U.S.-Russian summit in Helsinki sells NATO expansion idea

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): When the question of expanding NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) into Eastern Europe first came up, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott warned that it was "provocative and badly timed, with what is going on in Russia." Nevertheless,U.S. President Bill Clinton will spend Thursday and Friday in Helsinki trying to persuade Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO expansion is a good idea. It will be an uphill struggle.

The turn-about in American policy happened only in the past two years, mainly as a result of insistent pleading by the Eastern Europeans themselves. Having spent decades under the Soviet yoke, they wanted security guarantees for the future even though today's democratic and militarily enfeebled Russia poses no threat to them.

Washington's original attempt to finesse the problem, a vaguely defined 'Partnership for Peace' that included NATO, the former Soviet satellites, and Russia itself, satisfied nobody.

Eastern European governments eager for economic development would probably drop their demand for military guarantees if they were able to join the European Union, but over seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall the EU has yet to open membership talks with a single ex-Warsaw Pact country. Many suspect that the EU's current obsession with achieving monetary union is mainly a way of dodging the difficult question of eastward expansion.

So NATO was the only Western club that Eastern Europeans could join -- and since there are a lot more American voters descended from Polish, Czech and Hungarian immigrants than from Russians, those three countries are going to get their way. (It doesn't hurt that the new U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, is of Czech origin herself, but it was already a done deal).

Clinton's meeting with Yeltsin in Helsinki, therefore, is not really about whether Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary (plus maybe Slovenia and Rumania) should be invited to join the western alliance at the next NATO summit meeting in Madrid in July. That has already been decided. This is just a damage-control session where the West is trying to find ways of allaying Russian outrage.

That will be tricky, because the Russians are very outraged. Public and elite opinion in Russia is close to unanimous in opposing NATO expansion, and not just because of the ancestral Russian fear of 'encirclement'. The Russians feel betrayed -- and they do have a point.

The West is breaking a formal promise to Moscow, made at the time of German reunification in 1990, that if Soviet forces were withdrawn from Eastern Europe, NATO would not move in to replace them. Unfortunately, Moscow didn't get the promise in writing.

The Russians have full transcripts of the February, 1990 conversations in which then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker gave Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev categorical assurances that "the military presence or jurisdiction of NATO would not be expanded even one inch in an easterly direction."

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, still the leader of NATO's second-largest member, gave identical promises to Gorbachev, and nobody in NATO disputes the validity of the transcripts. The western governments just ignore them, because the promises were never enshrined in a formal treaty.

The other reason Russians feel betrayed is because adding 60 million Poles, Czechs and Hungarians to NATO will shift the military balance in Europe sharply to Moscow's disadvantage.

Back in the days of the Cold War, western strategists used to argue that the Warsaw Pact's three-to-one superiority over NATO in tanks proved Moscow's aggressive intentions. Incorporating Polish, Czech and Hungarian forces will give NATO a total of 17,664 tanks, more than three times what Russia has in Europe.

No sane person believes that NATO actually plans to attack Russia, but it is not enough to say 'just trust us'. By NATO's own logic, Moscow should now fear NATO's aggressive intentions.

In private, western diplomats point out to their Russian counterparts that it is safer to bring the Eastern Europeans into NATO, because otherwise their fear of Russia would have them making secret alliances that might even extend to include the Baltic states and Ukraine. But you can't say that in public.

So what will Clinton actually offer Yeltsin in Helsinki? None of the three things the Russians want most: a written guarantee that NATO will not deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members; a written guarantee that no foreign NATO troops or permanent bases will be deployed there; and a right of veto over the future membership of Ukraine and the Baltic republics.

NATO is perfectly prepared to declare that it has "no intention, now or in the foreseeable future", of moving troops and nuclear weapons into Eastern Europe. However, the Russians can't be expected to take the West's word on this sort of thing again.

A more fruitful approach would be to offer the early revision of the Conventional Forces Europe (CFE) treaty, which leaves Russia's forces in Europe greatly inferior to NATO's. The CFE was negotiated in the days when all the tanks in Eastern Europe belonged to the Warsaw Pact and counted towards Russia's total, and it is grossly unfair in the post-Cold War circumstances.

Russia cannot afford to build more weapons now, so the CFE's renegotiation would have to aim at cutting NATO forces down -- and especially on trimming the forces of the new Eastern European members. As a western diplomat remarked recently, "NATO enlargement is so important for these applicant countries that they are ready to sacrifice on the arithmetic."

Would this be enough to placate the Russians? Maybe, if it were combined with a high-profile new NATO-Russia joint security arrangement to salve their hurt feelings. But mere verbal agreements will not be enough. After their experience in 1990, the Russians want it in writing.