nearly the same costs that characterized America's Cold War global strategy define its post-Cold War strategy. To Bush's Pentagon, America's "leader- ship" in ameliorating the security problems of others - manifest in its Cold War alli- ances - thus continued to be vital despite the Soviet Union's demise. After all, the now infamous draft of the Pentagon's 1992 "post-Cold War" Defense Planning Guidance, which gave the public an unprecedented glimpse into the thinking that informs Washington's security strategy, merely re- stated in somewhat undiplomatic language the logic behind America's Cold War allied containment strategy. The United States, it argued, must con- tinue to dominate the international system by "discouraging the advanced industrial- ized nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or re- gional role." To accomplish this, Washing- ton must keep the former great powers of Western Europe, as well as Japan, firmly within the constraints of the U.S.-created postwar system by providing what one high- ranking Pentagon official termed "adult su- pervision." It must, therefore, protect the interests of virtually all potential great pow- ers so that they need not acquire the capa- bilities to protect themselves, that is, so that they need not act like great powers. The very existence of truly independent actors would be intolerable, for it would challenge American hegemony, the key to a prosper- ous and stable international order. Adult Supervision This understanding of America's world role and the challenges to it largely determined the Bush administration's post-Cold War foreign policy, including its squelching of Franco-German initiatives designed to cre- ate more independent European defense forces, and the president's insistence, when faced with disquieting signs of its European allies' desire for greater autonomy, that NATO could not be replaced "even in the long run." America's imperative to continue to provide "adult supervision" was also obvi- ous in the Bush State Department's single- minded focus in its negotiations with Moscow on two interrelated objectives cen- tral to America's traditional goal of allied containment: ensuring that NATO - the pri- mary means of U.S. preponderance and, hence, allied containment - survived in a post-Cold War Europe and ensuring that a reunified Germany would be enfolded in the alliance. Thus, in 1990 Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs James Dobbins explained America's post-Cold War role in Europe. Testifying before Con- gress, Dobbins argued that "we need NATO now for the same reasons NATO was created." The danger, he asserted, was that, without the "glue" of American leadership in NATO, West Europeans would revert to their bad ways, "renationalizing" their armed forces, playing the "old geopolitical game," and "shifting alliances." As articulated by Dobbins, U.S. policy in Europe rested on the assumption that, act- ing alone, the West Europeans - particu- larly with Germany united- could not preserve order among themselves. Without the United States acting as the stabilizer, European squabbling would "undermine po- litical and economic structures like the EC" and even lead to a resumption of "historic conflicts" on the order of the World Wars.2 Finally, the most conspicuous example of the Bush administration's foreign policy - the Persian Gulf War- cannot be sepa- rated from America's enduring imperative of allied containment and the concomitant requirement that the United States "retain the pre-eminent responsibility for address- ing... those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle in- ternational relations." Permanent Interests, Endless Threats 27 This content downloaded from 107.212.213.167 on Sun, 1 Jun 2014 04:26:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Were Washington to have relinquished its adult supervision and allowed its part- ners to protect their own interests in the Gulf - that is, to develop naval, air and ground forces capable of global "power pro- jection" - such actions would, according to this thinking, have led to a situation in which, as the United States no longer kept Europe (and Japan) on a tight political and military leash, the multipolar and autarkic world of power politics would have returned The Post-Cold War Domino Theory The Clinton administration's argument that NATO's security umbrella must be ex- tended to Eastern and Central Europe is merely an extension of the argument that America must provide adult supervision by leading in European security affairs. In the view of the proponents of NATO enlargement, if a U.S.-dominated NATO demonstrates that it cannot or will not address the new security problems in post- Cold War Europe (for instance, the "spill- over" of ethnic conflict, refugee flows into Western Europe, and the possibility that these could ignite ultranationalist feelings in, for example, Germany), then the alliance will be rendered impotent. If the main in- strument of U.S. leadership and "reassur- ance" in Western Europe is thus crippled, then, it is feared, the continent will lapse into the same old power politics that the alliance was supposed to suppress, shatter- ing economic and political cooperation in Western Europe. According to the logic of Washington's global strategy, while the end of the super- power rivalry has reduced American security risks and commitments in some respects, it has in other ways expanded the frontiers of America's insecurity. During the Cold War, stability in Europe could be assured by the Soviets sitting on and the Americans keep- ing a tight rein on their respective clients. In fact, this superpower condominium was probably the best means of ensuring Amer- ica's overriding interest in the stability of the continent, as American statesmen have often privately acknowledged. With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, however, its former charges have be- come unrestrained and consequently free to make trouble for each other and for Western Europe. As former Bush administration dep- uty assistant secretary of defense Zalmay Khalilizad, one of the leading advocates of NATO enlargement, asserts, "Western and East Central European stability are becom- ing increasingly intertwined. For example, turmoil in East Central Europe could drive hundreds of thousands of refugees into Western Europe - challenging political sta- bility in key countries, especially Germany." Even more important, proponents of NATO enlargement fear that if the newly in- dependent states of Eastern and Central Europe are not enmeshed in multilateral se- curity arrangements under "U.S. leader- ship," the region could once again become a political-military tinderbox as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Baltic countries, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech and Slo- vak republics, Hungary, and Romania wor- rying about each other and with all of them worrying about Germany. This tense situation, according to a sort of post-Cold War domino theory, will threaten the stability of the entire continent, as, for instance, a nuclear-armed Ukraine provokes the nuclearization of, say, Poland, which in turn pressures Germany into ac- quiring nuclear weapons, which ignites la- tent suspicions between Germany and its neighbors to the west. So, the argument goes, since European stability is, as Sen. Richard Lugar (r-in) - one of the most ardent advocates of NATO en- largement - argues, threatened by "those areas in the east and south where the seeds of future conflict in Europe lie," the U.S.