NATO's Expensive Trip East: The Folly of Enlargement

Amos Perlmutter and Ted Galen Carpenter

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1998

Article preview: first 500 of 2,411 words total.

Summary:  Everybody wants to believe that expanding NATO won't cost much, but they are wrong. Extending military guarantees is a big, and expensive, step.

Amos Perlmutter is Professor of Government at American University. Ted Galen Carpenter is Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

Advocates of NATO enlargement speak in nebulous terms about promoting cooperation and stability throughout Europe. They downplay NATO's military significance, portraying the organization as primarily a political association for the post-Cold War era. But NATO is first and foremost a military alliance intended to protect its members from attack. If NATO moves eastward as planned, admitting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic by the end of the decade, the United States and the other current members will undertake new and potentially far-reaching security obligations, a point that seems to elude proponents of NATO enlargement when the issue of financial cost is addressed.

There have been three major studies of enlargement's cost-one by the Congressional Budget Office in 1996, another by scholars at the Rand Corporation in the same year, and a February 1997 Pentagon report to Congress. Even NATO is preparing its own cost estimate, narrowing the definition of enlargement's expenses to only those additional costs that will be common to all members, primarily communications, air defense, and other infrastructure upgrades. NATO's military leaders apparently believe that expansion can be accomplished for a maximum of $2 billion-and perhaps as little as $1.3 billion-over ten years. That is less than one-tenth of the Pentagon's estimate, and one-fortieth of the CBO's lowest figure.

The three earlier studies are more complete than the NATO effort, including not only the common costs, but also the cost of modernizing new members' military forces. Still, they reached optimistic conclusions about the total cost and the portion that the United States will have to pay. All three studies are flawed-although the upper-end estimates in the CBO report are based on plausible assumptions. The Rand and Pentagon figures are little more than wishful thinking based on Pollyannaish security scenarios. They ignore long-accepted conclusions about the requisites of providing credible security commitments to vulnerable front-line states. Their assumption that American taxpayers will bear only a small percentage of enlargement's costs is even more dubious, for it ignores severe financial constraints and adverse political factors affecting both new and current European members of NATO.

THREE PRICES, ONE PRODUCT

The CBO report argues that "it is difficult to determine what NATO would need to do to provide an adequate defense for the Visegrad [Central European] nations. In the current environment, NATO can probably spend as much or as little as it likes to undertake expansion." The CBO’s analysts explore the probable costs of five options, from the least ambitious-helping a new member defend itself against a border skirmish or a limited attack by a regional power-to four more ambitious options that focus on the possible threat posed by a resurgent Russia. These include projecting NATO air power or German-based ground forces eastward to defend the Central European states; moving stocks of equipment; and stationing a limited number of NATO forces forward. The CBO’s cost estimates for the five options over a 15-year period, 1996 to 2010, range from $61 billion to $125 billion. Of that total, the United ...

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