[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 32 (Friday, March 20, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2351-S2354]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




PROTOCOLS TO THE NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY OF 1949 ON ACCESSION OF POLAND, 
                    HUNGARY, AND THE CZECH REPUBLIC

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       Treaty document 105-36, Protocols to the North Atlantic 
     Treaty of 1949 on Accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech 
     Republic.

  The Senate resumed consideration of the treaty.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I am going to speak today on the very 
important responsibility that the U.S. Senate has in ratifying the 
addition to the NATO treaty.
  I am a strong believer in the Senate's constitutional obligation and 
responsibility to advise and consent on treaties. Generally speaking, I 
also believe we have an equally strong obligation and responsibility to 
oversee American foreign policy. In fact, I think too

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often in this body we simply acquiesce to the President--regardless of 
party--when it comes to these responsibilities. Members on both sides 
of the aisle too often interpret the authority the Constitution gives 
to the President to conduct foreign policy as somehow superior to the 
authority the same document gives to us to oversee, advise, and 
consent.
  Because the Framers of our Constitution were concerned about the 
unchecked power of the executive branch, they placed the responsibility 
to advise and consent on all treaties in the U.S. Senate. I have read 
the Federalist Papers. I have studied the Constitution and what went 
into making the Constitution of the United States. It was clear that 
the Framers of the Constitution were very concerned about the king they 
had just left. And they put power in the legislative branch of 
Government to make sure that a treaty that would obligate the United 
States would be well thought out and not something that would be easily 
given by our Chief Executive. Because of that responsibility, I find 
myself--and the Senate in general--facing a dilemma when it comes to 
the question of whether or not to expand the North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization.

