CIAO DATE: 02/02

NATO's Past, NATO's Future

John Lewis Gaddis
Department of History, Yale University

Joint Workshop on Europe and Transatlantic Security: Issues and Perspectives
Kandersteg, Switzerland
August 25-27 2000

The Geneva Centre for Security Policy

Introduction

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization stands at a crossroads. Critical choices lie ahead that will determine its future. I begin my paper this way because it is customary to begin pronouncements on NATO with this kind of statement. Indeed papers and speeches on NATO have been beginning this way through the half-century of the alliance's existence - and yet NATO never quite reaches whatever crisis the speaker or writer has in mind. NATO seems to have a life of its own, which is remarkably detached from the shocks and surprises that dominate most of history, certainly Cold War history. And NATO's members, both actual and aspiring, seem bent on keeping it that way.

So what is a crossroad anyway in historical terms? Most of my colleagues, I think, would say that it's a turning point: a moment at which it becomes clear that the status quo can no longer sustain itself, at which decisions have to be made about new courses of action, at which the results of those decisions shape what happens for years to come. The Cold War was full of such moments: the Korean War, Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech, the Hungarian and Suez crises, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Six Day War, the Tet offensive, Nixon's trip to China, the invasion of Afghanistan, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War itself.

What strikes me as a historian, though, is how little impact these turning points had on NATO's history - even General deGaulle, who tried to turn himself personally into a turning point. The structure and purposes of the alliance today are not greatly different from what they were when NATO was founded. Which is to say that NATO's history, compared to that of most other Cold War institutions, is uneventful, bland, and even (let us be frank) a little dull.

That very uneventfulness, though, is turning out to be one of the more significant aspects of Cold War history. It surprised the historians, who have been able to cite no other example of a multi-national alliance that has had the robustness, the durability, the continuity, some might say the apparent immortality, of this one. It has also surprised the international relations theorists, for it is a fundamental principle of their discipline that alliances form when nations balance against threats. It follows, then, that as threats dissipate, alliances should also - and yet this one shows no signs of doing so. An instrument of statecraft, which is what an alliance normally is, has in this instance come to be regarded as a fundamental interest of statecraft. That requires explanation, which is what I should like to attempt here.

I.

Let me begin, perhaps improbably, with furniture. A table normally has four legs, the removal of any one of which will render it unstable. But if it should have twice or even three times the normal number, then we could expect that the table would remain upright even if several of the legs should crack, or rot, or get sawed off. Its stability would be, as the political scientists like to say, "overdetermined." NATO, I think, is like that: its durability stems from its multiple purposes - from the fact that it has served, if I may shift my metaphor, as a single stone aimed at three different birds. For as someone years ago said with brutal economy but total accuracy, NATO's function has always been to keep the Russians out, to keep the Americans in, and to keep the Germans down.

Because only the first of these objectives - containing the Russians - could be publicly advertised during the Cold War, it was to be expected that, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the future of NATO would have seemed to many people to have been in doubt. But the other two objectives have been there all along, operating behind the scenes in an early version of what we would today call the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Their continued relevance, I think, is what accounts not only for NATO's survival but for its enduring vitality in the post-Cold War era. So let me discuss each of these functions in somewhat greater detail.

II.

First, keeping the Russians out. It is hardly necessary to revisit the circumstances that led to NATO's formation in 1949:

How the West Europeans, and especially the British, and particularly that most formidable of British foreign secretaries, Ernest Bevin, began making the argument, late in 1947, that the strategy of containment, the rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine and the far more valuable economic assistance promised the Europeans in the form of the Marshall Plan would not suffice to restore self-confidence among them: that there would have to be some kind of American security guarantee.

How the Russians, with their characteristic bumbling, reinforced Bevin's argument with what seemed to be a particularly aggressive set of initiatives in the last half of 1947 and the first half of 1948: the apparent revival of the old Comintern in its new guise as the Cominform; the coup that transformed Czechoslovakia - as Munich had a decade earlier - from a promising democracy into a subservient satellite state; the threats to Tito's Yugoslavia for having challenged Moscow's claim to ideological infallibility; the harsh but as it turned out surprisingly ineffective blockade of Berlin.

How the Americans, who had hoped to see the emergence of a self-sufficient "third force" in non-communist Europe, now came to the realization that this was not going to happen: that they would have to provide both explicit assurances and the actual means of defense, thereby violating their long-standing policy of avoiding "entangling alliances" in peacetime.

How in April, 1949, the representatives of twelve states came together in Washington to sign the North Atlantic Treaty, Article V of which pledged that each member of the alliance would regard an attack on any other member as an attack on itself - language that was clearly aimed deterring, and hence containing, the Soviet Union.

How the alliance later expanded to include Greece and Turkey in 1952, West Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982, still with this fundamental purpose of containing the Russians in mind.

There is no way to know, even now, whether NATO succeeded in keeping the Russians out of Europe, for we know too little, as yet, about how, or even whether, they planned to come in. Did they ever intend an actual invasion and military occupation? Or was the plan to subvert non-communist Europe from within, capitalizing on what was then the widespread popularity, and at the same time the ideological reliability, of the French, Italian, and other West European communist parties? Or did Moscow require only a live and let live arrangement with the West that would have provided for the Soviet Union's security, and nothing more? Given the rarity with which one finds Mein Kampf - like blueprints in history, given the difficulty of distinguishing the contingency plans we may discover in the archives from the actual intentions that may have existed inside the heads of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and other Soviet leaders, we may never know just how serious the Soviet threat to Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean actually was.

For the purposes of NATO's history, though, it is not terribly important that we find out. What was really significant was the sense of insecurity that existed in the minds of the Europeans themselves in 1947-48, together with the indisputable fact that the creation of NATO largely alleviated it. NATO managed to convince most of its members that, if the Russians ever did attack, they would not be abandoned. It provided psychological reassurance, and that in itself was its most important accomplishment. But that reassurance that the Russians would be kept out of Europe depended on keeping the Americans in; and that brings us to the second major function that NATO served - the first one that falls under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

III.

Keeping the Americans in. One of NATO's most persistent critics, George Kennan, wondered at the time of its founding why the Europeans should need an explicit assurance that the Americans would use their overwhelming strength to prevent Europe from again falling under the domination of a potentially hostile power. "What in the world did they think we had been doing in Europe these last four or five years? Did they suppose we had labored to free Europe from the clutches of Hitler merely in order to abandon it to those of Stalin?"

There were two answers to this question, one rational and one emotional. The rational answer was that in World War II - and also in World War I - the Americans had delayed entering the conflict until it was almost too late, and Europe had suffered greatly as a result. If the Soviet Union followed the Germans' example and made yet another bid for hegemony in Europe, there was no doubt that the Americans would resist - and that they would in the end probably prevail. The only question was: what, if anything, would be left of Europe this time around? It was the fear of how long it would take to be rescued, more than it was doubt that rescue would eventually come, that led the Europeans to press for an explicit and unambiguous American security guarantee.

But there was also an emotional answer to Kennan's question. It had to do with something he himself had said about containment: that its chief purpose was to rebuild self-confidence among the Europeans. But that meant relinquishing the initiative to the Europeans, for only they were in a position to say when their own self-confidence had been restored. If they insisted that they would not be self-confident until they had a formal military guarantee from the United States, then who - certainly not Kennan - was in a position to argue with them?

The Europeans played these two cards for all they were worth. It was not enough, they claimed, to rely upon the formal commitment the United States had made, in the North Atlantic Treaty, to come to the defense of its other signatories if they were attacked. It was not enough to rely upon the military assistance the United States could provide its allies in order that they could build up their own forces. It became necessary, in the end, to put American troops - and later American nuclear weapons - into Europe, indeed to put them in the most exposed positions, so that if a Soviet attack came they would be the first to receive the full force of it and would have no choice but to resist.

NATO was an unusual alliance, therefore, in that it dramatically increased the risks its dominant hegemon would run. This is not the normal pattern for alliances, which generally seek to diminish risks. Nor was the issue of military deployments the only one in which the United States deferred to the wishes of its allies. Indeed I would argue that this pattern of deference - unusual on the part of a hegemon with respect to its smaller and weaker members - became one of the most striking features of the NATO alliance.

The United States pushed its allies to beef up their own conventional forces during the early 1950s, but when it became apparent that they would not or could not do so, it shifted to an alternative (and cheaper) form of deterrence in the form of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, it maintained its own troop commitment to NATO, despite Eisenhower's dogged determination to end it and make Europeans stand on their own feet.

The United States failed to explore whatever opportunities there may have been for a negotiated settlement with the Russians at the time of the Stalin note on Germany in 1952, the Malenkov initiative of 1953, the Geneva Conference of 1955, and the Berlin controversy in 1958-59 - for fear that such talks might demoralize or in some other way weaken its allies.

The United States responded to European concerns that US would not actually use its nuclear weapons with a long series of efforts to involve the Europeans in nuclear decision-making - culminating in its cumbersome proposal for a Multilateral Nuclear Force in early 1960s. It dropped this only when it became apparent that the Americans had come to believe in it more than the Europeans did.

The United States reacted with remarkable equanimity to a whole series of challenges to its leadership from one of its allies - DeGaulle's France - even to the point of tolerating French withdrawal from military cooperation with the alliance while allowing the French to continue to benefit from NATO's military protection.

The United States deferred to the desires of the Europeans - notably the West Germans - for a more forthcoming policy toward the USSR and its East European satellites during the 1960s and early 1970s. It went along with Ostpolitik, rather than resisting it.

The United States responded, again, to European anxieties over American nuclear commitment to Europe - this time as result of Soviet SS-20 deployment in mid-1970s - with schemes to bolster credibility of American commitment: ultimately the Pershing II and cruise missile deployment of 1983.

This was, in short, an alliance where the critical decisions were made by the smaller client states, while the hegemon scrambled to adjust itself to their wishes. That's not what one would have expected, given the power disparities that existed between them. It is certainly not the pattern found in previous alliance relationships, nor did it show up in NATO's great Cold War rival, the Warsaw Pact. NATO worked, paradoxically, because the Americans for the most part let the Europeans run it. But, in yet another paradox, the very restraint the United States exhibited wound up reinforcing its authority. For despite its superior power, the Europeans never saw the United States - or, by extension, NATO - as a threat. They thus granted NATO - and by extension the American presence in Europe - a degree of legitimacy arising out of consent that its rival alliance never enjoyed.

IV.

Keeping the Germans down. One of the few things the Americans did insist on was that those Germans not under Soviet occupation be integrated into, not excluded from, postwar European economic and security structures. It was clear from the outset that the Western occupation zones and after 1949 the West German state would receive Marshall Plan aid. It was equally clear that the French and other victims of Nazi aggression weren't at all happy about this, and that another of the attractions NATO had for them was that it would prevent an economically rehabilitated Germany from becoming again a militarily dangerous Germany.

To be sure, the European members of NATO had not anticipated that the Americans would call, quite so soon, for rearming the West Germans. Indeed, the Americans hadn't anticipated this either: the move came just after the Korean War broke out in the summer of 1950, at a time when it seemed that that event might be only a prelude to a Soviet attack in Europe, one for which NATO, without West German manpower, would be woefully ill-prepared. The French attempted to deflect this process with their plan for a European Defense Community that would have included the Germans but not as a German army; by 1954, though, they themselves had rejected that scheme. That left West German membership in NATO as the only alternative, and by the following year that had been arranged under the condition that the West Germans would accept the continued presence of other NATO troops on their territory, and that they would forego the development of nuclear weapons.

What's interesting about this arrangement is the nearly universal approval it elicited:

From the French and the other Europeans, who had grown quite comfortable with the idea of "dual containment" - that NATO's role was to contain both the Russians and the Germans, but that while the first task would be accomplished by exclusion, the second would work through inclusion. The first function would continue to be publicly announced; the second would be privately understood. As in the case of NATO's role in keeping the Americans in, the policy would again be one of "don't ask, don't tell."

From the Germans, who - reflecting a considerable amount of doubt about themselves - showed themselves less enamored of the full trappings of sovereignty than even their allies the Americans had suspected: witness the persistent efforts of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations to give the Germans at least the appearance of access to nuclear weapons, something the Germans eventually decided they didn't want or need.

And from, most interestingly, the Soviet Union itself, which found that it rather liked the idea of NATO if one of its unacknowledged purposes was to be the containment of the Germans. Hence the significance of Konrad Adenauer's reception in Moscow in 1955, which seemed to mark the acceptance on the part of Kremlin leaders that the Soviet Union was better off with part of Germany under NATO control than with all of it under German control. This peculiar sense that NATO served Moscow's interests persisted down through 1970s, by which time the Soviets were actually letting it be known that they opposed the proposals of Senator Mike Mansfield and others for a unilateral reduction of American troops in Europe.

One of the important reasons so many Europeans took the continued importance of NATO for granted after the Cold War ended was their unstated assumption - don't ask, don't tell - that it would continue to contain a Germany that was now to be unified as a result of that event. That was of course the major reason Gorbachev in 1990 went along with the idea that a reunified Germany could continue to be a member of NATO. What's even more remarkable is that so many Germans themselves continue to see NATO as a necessary institution - that they accepted the need to be contained.

V.

Two years before NATO was created, General John R. Deane, the former American military attaché in Moscow, published a book called The Strange Alliance. It dealt, of course, with the four years between 1941 and 1945 in which the United States and the Soviet Union had cooperated to bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany. But there was nothing strange about the collapse of that alliance once its enemy had disappeared: that is the normal pattern for alliances. I would argue that it is NATO that better deserves the term "strange alliance" because it did not follow that familiar pattern, or indeed any other for which there was a precedent. This was, after all:

An alliance which originated, and whose subsequent evolution repeatedly reflected, the wishes of its smaller and weaker members, not those of its dominant hegemon.

An alliance whose strategy was to place that hegemon at risk.

An alliance whose function was as much self-deterrence as it was the deterrence of adversaries.

The very strangeness of the alliance, though, may have been the secret of its success, for it served the needs of all of its members, and even in some ways those of its adversary. It was in this sense, like the twelve-legged table I mentioned earlier, "over-determined." With the collapse of the Soviet Union NATO's original rationale could become obsolete but it still provided significant benefits to its members. The Warsaw Pact had no such built-in redundancy. When it became clear, even before the demise of the Soviet Union, that that state was no longer prepared to use force to sustain the alliance it had created, it collapsed - like a table that had no legs at all.

VI.

None of this means, though, that NATO's future is indefinitely assured. For despite the fact it has survived the end of the Cold War, despite the fact that it has recently added new members, and that there are plenty of other potential members who would like to become actual ones, the alliance has taken on a new and daunting challenge.

I made the point at the outset that one of NATO's original functions - keeping the Russians out - was a publicly avowed role, but that the others - keeping the Americans in and the Germans down - could not openly be acknowledged. This "don't ask, don't tell" arrangement worked well as long as the Soviet Union remained in place, but its collapse left NATO with only unavowed purposes. Could the Europeans really admit openly that they were incapable of providing for their own security without external help? Could the Americans really acknowledge an indefinite obligation to provide that protection for a group of countries that were certainly as prosperous as the United States, and through the European Union were emerging as potential economic rivals to it? Could a newly-unified Germany really reveal the extent to which Germans themselves continued to fear what they might do with uncontested authority if they ever got it?

The Cold War had kept such discussions closeted by focusing on the common and acknowledged cause of containing the Russians. With the Cold War over the need for NATO remained, but it was not at all clear what its public justification was now to be. Dean Acheson once said of Great Britain that it had lost an empire but had not yet found a role. Substitute the word "enemy" for "empire," and you have a pretty good characterization of the situation in which NATO found itself as the Bush administration left office. It was left to the Clinton administration to come up with a solution.

VII.

If any reasonably informed observer of international affairs had been told, at the beginning of 1993, that the chief foreign policy accomplishment of the first post-Cold War administration would be to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the first response I think would have been an incredulous: "why?" Why enlarge an alliance in the wake of the total collapse of its adversary? If the intent was to transform it into a postwar security system, why not take in the defeated foe, as Metternich and Castlereagh had done with France in 1815, or as the United States had done with Germany and Japan after 1945? If the intent was not to create such a security system, then exactly who, or what, was the enemy? The idea of a partial expansion of NATO was hardly on the horizon at the beginning of the Clinton administration - and yet, this is what happened. So where did the idea come from, in the first place?

It came, first of all, from the Czechs, the Poles, and the Hungarians, who had just as obvious an interest in having their new-found independence guaranteed by the United States as the states of Western Europe and the Mediterranean had had at the time NATO was formed in 1949. We know that Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa first made this argument to Clinton in April 1993, and that they did so on humanitarian grounds: nations that had suffered as much as theirs had, both at the hands of the Germans and the Russians, deserved now to have their safety assured. The idea particularly resonated with Clinton's then national security adviser, Anthony Lake, who set a small group quietly to work on it within the National Security Council.

Turning NATO into a humanitarian instrument was not the only thing Lake and his allies had in mind, however: they did not rush, after all, to include within the alliance other victims of Nazi and Soviet brutality - the remaining East Europeans and even the Russians could certainly have qualified in that respect. Rather they seem to have been chiefly concerned that if NATO did not find some new function it would wither: the choice, as one set of Clinton's advisers put it, was that "NATO must go out of area [meaning beyond its familiar roles] or it will go out of business."

Lots of people in both Washington and Brussels worried about this problem, but few at the beginning saw expansion as the solution. The Pentagon was wary of taking on new defense responsibilities in an era of shrinking defense appropriations. It was also worried, as were people like Strobe Talbott in the State Department, about the impact NATO expansion would have on the Russians: would it not come across as a hostile military alliance directed against a country that was no longer an adversary, one whose democratization the administration was trying to promote? There was no great push from the European members of NATO for such expansion: they were concerned about at once diluting and complicating the management of the alliance. Nor was there overwhelming public support for this alternative; indeed there was hardly any public notice of NATO at all. So how did the idea of NATO expansion gain such support so quickly?

Several reasons have already been widely cited:

The role of what the political scientist James Goldgeier calls "policy entrepreneurs" - skillful behind the scenes operators like Lake and later Richard Holbrooke who can take a particular idea and through their very tenacity persuade others in government that it is indeed official policy.

The influence of voters with East European connections inside the United States, and especially - after the Republicans endorsed the idea in their ill-fated "Contract with America" during the 1994 campaign - Clinton's delight in finding ways to make their own proposals his own.

The belief, on the one hand, that the Russians were so weak that it didn't matter what they thought about NATO expansion; but also the conviction, on the other hand, that the Russians were now so integrated into Western ways of thinking and were now so trustful of American motives that they could easily be reassured.

The fear that, once a policy was announced, the consequences of rejecting it - even if it were ill-conceived - would be worse than ploughing ahead.

All of these explanations make sense, but they miss yet another explanation for NATO expansion, one that goes back to the original purposes of the alliance, to the fact that there were three of them, and to the fact that only the first, that of containing the Russians, had been publicly acknowledged.

Transforming NATO from an instrument of stability into a means of achieving justice provided a new reason for its existence that could indeed be mentioned in public. To say that the alliance's purpose was to keep the Americans in or the Germans down was one thing; to say that it was to enlarge the democratic sphere was quite another. With the Cold War over, with little need remaining to coddle unsavory allies in the interests of containing an even more unsavory enemy, the search for equity as well as stability could become an openly avowed objective: one could now not only ask, but proudly tell.

What we've seen evolve over the past several years, then, is a new mission for NATO: one that is aimed at containing, not just the Russians, or the Germans, or whatever isolationist tendencies may yet lurk among the Americans, but also the tendency of brutal people to brutalize others. Kosovo gives us a glimpse of NATO's future, and it is a very different one from its past. This really is, at last, a turning point in NATO's history.

VIII.

The intentions involved here are admirable. No one would question the desirability, in principle, of seeking to make Europe - or the world - a more humane place. Certainly it is hard to see, given the situation as it was allowed to develop in Kosovo, how NATO could not have intervened. What concerns me, though, is that even as we've assigned the alliance this ambitious new task of containing brutality itself, we've thought very little about how we might perform it.

I can conceive of two quite different ways in which one might seek to enlarge the realm of humane governance. Call them the "inside-out" and the "outside-in" models. Both would accept that there are going to be, for the foreseeable future, great disparities of power, wealth, and influence: that there will continue to be big and small states; that there will be majorities and minorities within them. But there the similarities end.

The inside-out model would work with the powerful to discipline their use of power. It would seek to convince those who possess authority that it is in their own interest to treat those without in ways that they themselves might wish to be treated if the roles were reversed. Whether through the use of international legal norms, or the lure of economic rewards, or threatening the isolation that comes with sanctions, or simply withdrawing the acknowledgment of legitimacy - something never to be underestimated in dealing with authoritarian regimes - the idea would be to encourage a long term evolutionary process by which dictators would become democrats.

Can this work? In some ways it already has. It has done so within NATO, where regimes like those in Portugal, Greece, and Turkey gradually abandoned authoritarianism and subjected themselves to constitutional checks and balances. Spain's admission to NATO took place only after it had made an equivalent transition. The whole premise of Ostpolitik was to work with the East German and other East European regimes to make them more humane; and while the results are still debated they were by no means totally negative. Similar policies have produced similar results outside of NATO: in countries like South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and in much of Latin America. And the biggest success story for the inside-out strategy, of course, was the Soviet Union itself, where during the late 1980s a formidably powerful autocracy concluded that it could not continue to live that way, and proceeded to change its character profoundly from within.

Such inside-out strategies are, of course, subject to criticism. It is hard to avoid complicity, especially at the beginning of the process, in the distasteful character of the regime one is seeking to transform. For there is no effort here to challenge that state's sovereignty or even to question its authority; there are no immediate attempts to rescue its victims, who are told only that they must be patient and that things will gradually improve. It is often necessary to defer to, and even flatter, whatever despot is running the place: you can't expect to convince by condemning. As a consequence, it's easy to look like you're consorting with dictators instead of subverting them. But such subversion has, in the end, taken place under the inside-out strategy - not everywhere all the time, but more often than one might think.

The alternative model would be the outside-in method of accomplishing reform. Here one would champion the cause of a small state, or of a group within a state, without regard to the interests, concerns, or prestige of the regime that is oppressing them. The point here is to stick to principle: if confrontation results, so be it; if sovereignty is compromised, well, many people think it's an outdated concept anyway. Where the inside-out model seeks justice by transforming those who had denied it, the outside-in model does so by directly challenging its deniers in the expectation that, since they are in the wrong, they can only surrender. The inside-out approach assumes the possibility of redemption. The outside-in approach regards that prospect as naïve, and those who entertain it as morally compromised.

Can such a strategy work? There are surely some situations where dictators are not redeemable: where an outside-in confrontation is the only alternative. One thinks, first of all, of Hitler, and what the practitioners of an inside-out strategy - we remember them now as the appeasers - had to learn about him. It is not at all clear that Stalin could ever have been persuaded to change his methods, even though several of his successors were persuadable. We'll never know whether the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan horrors, or the Bosnian atrocities could have been prevented by challenging those that perpetrated them: it's clear enough, though, that appealing to their better natures, as the inside-out strategy would recommend, did not work.

Those precedents weighed heavily when American and NATO planners confronted Milosevic's intransigence in Kosovo: what resulted was the most direct application yet of the outside-in strategy, as for the first time the international community overrode the sovereign rights of a particular country to intervene on behalf of an oppressed minority within it. The ultimate outcome is not yet clear, but of the fact that important precedents have been set, there can be little doubt.

IX.

Where, then, does NATO expansion fit within this spectrum of "inside-out" and "outside-in" approaches to the problem of expanding humane governance? Historians will see the inclusion of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, I believe, as the point of transition from the first to the second method of seeking this objective. To be sure, these countries were, unlike Kosovo, independent states, so bringing them into NATO posed no legal challenge to anyone else's sovereignty. Let us be honest about it, though: NATO expansion did challenge the dignity of another state, indeed of a state that, for all its weaknesses, remains a great power in the region, and through its possession of thousands of nuclear weapons, potentially in the world as well. The United States and its NATO allies confronted post-Cold War Russia in a way that they had never confronted the Soviet Union during the Cold War: their message to Moscow, quite bluntly, was "like it or lump it." It's in this sense, then, that with NATO expansion, the "outside-in" strategy began to prevail.

