Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 9, 1993 TAG: 9312150004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL MANDELBAUM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Polish President Lech Walesa issued a joint statement with Yeltsin noting Poland's desire to join the NATO, the Western security alliance that had opposed the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and stating Russia's ``understanding'' of this desire.
The idea is a good one. The inclusion of Poland - and of Hungary and the Czech Republic, the two other formerly Communist countries most firmly committed to democracy and free markets - would be good for them, good for the West and good for Russia too, provided it is accompanied by a clear definition of a new NATO policy toward the former Soviet Union.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic seek full participation in NATO along with membership in the European Community as a way of anchoring themselves firmly and irreversibly in the West. Their pro-Western governments wish to strengthen the forces within their countries committed to consolidating democracy and building market economies.
Poland, the largest and strategically most important of them, faces no immediate threat.
Membership in NATO is, for the Poles, a way to ensure no threat will arise in the event that Russian political forces opposed to Boris Yeltsin and democracy and interested in re-creating the Soviet empire should take power in Moscow.
Because Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic face no imminent threat, the West would not risk war by admitting these countries to NATO. Nor would their membership saddle the alliance with internal territorial and political disputes of the kind that set Greece and Turkey at odds with each other during the Cold War.
Including the three Eastern European countries in NATO would bring benefits not only to them but to the West as well.
It would ensure stability on Germany's eastern border. It would extend the zone of stability and democracy in Europe eastward, thereby consolidating some of the gains of the Cold War. Perhaps most important, NATO membership for these three countries would begin the long, complicated and necessary process of transforming NATO from a defensive alliance against a threat that no longer exists into a broader security community capable of contributing to the establishment of democracy and the maintenance of peace.
Part of that process may well involve undertaking ``out of area'' missions, such as policing a negotiated settlement in the former Yugoslavia. Here Poland could be particularly useful.
As a country with a proud military tradition and a strong sense of international responsibility, Poland would likely be more willing to furnish troops for such operations than many Western European members of the alliance.
NATO's European members are not unanimously enthusiastic about opening their ranks to Eastern Europe. Many in Western Europe want the alliance to remain exactly as it is, as an insurance policy against the revival of a threat from the east and as a mechanism for preventing the ``renationalization'' of defense policy, by which they mean independent German foreign and defense policies.
The only way to perpetuate NATO, however, may be to change it. Unless the alliance adapts to the new circumstances of the post-Cold War world, public support for it, especially in North America, may wither.
As Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the most influential Republican voice on foreign policy and a supporter of expanding alliance membership, recently put it, ``The choice is not between the current NATO and a new NATO but rather between a new NATO and no NATO.''
Were it to accept the three Eastern European countries, the alliance would have to establish a timetable for their accession to membership. The most important issue this prospect raises, however, is NATO's relationship to the countries to its east. Specifically, expansion to the borders of the former Soviet Union unavoidably raises the question of NATO's approach to that vanished empire's two most important successor states: Russia and Ukraine. The suspicions and multiple sources of conflict between them make the relationship between these two new and unstable countries, both with nuclear weapons on their territory, the most dangerous and potentially the most explosive on the planet today.
An expanded NATO must contribute what it can to promoting peaceful relations between them, while avoiding the appearance either of constructing an anti-Russian coalition or washing its hands of any concern for Ukrainian security.
There is no more difficult task for the United States and its European allies and none more urgent. To the extent that their accession to NATO provides an occasion for addressing that task seriously, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic will have performed yet another service for the West.
\ Michael Mandelbaum is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and director of the Project on East-West Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.
\ The Washington Post
by CNB