  On one side we have colleagues who strongly support the resolution of 
ratification. I respect their views, and I believe they are in the 
majority in this body. But throughout the course of the past few days 
of debate, I have heard some of those supporters speak out in an 
intemperate manner about the reservations other Members have raised. I 
have heard supporters say, in effect, that any reservation is a bad 
reservation, that the proposal to add these new members is moral and 
just and needs no further thought. We have been told that the United 
States owes these countries membership in NATO, and it has been implied 
that to question this assumption is to question the very merits of the 
cold war and NATO's role in winning that war.
  I was just a citizen during Desert Storm, and I watched intently the 
debate in the U.S. Senate on the resolution to approve sending our 
soldiers to Desert Storm. What struck me about that debate was that it 
was a wonderful debate, and it was what I thought the Senate would be 
and should be. It was Members speaking from the heart about what they 
believed their responsibilities were and how they would exercise those 
responsibilities in relation to what the President was asking them to 
do. I never heard one Member in that debate criticize another Member 
for having a different view. And I think that is what the Senate should 
be today as we debate NATO expansion.
  Many of us who have reservations about this proposal are strong 
supporters of NATO--I certainly am--and of American leadership within 
the alliance, because I think NATO is the best defense alliance that 
has ever been in the history of the world. I want to make sure that we 
preserve it. We understand, however, that there are many other places 
in the world where only the United States can and will lead. We cherish 
the role that NATO played in winning the cold war, and it is because of 
that commitment to support NATO that we take this responsibility to 
consider the ramifications of enlargement so seriously.
  Mr. President, many of us with reservations are not isolationists. 
Neither are we interventionists. We want to see the United States take 
its fair place in the world and its fair share of the responsibility, 
but we do not think it should be involved in every regional conflict, 
dissipating our strengths and endangering our role as a superpower 
capable of responding where no one else will.
  On the other side of the dilemma--in which many of us find ourselves, 
frankly--is the failure of the President of the United States to lead. 
While our colleagues who support NATO and support the enlargement 
vigorously oppose any reservations and conditions we may wish to 
debate, the fact is it was the President's responsibility as the 
executor of American foreign policy to negotiate these reservations and 
conditions.
  Instead, he all but promised the three countries under 
consideration--worthy countries--that their admission into the alliance 
was assured. He presented this to the Senate as a fait accompli, and 
now it is being suggested that any opposition or even reservation must 
be seen as isolationist or, as some colleagues in this body have 
suggested, as appeasement of the antidemocratic forces of the cold war.
  Mr. President, we have seen this approach to difficult foreign policy 
issues by the President before. In Bosnia, the President negotiated 
peace accords that required the involvement of tens of thousand of U.S. 
troops and then dared the Congress to oppose his decision to send those 
troops. More recently, in Iraq he sent tens of thousands of U.S. forces 
without having laid out any coherent mission.
  So what should the President have done? I think the responsibility of 
the President of the United States was to sit down with our NATO allies 
at the end of the cold war and say, ``We won the cold war. Now let's 
talk about what is the biggest threat to our collective body, and let's 
address that threat.''
  What is the purpose of NATO? That should have been the first 
question. Given our victory in the cold war and the consolidation of 
freedom and democracy in the former Soviet bloc, what should we do that 
would enhance the security of Europe and look to the security threats 
to all of us in the future? What is the role of the United States in a 
revised strategic alliance? Does the United States need to be the glue 
that holds Europe together? Or is this the time to start encouraging 
our European allies to take more responsibility for their own 
continental security? I am not saying there is the answer before us, 
but I say this should be the question.
  The second thing the President should have done before we started 
talking about specific countries is establish the criteria for 
membership, having negotiated a new post-world-war strategic rationale, 
as he should have done. Then the President should have organized the 
allies to start thinking about the criteria for new members. It would 
have been better to set these qualifications before personalities were 
involved.
  No. 3, having adopted a new strategy on admission and identifying the 
country that could help NATO execute that strategy, the next step for 
the President would have been to establish the fair share of the United 
States of America. He would have made it clear to the allies exactly 
what it is the United States would bear, mindful ever of the reality 
that we already pay for 25 percent of NATO's common costs. He would 
have discussed with the allies the amounts the United States already 
spends disproportionately to maintain the remainder of power in Asia 
and in the Middle East. He would have recounted those early debates in 
the United States about NATO membership 50 years ago when the Senate 
and President Truman agreed that the United States commitment could not 
continue at such levels forever if we were to maintain the capability 
of responding elsewhere in the world.
  It was President Truman who was thinking ahead at the time with the 
Congress of the United States and realized that there were limitations 
which must be addressed for the long term.
  Fourth. With a new strategic rationale, a new mission, new members 
identified and reasonable cost sharing, the President should then have 
established some mechanism to ensure that NATO was not importing into 
the alliance the border, ethnic or religious disputes that have riven 
Europe for centuries. He would have pointed to the ongoing conflict in 
the Balkans, the longstanding conflict between Greece and Turkey and 
seen the opportunity to leverage our allies' desire for NATO 
enlargement into a formal process of dispute resolution that would be 
well understood and accepted by all members present and future. Such a 
process would prevent the United States and other NATO allies from 
having to honor mutual defense commitments required by the alliance in 
the event of border or other conflicts that are not worthy of the 
alliance's involvement.
  We all know that this has not happened. Instead, the President has 
presented to us a proposal to add new members to the alliance--nothing 
more, nothing less. We know nothing about what it will cost the United 
States. The administration's own estimates have varied wildly. They are 
somewhere between $400 million and $125 billion. We are not considering 
an updated, new strategic rationale for

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the NATO alliance. We are not considering standard criteria for 
membership for other countries to have a precedent. We are not 
considering how the expanded alliance will handle future conflicts 
among members or between members and nonmembers.
  To put it simply, we are today debating who and when, and we should 
be debating how and why.
  That is the crux of my problem with this process. So it is left to 
the Senate to answer these questions and provide this definition. I 
commend the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, my friend, the 
senior Senator from North Carolina. He tried to do this work in his 
committee. He has established some good conditions and reporting 
requirements that are in the proposal before the Senate today. But 
because the President put the cart before the horse, we are facing a 
terrible dilemma. We are trying to put the criteria in place on the 
Senate floor that should have been negotiated before invitations were 
issued.
  So where are we now? We are considering three wonderful countries, 
and we are talking about the criteria and the cost and the new mission 
in the context of whether we would take these wonderful countries into 
NATO. I do not like to be faced with a dilemma of voting against these 
countries, the hopes of which have been raised to such high 
expectations. I am affected by that dilemma because every one of these 
countries has wonderful people who are trying very hard for democracy 
and a free economic system. I want to support these countries. I want 
to support NATO enlargement. The key for me is whether we can set 
responsible conditions that should have been set before we ever got 
into invitations for membership.
  I hope I will be able to do it because I hope the Senate will act in 
a responsible manner and do what the President should have done, and 
that is provide for the mission of a post-cold-war NATO, look at the 
fair share that America should put into European security, establish a 
border resolution process for disputes, and make sure that the criteria 
are set so that we will not raise false hopes or no hopes from other 
countries that will be seeking membership.
  Let us talk about where we are now for our own security interests. 
Our defense resources are being stretched to the limit. We are leading 
all over the globe. We have tens of thousands of U.S. forces in Asia. 
We have thousands in Korea. We have thousands in Bosnia, with thousands 
more backing them up. I have already mentioned the Middle East where it 
seems only the United States is able to lead in that vital area.
  While these obligations have grown since the cold war, the forces we 
have to meet them have decreased. In fact, defense spending has 
declined by 40 percent in real terms since the peak in 1985. Our 
ability to modernize and prepare those forces for the 21st century 
threat has been mortgaged against today's more urgent, though 
ultimately less important, priorities.

  Regardless of the cost, our intention to add security obligations 
seems to contradict the reality of declining defense budgets and the 
general post-cold-war retrenchment that is taking place in all of the 
Western democracies. French President Jacques Chirac has already flatly 
declared that France does not intend to raise its contribution to NATO 
because of the cost of enlargement.
  It seems fitting that we are discussing these issues even as we are 
preparing to approve an additional $1/2 billion to the ongoing U.S. 
mission in Bosnia. It is a warning about cost estimates and reality. 
This administration estimated the cost of the operation in Bosnia at 
less than $2 billion. Recently, Secretary of Defense Cohen acknowledged 
that we are approaching $8 billion, and now our mission has no 
withdrawal date so there is no limit.
  Mr. President, we are drawing $8 billion out of a shrinking defense 
budget, and we are having trouble recruiting in the Army, and we are 
having trouble keeping our F-16's in parts. What are we thinking? Have 
we looked at the big picture here? So this is why I and other Members 
are going to try to impose cost containment on the expansion of NATO. 
It is long past time that we tried to establish somewhat more equity 
between the amount we spend and the amount our allies spend to defend 
their countries. Right now, the United States spends nearly 4 percent 
of our gross national product on defense. Our allies spend an average 
of 2.5 percent. In NATO, we bear about 25 percent of the common costs. 
Our next closest ally spends 18 percent. So we will be introducing 
several amendments to establish equity for our fair share of NATO. We 
want to pay our fair share, but I am not sure we are there yet.
  I am also concerned about the question of collective security. In an 
era when border and ethnic disputes may be on the rise, we obviously 
need to look at the example of the Balkans to see what could happen 
with the United States pledging, as we have in NATO, to consider an 
attack on an ally as an attack on the United States of America.
  I am aware that the President and the Secretary of State have assured 
us that the very promise of NATO enlargement has served to hasten 
resolution of many longstanding disputes. Certainly, it seems that 
Hungary has worked quite hard to reach an agreement with Romania 
regarding the ethnic minorities and borders, and there are other good 
examples.
  However, NATO is not a stakeholder in that resolution. Should the 
alliance expand to include Hungary as a member and should Hungary's 
agreement with Romania break down, for whatever reason, we would face a 
significant problem of alliance management as we work to resolve the 
dispute. Frankly, we have seen the burden imposed on the alliance by 
the ongoing dispute of Greece and Turkey. It makes little sense to pass 
up this opportunity to fix this problem.
  So I have an amendment that will require the U.S. representative at 
NATO to enter into discussions with our allies on establishing such a 
process. My proposal for doing so would be for the North Atlantic 
Council to establish a formal mechanism for resolving disputes. There 
are a variety of approaches to do this. I am just going to suggest one 
to be like that used in American labor disputes. If such a process were 
adopted by the North Atlantic Council, countries would have the 
opportunity to resolve the dispute among themselves in this way. If by 
a certain date the parties cannot resolve the dispute, the North 
Atlantic Council could implement the dispute resolution mechanism. Each 
disputant would select a NATO country to represent it. The two 
representative members would together select a third member. These 
three NATO members could then form a dispute resolution council to 
consider the matter and help negotiate a settlement. Once a settlement 
is established, the disputants would have a specific period to accept 
or reject it and conduct the bilateral diplomacy needed to ratify it 
according to each country's laws. If the dispute resolution council's 
negotiated settlement is rejected, the rejecting disputant would 
forfeit their article 5 collective security protection.