Russian objections to NATO expansion have both a psychological and a practical basis. Psychologically there is the sense, not only of having been defeated in the Cold War, but now of being humiliated as well as one's former territories are incorporated, one by one, within an alliance still dominated by a former adversary - especially when the Russians thought they had gained assurances from the West at the time the Cold War ended that NATO would not expand. Practically the problem is one of precedents. Russia is still a multi-national state, and the sight of former territories of the Soviet Union itself now being considered for admission to NATO, together with the example NATO set through its actions in Kosovo, raises prospects, however remote, of similar efforts to detach portions of the Russian Republic itself. If NATO can rescue the Kosovars, what is to prevent its helping the Chechens, or any number of other discontented minorities that still remain within Russia's boundaries?

There is another problem here as well, which is that what NATO does in Europe can have consequences extending far beyond that part of the world. China, we know, was not at all happy with NATO's brief war against Serbia; but this was not just because its embassy in Belgrade got bombed. That incident provided an excuse for venting much deeper anxieties. Whether former President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan had the Kosovo precedent in mind when he began speaking of a "state to state" relationship with the PRC during the summer of 1999 is still not clear, but Beijing's reaction suggests that it saw the connection. Without intending to do so, the Clinton administration's actions in Kosovo appeared to undermine the "one China" formula that had kept things in the Taiwan Strait since Nixon and Kissinger negotiated it over a quarter century ago.

Has the United States not therefore created, through its war for Kosovo and its continuing talk of further expanding NATO, a common grievance for both Moscow and Beijing? Do they not both have reason to worry that the focus of American policy has shifted from efforts to work with them to achieve reforms to a campaign aimed - even though in the name of reform - at splitting away portions of what they regard as their territory? Does this not in turn raise the possibility of a new Russian-Chinese alignment in world politics directed against the Americans and their NATO allies, not unlike the old Sino-Soviet bloc, the emergence marked one of the darkest and most dangerous moments of the Cold War?

Far-fetched? No more so, I think, than Mao's decision to lean toward Moscow seemed to Americans in 1950 - a development, we now know, that was powerfully reinforced by the Truman administration's decision, after the Korean War broke out, to protect Taiwan. Nor is such an arrangement at all improbable when you consider China's current appetite for sophisticated military technology, which the Russians still have in abundance, alongside Russia's need for the consumer goods China now produces in even greater abundance. Actions, even well-intentioned actions, have consequences. It would be a tragedy indeed if NATO's pursuit of justice in one part of the world should set off a reaction elsewhere that could compromise it on a far wider scale.

X.

I raise this gloomy prospect to make the point that the pursuit of justice and order - of equity and stability - ought not, in statecraft, to be mutually exclusionary. The quest for order at the expense of justice is, to be sure, tyranny. But to seek equity at the expense of stability can be equally dangerous. For if we allow NATO's new preoccupation with justice for small powers to undermine the order among the great powers that has emerged since the end of the Cold War - if the great powers once again align themselves in competitive coalitions, as they did through so much of the 20th century - then the prospects for the early 21st century could be depressing indeed.

Now that NATO has indeed passed a genuine turning point - now that its principal public justification is to be expanding the realm of humane governance, even as its old unacknowledged rationales of keeping the Americans in and the Germans down remain in place - it's going to be very important to decide which method of operation it is going to pursue. Will it return to the inside-out approach that brought considerable benefits during the Cold War, even though this may require postponing immediate payoffs and collaborating more than one might like with regimes of which we disapprove? Or will it proceed along the paths suggested by the NATO expansion decision and the Kosovo operation, of standing firmly for principle, letting the chips fall where they may?

I don't pretend to know the answer to this question: there are certainly valid arguments on both sides. What sticks in my mind as I think about this late at night, though, is the unsettling image of one of Charles Dickens's most memorable characters, Mrs. Jellaby, from Bleak House. That formidably well-intentioned lady, you may recall, stood solidly for principle by devoting all her energies to saving the starving children of Africa - even as she allowed her own children at home to starve. What Mrs. Jellaby forgot was the importance of infrastructure: that one must secure one's own surroundings before one goes about rescuing others.

The infrastructure that concerns me is the global geopolitical order, something I fear that both the Clinton administration and NATO have neglected in their pursuit of regional humanitarian concerns. We need now to regain a sense of balance, of proportion, of how the various parts of one's strategy relate to the whole. Otherwise there's the real possibility that we will, like Mrs. Jellaby, wind up with the best of intentions producing the worst of results.