NATO ENTERS THE 21st CENTURY Of Related Interest Twenty-First Century Weapons Proliferation: Are We Ready? edited by Henry Sokolski The US Military Profession into the Twenty-First Century by Sam C. Sarkesian and Robert E. O'Connor Jr US Allies in a Changing World by Barry Rubin and Thomas Keaney International Security Issues in the Post-Cold War Era: Contemporary Debates by Clive Jones and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe Critical Reflections on Security and Change by Stuart Croft and Terry Terrif NATO ENTERS THE 21ST CENTURY Editor TED GALEN CARPENTER (Cato Institute, Washington DC) FRANK CASS LONDON•PORTLAND,OR First Published in 2001 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Newbury House, 900 Eastern Avenue London, IG2 7HH and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS c/o ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo Street Portland, Oregon, 97213-3644 Website: www.frankcass.com Transferred to Digital Printing 2005 Copyright© 2001 Frank Cass Publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data NATO enters the 21st century I. North Atlantic Treaty Organization I. Carpenter, Ted Galen 355'.031'091821 ISBN 0-7146-5058-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8109-1 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data NATO enters the 21st century I editor Ted Galen Carpenter p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7146-5058-7 (cloth)-ISBN 0-7146-8109-1 (pbk.) I. North Atlantic Treaty Organization. I. Carpenter, Ted Galen. UA646.3 .N24252 2000 355'.031091821'0905 -dc21 00-063920 This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on 'NATO Enters the 21st Century' of The Journal of Strategic Studies (ISSN 0140 2390) 23/3 (September 2000) published by Frank Cass. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permissionof the publisher of this book. Contents I. Introduction: NATO's Prospects at the Dawn of the 21st Century Ted Galen Carpenter I 2. NATO's New Strategic Concept: Coherent Blueprint or Conceptual Muddle? Ted Galen Carpenter 7 3. NATO Burden-Sharing: Promises, Promises Alan Tonelson 29 4. US Hegemony and the Perpetuation of NATO Christopher Layne 59 5. The New NATO and Relations with Russia Alton Frye 92 6. NATO's 'Fundamental Divergence' Over Proliferation Kori Schake 111 7. The Corruption of NATO: NATO Moves East Amos Perlmutter 129 8. NATO 1949 and NATO 2000: From Collective Defense Toward Collective Security Richard Rupp 154 Abstracts 177 About the Contributors 181 Index 183 1 Introduction: NATO's Prospects at the Dawn of the 21st Century TED GALEN CARPENTER NATO's 50th anniversary summit in April 1999 was supposed to be a grand and glorious celebration. Not only was the event designed to mark a half­ century of success in preserving the peace of Europe, it was to underscore the alliance's continuing indispensable role in the approaching twenty-first century. In its next 50 years, NATO would be able to bring the blessings of peace and democracy to all of Europe, not merely the western half of the Continent as during the Cold War. The summit proved to be a far more somber proceeding than planned. Just four weeks earlier, N(cid:33)TO had launched air strikes against Yugoslavia to compel the Belgrade government to relinquish control of its restive, predominantly Albanian province of Kosovo to a NATO-led international peacekeeping force. Western leaders evidently assumed that a brief 'demonstration' bombing campaign would cause Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate, and that the armed conflict would be long over before the NATO meeting convened in Washington in late April. Instead, the war raged on with no end in sight, casting a pall over the gathering. Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's Paul Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, caustically termed the summit a funeral masquerading as a birthday party. Mandelbaum's assessment may have been unduly harsh, but there was a palpable atmosphere of uneasiness and apprehension among the NATO dignitaries. The governments of at least four members - Italy, Greece, Hungary and the Czech Republic - were critical of the alliance's use of force against Yugoslavia (although they reluctantly went along with that policy to avoid a public schism), and the publics in those countries were even more negative. Public opinion in NATO's leading member, the United 2 NATO Enters the 21st Century States, was also bitterly divided, and the US House of Representatives had refused to approve legislation backing the Clinton administration's policy. The summit survived all of the disharmony and celebrated the alliance's 50th birthday, albeit in a decidedly more subdued manner than originally planned. Alliance leaders even approved a detailed new Strategic Concept to guide NATO in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, uneasiness about NATO's future persists in many quarters on both sides of the Atlantic. Major disagreements about the alliance's strategy - even about its very