- led NATO must now stabilize both halves of the continent. The important point is that the logic of American global strategy does indeed dictate that the U.S.-led NATO move eastward. While NATO expansion is often 28 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL FALL 1997 This content downloaded from 107.212.213.167 on Sun, 1 Jun 2014 04:26:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions described as a "new bargain/' it is in fact only the latest investment, made necessary by changing geopolitical circumstances, in a pursuit begun long ago. For instance, al- though the perceptive foreign policy com- mentator Walter Russell Mead opposes NATO expansion as costly and provocative, his 1993 analysis of the dangers of instabil- ity in Eastern Europe in fact points directly to the need for that expansion. Starting from the assumption that an economically "closed Europe is a gun pointed at Amer- ica's head," Mead draws a frightening sce- nario of America abjuring leadership in Eastern Europe: In a well-intentioned effort to stabilize Eastern Europe, Western Europe, led by Germany, could establish something like Napoleon's projected Continental System. Eastern Europe and North Af- rica would supply the raw materials, cer- tain agricultural products, and low-wage industrial labor. Western Europe would provide capital and host the high-value- added and high-tech industries. A Europe of this kind would inevitably put most of its capital into its own back- yard, and it would close its markets to competitors from the rest of the world. It would produce its VCRs in Poland, not China; it would buy its wheat from Ukraine, rather than the Dakotas.3 Since Mead is unwilling to allow Amer- ica's West European "partners" to assume responsibility for stabilizing their neighbor- hood, America's responsibilities must multi- ply. The U.S.-led NATO expansion is hence nothing more than the logical outcome of the imperative that America must play - in the words of Secretary of State Albright and President Clinton - the role of "the indis- pensable nation" for global order. NATO enlargement thus manifests the draft Defense Planning Guidances argu- ment that Washington must forestall the advanced capitalist states from challenging American leadership "or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role." As Senator Lugar warned, "American leadership on European security issues is essential.... If NATO does not deal with the security prob- lems of its members, they will ultimately seek to deal with these problems either in new alliances or on their own." Its "leadership" role means not only that the United States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated states in Europe and East Asia - America's "allies" - but also that it must deal with such nui- sances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milo- sevic and Kim Jong II, so that potential great powers need not acquire the means to deal with those problems themselves. And those powers that eschew American supervi- sion - such as China - must be both engaged and contained. The upshot of "American leadership" is that the United States must spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined. Imperial Overstretch The logic that dictates NATO expansion per- fectly illustrates "imperial overstretch." Af- ter all, if the United States, through NATO, must guard against internal instability and interstate security competition not only in Western Europe but also in areas that could infect Western Europe, where do NATO's re- sponsibilities end? It is often argued, for in- stance, that the alliance must expand eastward because turmoil in East-Central Europe could provoke mass immigration flows into Western Europe, threatening po- litical stability there. Of course, turmoil in Russia or North Africa could have the same effect, as could instability in Central Asia (which could spread to Turkey, spurring a new wave of immigration to the West). Must not NATO, then, expand even fur- ther eastward and southward than is cur- rently proposed? Senator Lugar argues that the U.S.-led NATO must go "out of area" be- cause "there can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery." If Permanent Interests, Endless Threats 29 This content downloaded from 107.212.213.167 on Sun, 1 Jun 2014 04:26:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions this logic is followed, then the ostensible threats to American security will be nearly endless. If America is to forestall the risks and costs that inevitably accompany these ex- panding frontiers of insecurity , then a new debate must begin. Rather than focus on the narrow issue of NATO enlargement, this de- bate must assess the underlying assumptions that impel that policy; the debate must stop revolving around how the Pax Americana should be administered and instead examine whether there should be a Pax Americana at all. Once that debate is under way, the pub- lic will come to realize that it has been fund- ing an arcane endeavor indeed. Its response to those urging NATO expansion was likely anticipated five years ago by Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican, upon hearing NATO secretary general Manfred Woerner's explanation that the United States should remain militarily present in Europe to stabilize security relations among the West Europeans and thereby prevent "renationalized" European defense struc- tures, replied that "Americans would never accept that the maintenance of stability be- tween Western Europeans could be a plausi- ble rationale for continuing to deploy troops in Europe. Most Americans believe [the Europeans] can do this on their own."4 Is the public likely to continue to sup- port an imperial project that is perforce open-ended and permanent? Arguing for the maintenance of Washington's Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "If we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?"5 The problem is that America can never know, so, according to this logic, it must always stay.* Notes This article is adapted from a paper presented at a conference, "NATO Enlargement: Illusion and Reality," sponsored by the Cato Institute, June 25, 1997. 1. John Foster Dulles, "Statement Before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate," The Atlantic Pact (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1949). 2. U.S. Congress, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Implementation of the Helsinki Accords, 101st Cong., 2d sess., April 3, 1990, pp. 8 and 18; and U.S. Congress, Senate Foreign Rela- tions Committee, The Future of NATO, 101st Cong., 2d sess., February 9, 1990, p. 19. 3. Walter Russell Mead, "An American Grand Strategy: The Quest for Order in a Disordered World," World Policy Journal 10 (spring 1993), p. 21.
4. Quoted in David G. Hag land, "Can North America Remain 'Committed' to Europe? Should It?" Cambridge Review of International Affairs (winter 1992-93), p. 18. 5. Quoted in Morton Kondracke, "The Aspin Papers," The New Republic, April 27, 1992, p. 12. 30 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL FALL 1997 This content downloaded from 107.212.213.167 on Sun, 1 Jun 2014 04:26:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions