[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 44 (Tuesday, April 15, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E654]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              BYE-BYE NATO

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. DAVID R. OBEY

                              of wisconsin

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 15, 1997

  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, Thomas Friedman, the respected international 
affairs columnist for the New York Times, has written an excellent 
column questioning the wisdom of the expansion of NATO.
  He raises important concerns about whether or not the expansion of 
NATO will, in fact, dilute it, making it less likely that NATO will 
serve as an effective military instrument to defend any of the 
countries under its umbrella.
  It is a sobering article and I urge every member of the 
administration to heed the concerns raised by Mr. Friedman:

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 14, 1997]

                              Bye-Bye NATO

                        (By Thomas L. Friedman)

       Brussels.--Some enterprising Russian p.r. experts recently 
     visited NATO headquarters and suggested a novel way to ease 
     tensions between an expanding NATO and Russia: Just change 
     NATO's name, the Russians suggested, because NATO is a four-
     letter word for Russians. So how about calling it TOMATO 
     (Trans-Oceanic Military Alliance and Treaty Organization), or 
     POTATO (Peace Organization for Trans-Atlantic Ties and 
     Operations), or maybe VODCA (Vanguard Organization for 
     Defense, Cooperation and Assistance)?
       NATO's savvy boss, Javier Solana, laughed off the Russian 
     proposal. But discussions with officials here left me 
     convinced that if NATO goes ahead with its expansion, just 
     about everything other than its name will be changing--and 
     that's too bad. I rather liked NATO the way it was--a tightly 
     knit group of like-minded democracies capable of taking on 
     any military foe in the world. Everyone is assuming that NATO 
     can expand and keep that focused identity. Don't believe it. 
     The real truth is NATO is now locked on a path of expansion 
     that will dilute its power every bit as much as baseball 
     expansion diluted Major League Pitching and made every 90-
     pound weakling a home-run threat.
       It didn't have to be this way. NATO has always had two core 
     functions. One was defense management--the commitment by each 
     member to defend the others in the event of attack. The other 
     was peace management--the commitment by NATO's 16 members to 
     share their defense plans and budgets so that everyone knew 
     what his neighbor was up to. Mutual defense kept peace 
     between NATO and Russia and peace management kept peace among 
     NATO's 16 members.
       The question NATO asked itself after the cold war was: How 
     do we preserve our defense strength while expanding our peace 
     management capabilities to stabilize newly liberated Central 
     Europe? It came up with a solid idea: Partnership for Peace. 
     P.F.P. was a junior NATO in which 27 non-NATO European 
     states--including Russia--engaged in joint exercises, sent 
     ambassadors to NATO, were educated on NATO standards, 
     discussed problems and participated with NATO in peacekeeping 
     in Bosnia. The one thing P.F.P. members didn't get was NATO's 
     commitment to mutual defense, which was confined to the core 
     16. The beauty of P.F.P. was that it preserved NATO's 
     core strength while creating a framework to fill the power 
     vacuum in Central Europe--without threatening Russia or 
     setting up a competition over who gets into NATO and who 
     doesn't.
       So what happened? Unfortunately, in 1996 the Clinton team 
     abandoned P.F.P. in favor of expanding NATO's core members. 
     It was a clinical effort to attract votes from Polish, Czech 
     and Hungarian Americans by promising their motherlands 
     membership. This silly decision set NATO on a slippery slope 
     to who knows where.
       NATO now has three options. One is that it eventually 
     expands to Russia's border, including the Baltic states 
     Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. If that happens, it will be 
     the end of NATO as a mutual defense alliance because there's 
     no way the U.S. Army is going to guarantee the Estonia-Russia 
     border. In this scenario NATO becomes just a mini-U.N. Or as 
     a senior NATO military officer told me: ``The more nations 
     that come in, the more NATO becomes just a collective 
     security organization, in which members watch each other--not 
     a collective defense group against a common enemy. That's not 
     the NATO we have now.''
       Scenario 2 is that NATO doesn't expand beyond Poland, 
     Hungary and the Czech Republic and tries to maintain its 
     current defense and peace management functions, with just 
     three new members. But then we'll have a permanent gray zone 
     of states between NATO and Russia. The states left out will 
     fight to get in and Russia will fight to keep them out.
       Scenario 3, the one the White House is counting on, is that 
     NATO begins to expand now but simultaneously deepens NATO-
     Russia cooperation and aid to Russia. This creates so many 
     incentives for Moscow to be nice that NATO will be able to 
     steadily creep toward the Russian border, and fill in the 
     gray zone with new members, without alienating Moscow.
       Which will it be? No one at NATO can tell you. In other 
     words, NATO expansion is a swan dive into an unknown future. 
     What a reckless way to deal with the most successful military 
     alliance in history.

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