THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 3, 1994 TAG: 9412030249
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Analysis
SOURCE: BY ROBERT A. RANKIN, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
For four decades, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization stood as a vital shield, protecting Western Europe from the imperialist Soviet Union.
Today NATO stands utterly helpless against a tiny ethnic army's brutal assault on its near-defenseless neighbors in bloody Bosnia.
And so the question resounds across the Atlantic: If the collective might of the United States and Western Europe can't stop a brush-fire war in Bosnia, then what good is their grand alliance? What good is NATO?
``It's almost reached the point where NATO may be irrelevant,'' Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., said this week. ``If they can't do what they're prepared to do, then what is their real purpose?''
A growing school of thought contends that NATO may be no longer fit to fight the battles of the emerging post-Cold War era.
``I would phase it out over the next five to 10 years,'' said Ted Galen Carpenter, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Maintaining America's commitment to NATO and keeping 100,000 U.S. troops in Europe costs U.S. taxpayers $90 billion a year. Carpenter contends that Western Europeans have a larger collective economy than ours and can afford to pay for their own defense.
But the real problem is not NATO itself; it is that the world around it has changed. NATO's member-states no longer face a common enemy and so have lost the clarifying unity of common purpose. As a military instrument, NATO remains matchless; confusion and dispute over how to use it are at the heart of today's debate.
``The real issue here is not an institutional one about NATO or the U.N.,'' said Bob Putnam, director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
``The real issue is (that) we and our closest allies have had a fundamental disagreement,'' Putnam said. ``In the past, the shadow of the bear off to the east made everybody gulp and compromise. The bear has disappeared, at least for the time being, and therefore people may be less willing to compromise. That may be the future - although I hope not.''
President Clinton leads America's bipartisan foreign policy establishment in insisting that NATO remains essential to European stability and that U.S. leadership of it is vital to America's global security.
Indeed, at several European conferences this weekend, Clinton and his top aides are pressing to expand NATO membership, seeking to anchor Eastern Europe's fledgling democracies, such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, firmly in the West by integrating their militaries into NATO.
Some Washington insiders share Clinton's vision.
``I would hope we don't rethink the importance of NATO and the U.S. role,'' said Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind..
But a rising chorus of skeptical outsiders argues that blind allegiance to the NATO ideal threatens to entangle America in more bloody sideshows, for they believe that Bosnia-like ethnic warfare is the most likely threat to European stability in the post-Cold War era.
``Hungary is at the top of the list for early (NATO) admission,'' Carpenter said. ``Hungary has ethnic disputes with no fewer than three neighboring states over the treatment of ethnic minorities.
``I don't want to see this country involved (via NATO) in a conflict between Hungary and Romania over mistreatment of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania'' Carpenter said. Two million ethnic Hungarians live under harsh Romanian rule there.
Widespread public sentiment resembling Carpenter's is precisely what crippled NATO in Bosnia. None of the NATO powers, despite their moral revulsion at the Bosnian Serbs' murderous ``ethnic cleansing'' of Bosnia's Muslims, was willing to pay the price necessary to stop it.
``They had moral interests at stake. Nobody wants to stand by and look at the horrible mess. . . . They wring their hands and say, `This is awful; we must do something.' . . . But they don't want to pay as much in blood and treasure as they would if their own security were at stake,'' said Richard Betts, director of security studies at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
The result was a blundering, ill-defined mess of a U.N.-NATO Bosnia policy. The United Nations sent in 24,000 ``peacekeepers'' to provide humanitarian relief, but not to impose peace. NATO was charged with protecting the U.N. troops, but NATO could not act without U.N. approval, which rarely came.
Washington wanted NATO to use ``robust'' air strikes to drive the Serbs to negotiate peace, but it refused to put any U.S. troops on the line as peacekeepers. Meanwhile, America's closest allies - Britain, France, Germany, even Russia - fiercely opposed serious NATO bombing. They said it would risk widening the Balkan war and would risk Serbian reprisals against their own troops among the 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers.
In short, none of the NATO powers wanted to use NATO's full power in Bosnia, and they disagreed bitterly over how to use it sparingly.
The allies' internal conflict not only crippled NATO's ability to act decisively; it also eroded any remnant of shared purpose among the NATO partners. That has dangerously weakened the historic alliance; London and Washington are feuding more bitterly over this than over any other dispute since the 1956 Suez Crisis.
``I don't think it's fair to say that Bosnia is a failure of NATO,'' said Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, D-Ind., outgoing chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. ``NATO was not formed for that purpose and is not capable of resolving ethnic problems of the kind you have in Bosnia. NATO is casting about to define its mission.''
That, skeptics says, is precisely the problem. by CNB