Table Of ContentNATO 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
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London, IG2 7HH
and in the United States of America by
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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