  I have discussed this process, or something similar to it, with the 
Foreign Ministers of the three prospective allies. Their responses were 
positive. Their only question was that they wanted to ensure they would 
not be treated differently from present members of the alliance. That 
is a fair statement, and I agree with them. It should apply to present 
and future members. This is an opportunity to help the situation we 
face now and for any future developments we may not see on the horizon.
  There are other ways that we can improve the resolution before us. 
NATO needs a new strategic rationale. We must ask the question, Why do 
we have this great alliance in the post-cold-war era? What should be 
the goal for future alliance in Europe? What is our collective 
strategic need? And what is our threat? How does expanding the alliance 
help us with other priorities such as deterring the spread and use of 
nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction? We are putting 
the cart before the horse by adding new members to the alliance without 
first answering the question as to what those members will be asked to 
do and what purpose the alliance serves for the future.
  We have a golden opportunity to recreate this remarkable alliance in 
ways that were not possible when it was forged in the crucible of the 
cold war. If we miss this opportunity, we could sow seeds for the 
eventual demise

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of the alliance if it loses its focus and becomes mired in all manner 
of regional disputes. We should not be debating who and when. We should 
be debating how and why.
  Mr. President, I take very seriously my responsibilities as a Member 
of the Senate to do what is best for America, what is best for our 
present troops that are protecting our security and the security of 
generations to come. How we approach our obligation to European 
security is a key part of the future security of the United States. We 
must establish our place in the world, our responsibilities in the 
world and make sure that we can cover those responsibilities with the 
strength and integrity that our word as the greatest superpower in the 
world should have. If we do this on a piecemeal basis, without laying 
the groundwork for the strength of this alliance, we could risk losing 
the alliance in the long term and we could risk losing the strength of 
America. I will not allow that to happen without at least speaking for 
what I think would maintain the place for America in the world, the 
strength of our country, and making sure that we have the ability to be 
the beacon for what is the best of people and that we have the strength 
to back it up. Our decision on the way we approach this alliance, this 
treaty, and the future of this alliance is key to the future of 
America.
  I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.
  Mr. CRAIG addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, let me associate myself with the remarks of 
the Senator from Texas. She is always very thoughtful on these issues 
and spends the time it must take to understand them. I appreciate, not 
only her concern, but what she is offering as a constructive approach 
toward what might otherwise be a very frustrating effort to expand NATO 
without, certainly, the consideration of the impact of that expansion.
  Mr. President, this morning I come to the floor not to speak about 
NATO, so let me, at this time, ask unanimous consent that I be allowed 
to speak up to 40 minutes as in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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