purpose ­ simply will not go away. Indeed, in the months since the 50th anniversary summit, some of those disagreements appear to have intensified rather than diminished. There are sharp disputes about whether NATO should continue to regard collective territorial defense under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty as its core mission. Advocates of maintaining that focus argue that departing from the traditional mission risks a loss of consensus and even a breach in alliance ranks. The intra-alliance tensions over the 1999 Balkan war, they warn, were an omen of what will befall NATO if it ventures beyond its original purpose. Their opponents respond that most of the problems that have troubled Europe's peace since the end of the Cold War have occurred outside the territory of NATO's members, and that if the alliance refuses to venture out-of-area, it risks becoming irrelevant. Yet even within the ranks of proponents of out-of-area missions there are sometimes fierce disagreements. The Clinton administration and some other American supporters of NATO suggest that the alliance become an institutional mechanism for defending Western interests wherever they are threatened - even if that task takes NATO outside of Europe entirely. That approach is strongly resisted by NATO's European members, who fear that they might be dragged into disputes that have little relevance to Europe's security interests. Disputes have also flared about burden sharing and the proper relationship between NATO and the embryonic European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI). US officials complain that the United States had to bear a grotesquely disproportionate share of the military burden during the air war against Yugoslavia. Americans seethe as they witness already low European defense budgets continue their downward slide. Indeed, US military leaders warn that the gap in capabilities between the American military and its NATO counterparts is growing so large that coordination for major operations in the future will become difficult, if not problematic. In addition to the latest round in the burden-sharing controversy, Americans increasingly wonder whether the European members of NATO Introduction 3 are merely engaging in empty rhetoric about building a strong ESDI. The Europeans respond that Washington's professed support for ESDI often appears to be insincere. Indeed, some European leaders note that every time they move closer to making ESDI a reality, the United States voices new caveats designed to preserve NATO's primacy in Euro-Atlantic security. Many Europeans wonder if the various 'conditions' being raised by Washington are not attempts to sabotage any attempt to create an effective European security organization. To some capitals on the Continent, US policy seems designed to perpetuate America's dominance of the transatlantic relationship at all costs. Finally, there are bitter disagreements about Washington's emerging decision to deploy a national anti-ballistic missile system. European members of NATO fear that the deployment of a US National Missile Defense (NMD) system may reignite a strategic arms race with Russia (and possibly China as well), thereby making Europe less secure. They also worry about decoupling American and European security interests if the United States has reliable protection against missile attacks and Washington's European allies do not. That opposition both puzzles and annoys American leaders. They emphasize that an NMD system is designed to protect the United States from attacks (or more likely, blackmail) by such 'rogue states' as North Korea, Iran or Iraq. The missile capabilities of such states are growing, US officials warn, and the deployment of an effective NMD may be essential if the United States is to continue defending allies and clients without undue risk to its homeland. Those internal disputes raise new questions about NATO's effectiveness, perhaps even its viability. The studies in this collection examine various aspects of the alliance as it enters the new century. In the first essay, I look at NATO's new Strategic Concept and conclude that it is a document that attempts to placate competing factions on several major issues. Indeed, the carefully crafted language barely conceals the depth of the discord on such matters as NATO's commitment to out-of-area missions or the functional relationship between the alliance and the ESDI. As a political and public relations document, the Strategic Concept has been a solid success in preserving at least the fas;ade of alliance unity. Yet the underlying substantive disagreements continue to roil. Thus, as a coherent strategic blueprint the Concept is not, and likely will not be, terribly relevant. Alan Tonelson examines the long-standing burden-sharing controversies within NATO. He documents numerous promises by the European members of the alliance -from the 1950s to the present time -to bear a greater share of the defense burden and to build an effective 'European pillar' . All of