Can't Russia Join the Club, Too? by Fareed Zakaria

May 4, 1998, U.S. Edition

Can't Russia Join the Club, Too?
If the NATO alliance is about strengthening democracy, the troubled nation should get its own invitation.
By Fareed Zakaria

The expansion of NATO is a foregone conclusion. The Senate will soon vote overwhelmingly to extend membership in the alliance to Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. But while they're at it, the senators might think about adding one more name to that list -- Russia. This is not nearly as preposterous as it sounds. Having succeeded in its original mission -- to deter the Soviet Union -- NATO is somewhat lost in this new era. Expansion, the Clinton administration has stressed, is an ongoing policy that could result in many new members. That will further change the essential nature of the alliance, moving it from a tight military camp to a larger crisis-solving and democracy-strengthening organization. In this new context, Russian participation becomes indispensable.

Few alliances survive victory. After having come together to defeat Napoleon, the Quadruple Alliance soon fell apart in the 1820s and 1830s. NATO has done better. It still exists, has a large bureaucracy, conducts military maneuvers and is used by the United States as its preferred military outfit when force is required. But its core function -- defending its members from Soviet attack -- is dead; as dead as the Soviet Union.

The United States still has many problems dealing with Russia, but they stem from Russian weakness rather than strength. Russia's economy today is slightly more than half the size it was 15 years ago, and has declined for five straight years. Its military is in ruins, with salaries, food and medicine in scarce supply, let alone modern tanks and aircraft.

Additionally, Russia's new borders are father away from those of NATO members -- including the new countries of Central Europe -- than they have been for 300 years. Yet NATO has responded to this precipitous decline in Russian power and its diminished imperial intentions by bulking up and getting closer. The administration has given a wink and a nod to the Baltic states, which want to be next in the club. Their membership would almost certainly end any pretense of credible security guarantees: NATO could defend the Baltics by only one means -- nuclear attack.

All this is old thinking, we are told by the Clinton administration. The new NATO is meant to deal with the new world. Precisely because there are no longer actual threats to the security of Western Europe and other members, the alliance must deal with those threats that exist -- whether in Bosnia or the Middle East -- which require a new, expanded alliance. "NATO must go out of area or out of business," says Sen. Richard Lugar. This turns NATO into a kind of off-the-shelf army that might be used when its members can agree. But as the war in Bosnia bloodily proved, NATO members can't really agree on much. Out of area -- in Libya, Iran, Iraq, the peace process, China -- the United States and Europe are out of sync.

Hence, when the United States wants to use military force, it will try to get NATO support. If not, it will go alone. And if it gets a few NATO countries and a few non-NATO ones to come along, it will construct a "coalition of the willing." So how exactly is the new, improved NATO helping here? If global problem-solving is NATO's new mission, it can work only with the cooperation of other great powers -- principally Russia, which straddles two continents and has the world's second largest nuclear arsenal and a veto in the Security Council. To try to construct an international security system and leave Russia out because it lost the cold war contradicts the most simple rule of strategy for the victorious. Written across the first page of Churchill's magnificent history of World War II is the four-line "moral of the work," which reads: "In War -- Resolution; In Defeat -- Defiance; In Victory -- Magnanimity; In Peace -- Goodwill." The last time a losing power was excluded from the new order was Germany in 1918, and things didn't turn out so well.

There is, finally, the moral argument. We are told that the countries of Central Europe deserve to be recognized as full-fledged members of the West, and their fledgling democracies supported and strengthened. But if one of NATO's new goals is to strengthen democracy, then surely its place lies with the most important democratic experiment taking place on the European continent -- in Russia. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary are in no real danger of backsliding on democracy. What they need is access to West European markets. Membership in the European Union, not NATO, can alone solve that problem. But the fate of Russian democracy is in the balance, and the outcome will have enormous consequences for the democratic idea everywhere and for peace in Europe. Why not help where help is needed?

As for belonging to "the West," Central Europe has many cultural affinities with Western Europe, but surely they are matched by those of Russia. Which has made a larger contribution to European culture: Hungary or the land of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Prokofiev, Kandinsky and Shostakovich? Bringing Russia firmly into the West is a goal worthy of the United States--and its Senate.