Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 17, 1994 TAG: 9401170015
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY MOSELEY CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
For leaders on this side of the Atlantic, that was the most reassuring aspect of Bill Clinton's first trip as president to their shores last week.
Some of them had suspected he had a different agenda from his predecessors; he was not merely putting domestic concerns ahead of foreign policy, but adopting a policy that downgraded Europe in the United States' strategic reckoning.
Not so, Clinton ever so tardily told his allies; the Atlantic relationship remains vital to the United States' well-being, and a minimum of 100,000 U.S. troops will remain in Europe indefinitely.
Not only that. The Europeans saw a youthful American president in Brussels, Belgium, exercising leadership in a troubled entity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He dominated its 11th summit - not with the panache of John F. Kennedy, the stridency of Lyndon Johnson or the long familiarity of George Bush, but with well-considered initiatives and an attention to detail that many found impressive.
But some of the other accomplishments of Clinton's trip, if they were such, may not be measurable in the short term. There still are question marks dancing around them, and none more so than the NATO decision on Bosnia.
The decision was to carry out air strikes, if necessary, to force Bosnian Serbs to allow the replacement of 300 Canadian peacekeepers in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica by Dutch troops and to open the airport at Tuzla, in central Bosnia, to deliver humanitarian supplies for an estimated 1 million civilians.
In the end, all 16 leaders voted for air strikes. The next few weeks will determine whether they meant it. If they didn't, NATO's future could be bleak.
Even if this commitment is kept, many observers will continue to find NATO weak-willed for having failed to pledge just as firmly to relieve the Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. A NATO resolution of August, reaffirmed at the Brussels summit, promised air strikes to prevent the strangulation of Sarajevo. Yet Sarajevo is being slowly strangled, and NATO won't admit it.
British officials said the French were worried about the risks to their troops in bombing positions around Sarajevo, and the British remained "very skeptical."
Clinton sought to make a "Partnership for Peace" with Eastern Europe the centerpiece of the NATO summit. This was a much criticized but innovative American proposal for denying immediate NATO membership to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic but holding open the prospect they can get into the club some day.
The proposal pacifies Russians worried about isolation in a new division of Europe and yet draws the Eastern countries into a step-by-step approach to a commitment for which they are not yet prepared.
The end result of this enterprise remains uncertain. NATO says it wants to avoid drawing a new line through Europe, yet will let the Eastern countries in eventually. Since Russia is unlikely to abandon its historic fear of isolation, how can NATO take on new members without drawing a line through Europe?
And what makes Clinton or any other NATO leader believe that, even after the democratic and economic transformation of the East is more advanced, the U.S. Congress and other member parliaments will be willing to extend security guarantees to a host of new countries?
These questions are unanswerable at the moment. But two things are clear. No one is saying so publicly, but the Baltic states and Ukraine have no hope of joining NATO, whatever happens to the other Eastern states; the feeling in the West is that Russia never could live with that.
There is one other uncertain feature of Partnership for Peace that few people noticed. NATO estimates it will cost $4 million to $10 million in the first year to fund it. Yet some major countries, Britain among them, are reluctant to promise even the modest amounts asked of them.
by CNB