Building A New NATO

Ronald D. Asmus; Richard L. Kugler; F. Stephen Larrabee

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1993

Article preview: first 500 of 4,174 words total.

Summary:  The West's challenge after the Cold War is to build a new NATO to secure the alliance's unstable eastern and southern flanks. An expanded alliance not only betters the odds for East-Central Europe's political and economic reform. It also reduces the dangers of German-Russian rivalry, instability spilling west and rampaging nationalism. The first step is a new transatlantic bargain, one that balances changed U.S. and European interests, and recognizes that the concerns of Europe's periphery are central to the continent as a whole.

Ronald D. Asmus, Richard L. Kugler and F. Stephen Larrabee are senior analysts at RAND. The views and conclusions expressed are their own and should not be interpreted as representing the views of RAND or any other agency sponsoring its research.

A NEW TRANSATLANTIC BARGAIN

THREE YEARS AFTER the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is headed toward crisis. Memories of democracy's triumph have faded. The immense problems facing the new democracies in the East are increasingly compounded by political gridlock, economic recession and resurgent nationalism. The revolutions of 1989 not only toppled communism; they unleashed a set of dynamics that have unraveled the peace orders of Yalta and Versailles. War in the Balkans, instability in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, growing doubts about the European Community's future as well as the future role of the United States-all underscore the lack of any stable post-Cold War European security order.

Nationalism and ethnic conflict have already led to two world wars in Europe. Whether Europe unravels for a third time this century depends on if the West summons the political will and strategic vision to address the causes of potential instability and conflict before it is too late. A new U.S.-European strategic bargain is needed, one that extends NATO'S collective defense and security arrangements to those areas where the seeds for future conflict in Europe lie: the Atlantic alliance's eastern and southern borders.

EUROPE'S CHANGED STRATEGIC LANDSCAPE

THE ENDOFTHE Cold War has wiped away the strategic distinction between Europe's center and periphery. Whereas the potential locus of conflict in Europe during the Cold War was located along the old inner-German border, Europe's new strategic challenges exist almost exclusively along two "arcs of crisis." The first is the eastern arc: the zone of instability running between Germany and Russia from northern Europe down through Turkey, the Caucasus and middle Asia. The second is the southern arc, running through northern Africa and the Mediterranean into the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

In the eastern arc especially, the Soviet collapse has left behind significant and unbalanced military forces and weapons inventories among nations experiencing a wave of instability and conflict generated by virulent nationalism. East-Central Europe is littered with potential mini-Weimar Republics, each capable of inflicting immense violence on the others. Paradoxically, while heavily armed, these countries nonetheless lack the ability to defend themselves against major outside aggressors. This is the case despite strong residual fears about the threat of a possibly resurgent Russia-a nation that has itself demonstrated real signs of instability, the potential for a shift to the right and flirtations with imperial restoration.

These factors combine to fuel an almost desperate search for security in the region, which itself reinforces the trends toward geopolitical competition, proliferation and instability, as the expectation builds that states may soon pursue unilateral attempts to gain real or perceived security. Ideological mobilization alongside a security vacuum is once again proving to be Europe's classic recipe for instability and conflict.

While these circumstances are seemingly located safely on Europe's periphery, for a number of reasons conflicts along either arc are in fact central to European security. First, conflicts in the arcs are increasingly generated by antidemocratic and anti-Western ideologies that threaten the liberal-democratic foundations of ...

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