New Looks at NATO. (Review Essays)

Suddenly, after 11 September, Russia is an ally and NATO is unimportant. It is some-times forgotten that alliances are based on interests, not on abstract notions of community. Russia and America, at least for while, have common interests in combating Islamic terrorists. Before, we criticized Russia for brutality in Chechnya; now we stay silent. In 2001 NATO invoked Article 5--an attack on one is an attack on all--of the 1949 treaty for the first time, but this requires nothing specific from member countries, and that is what Europe delivered. What can NATO do in the Middle East? If responsibilities there fall exclusively on the United States, NATO will slide into irrelevance. Considering what could go wrong in the Gulf region--Saudi oil and Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamist terrorists-the Cold War in Europe may seem like extended rest and recreation. One wonders if books on NATO enlargement will interest more than historians. Gale Mattox and Arthur Rachwald, both professors of political science at the US Naval Academy, have edited and contributed to Enlarging NATO: The National Debates, collection of country-by-country reviews explaining how present NATO members, new members, and nonmembers to the east reacted to the enlargement that was formally proposed in 1994 until the addition of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999. The essays present great deal of material--including public and editorial opinion, and parliamentary debates--and will be valuable to historians trying to reconstruct the episode. Each country handled the question differently, on the basis of its perceived national interests, but two generalizations stand out: (1) no country (except Russia) made it major issue, and (2) it was an elite decision with little citizen input. Poland is an exception, as many Poles were enthusiastic about joining. Czechs and Hungarians were lukewarm but went along with their leaders' preferences. NATO membership offers US-backed security and opens the door to the European Union. We might recall here that most Spaniards did not want to join NATO, but Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, head of party that had been anti-NATO, persuaded his countrymen to vote for it in 1986 referendum. His helper, trendy leftist Javier Solana, was scathing about NATOin the 1977 elections. Solana eventually became Secretary General of NATO, and an excellent one at that. Career advantage generates its own enthusiasm. (In political science, this is called rational-choice theory.) Russia paid more attention to NATO enlargement than anyone else, argues contributor Irina Kobrinskaya of the Moscow Center of the East-West Institute. Russian politicians played the nationalist and threat cards and claimed NATO actions in Bosnia and Kosovo proved their point. We don't know if Moscow really believes that NATO is threat. Actually, NATO has some utility only if Moscow sees it as potential threat. Balkan deployments are more than peace operations; they are exercises and demonstrations, and it is just as well the Russians don't like them, although polite people do not speak of such things in public. Thomas Szayna, as part of RAND project for the US Air Force, presents the most methodological and technical case in NATO Enlargement, 2000-2015. He assumes that NATO has already transformed itself into a true security community and has only residual collective defense function. (Then what good is it?) NATO, he claims, has accepted power projection role. (Projecting into where? Into Chechnya? The Middle East?) The fleeting references to the 1999 Kosovo campaign suggest that Szayna had largely completed the study before Operation Allied Force. …