Retool the Charter Before Expanding

It’s been 50 years since President Truman dispatched Secretary of State George Marshall to Europe to rebuild that continent. Last month, another U.S. president, Bill Clinton, declared the unequivocal success of the Marshall Plan and called for a new U.S.-European relationship. Central to Clinton’s plan is the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Simply adding new members to NATO hardly seems like bold leadership. We must assess the very nature of the alliance based on the realities of 1997, not 1947. That will involve questions of grand strategy, including a new mission for NATO based on the threats we expect to face into the next century. But even before meeting that formidable challenge, the alliance must perform some serious housekeeping.

I question whether the alliance is ready for expansion, and my skepticism has nothing to do with particular concerns about any of the prospective new members. Rather, it seems the alliance is avoiding the really tough work of changing the NATO charter to account for broader membership.

To date, the NATO expansion debate has centered on how to address Russia’s concerns, and the recent signing of the Founding Act, bringing Russia into NATO councils, ends that debate. Regardless of the relative merits of the Founding Act, though, I am concerned that we have spent so much time figuring out how to avoid a clash with Russia over NATO expansion that we are ignoring the likelihood of conflicts within the alliance itself once expansion takes place. We have the experience of Greece and Turkey to caution us that members with historic border-related tensions can create a difficult problem of alliance management. Free of the bonds of Cold War defense against a hostile enemy, allies might one day be adversaries as the result of such tensions.

At the heart of the NATO relationship is Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states quite simply that the members “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” On the Clinton administration’s present course, over the next few years, we will offer NATO membership to countries with border disputes that are long-standing and serious. To do so without modifying the treaty would be a disservice to the American people, who will pay the price and bear the burden of expanding U.S. security commitments.

Specifically, the alliance should agree to a process for resolving disputes between members. These conflicts are inevitable as membership grows. Fixing the problem now will keep the United States from being drawn into regional conflicts in Europe that would sap our own strength and weaken the American security umbrella and the alliance’s guarantee of mutual self-defense.

I propose that the alliance establish a dispute resolution process and write it into the NATO treaty. The Senate on Tuesday unanimously passed my amendment to the State Department authorization bill, calling on NATO to consider such a process.

We might even model our efforts on the mechanisms for dispute resolution and binding arbitration used in American labor law. In that process, disputants select arbitrators who collectively select a third arbitrator to air views on both sides and propose a resolution. In the case of NATO, countries in a dispute would each select an ally; those two would select a third impartial ally to negotiate a settlement and, if necessary, impose a binding solution on the disputants.

We could also suspend disputants from mutual defense protections until they reach a resolution and ratify it. This would offer member states an incentive to work agreements out quickly, before they reach the binding arbitration stage. This process would retain alliance integrity by keeping dispute resolution within NATO.

It will not be easy to amend the North Atlantic Treaty, which has not changed substantively in the nearly half-century since it was written. Adding new members has been relatively easy by comparison; we’ve done so on three occasions.

Another factor to consider--particularly by the countries now asking to join--is whether NATO membership is even in the best interests of the emerging East European democracies. In assessing their own security threats, are the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland more vulnerable to invasion from Russia or to economic instability? If their governments believe that strengthening their economies is a higher priority, then are the billions of dollars a year in defense spending required to meet NATO force standards really appropriate? Wouldn’t such funds be better spent on infrastructure such as roads and water treatment systems, or on investments in manufacturing and agriculture, than to buy tanks and modernize their armies?

With the end of the Cold War, we need a new NATO charter, not just new NATO members.