NATO's enlargement plan going through the motion

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Former general Alexander Lebed, Russian internal security chief and President Boris Yeltsin's likeliest successor, has moved a long way in a year. Last year, he warned that if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expands to include Eastern European countries that were formerly Soviet allies, the sky would fall. "World War III will start. Civilized and uncivilized states will be destroyed, everybody and everything."

Even allowing for Russia's traditional fear of encirclement, that sounded rather unlikely, so NATO pressed on with its plans. Although Lebed toned his rhetoric down a bit once he was brought into Yeltsin's government last spring, he didn't change course. Talking to Russian journalists on Oct. 1, he said: "Russia has something with which to oppose NATO's enlargement. They're rusty, but they're missiles all the same."

How different he sounded after his first official visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels on Oct. 7. "It is NATO's business what NATO decides. Whatever NATO does, Russia is not going to go into hysterics. The main thing is not to hurry, or you may trip up." Lebed wasn't dropping his disapproval of the expansion plan, but he was certainly signaling his willingness to make deals. Are the Russians really going to accept NATO's expansion right up to their borders without spinning out? And is this new version of an old alliance what the world needs today?

NATO is now locked on course to bring an additional 60 million Europeans under its nuclear umbrella. Details will be settled at a NATO foreign ministers' meeting in December, and Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia will be officially invited to begin negotiations for membership at a NATO summit meeting next summer.

Formal accession is expected in April 1999, the alliance's 50th anniversary.

But why do they want to join NATO? How can they trust an alliance that repeatedly chickened out in Bosnia when confronted by nothing more daunting than poorly trained, frequently drunk Bosnian Serb troops whose military specialty was ethnic cleansing? And why are the new NATO recruits afraid of Russia anyway?

The Russian army, at the moment, is about as frightening as the Salvation Army.

On paper, there are supposed to be 1.5 million Russians under arms. But Moscow admits this has fallen to a million, and the true figure may be much lower. Soldiers' pay is months in arrears, and many are so desperate that they are selling their weapons to get money for food. Lebed has been issuing warnings about possible mutinies, but the troops seem too demoralized even for that.

The military budget has fallen by 45 percent in real terms since 1992, and the army's fighting ability is so low that Chechen guerrillas actually recaptured Grozny, the breakaway republic's capital, in the last round of fighting in Chechnya. They were then able to hold it against all Russian attempts to dislodge them.

As a means of projecting force abroad, the Russian armed forces are completely useless. The army needs 300 new tanks a year to replace old ones, but it gets fewer than 60. Fighter pilots get only 10 or 20 hours of flight time a year, one-tenth of the amount needed to remain combat-ready. The navy has not built a single nuclear-armed submarine in the past five years.

Russia is not dangerous. So why join NATO for protection from it? Even if Russia should re-arm and turn nasty, do the Poles truly believe that NATO countries like Germany, Britain and the United States would really risk a nuclear war to save them?

Oddly enough, the Poles (and Czechs, Hungarians and Slovenes) do believe something like that. Or at least they think that NATO membership might force an aggressive Russia to think twice before attacking them, just in case the alliance wasn't bluffing.

There is certainly no guarantee. The Czechs remember being betrayed to Hitler 60 years ago by Western European countries that had promised to protect them. Poles, on the other hand, remember a promise that Britain and France made to protect them from Nazi aggression -- and actually lived up to when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. Nobody knows which way NATO would jump in a crisis, but joining it is cheap insurance.

This view is shared by the other Eastern European states that will not be receiving invitations to join NATO next year. Slovakia and Croatia were rejected because they are drifting perilously close to dictatorship. Rumania and Bulgaria are too unpredictable.

Former Soviet republics -- even Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, who would desperately like to join -- are out of the question: Moscow would go crazy. But NATO thinks it can get away with four new members.

So there will be a very limited expansion of the alliance. Moscow will be mollified with promises that neither nuclear weapons nor foreign troops will be stationed on the territory of the new members. Other Eastern European countries will be offered all sorts of symbolic associations with NATO, but nothing concrete.

To sweeten the pill further, NATO will negotiate a "NATO and Russia Charter" giving the Russians a privileged role in shaping political and military decisions in Europe. But that charter will not be signed before NATO's expansion is agreed, lest Moscow tries to veto it. Everybody will hope that the Russian parliament doesn't get so upset that it cancels or refuses to ratify existing arms limitation treaties like START II.

Is all this strictly necessary? Probably not. Will Russia be so angered that it retaliates by kicking over the whole structure of European security treaties? On the evidence of Lebed's shifting position, probably not.

And will Europe be a safer and happier place when it is all done? Probably not.