Top White House aides breathed a sigh of relief when they saw an ominously familiar name on the list of U.S. foreign policy establishment elder statesmen who had signed an open letter opposing their plan to enlarge the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Original cold warriors like Paul Nitze and arms-control experts like Paul Warnke joined retired senators like Sam Nunn, Gary Hart and Mark Hatfield to warn that it would be a "policy error of historic proportions."
They were reinforced by the two U.S. ambassadors to Moscow in the closing years of the Cold War, Arthur Hartman and Jack Matlock, former CIA director Stansfield Turner and an array of foreign policy grandees like Edward Luttwak, Michael Mandelbaum and William Maynes.
Their collective eminence and reputations guarantee a hard-fought policy debate next year, when the amended NATO treaty to absorb the new East European members goes to the Senate for ratification. And they are determined to provoke a foreign policy confrontation unprecedented since the U.S. Senate rejected President Woodrow Wilson's treaty to join the new League of Nations in 1921.
This will also be a generational clash. Overwhelmingly from the Cold War generation, the campaigners contain few of the younger foreign policy experts who grew up in opposition to the Vietnam War and now dominate the strategic councils of the Clinton administration.
This brings us to the crucial name: Robert McNamara. Defense secretary from 1961 to 1968 under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and later president of the World Bank, McNamara and his reputation have never quite recovered from his central role in the Vietnam War.
President Bill Clinton and his fellow baby boomers know that McNamara has been wrong before, and they have been little mollified by his belated apology for being wrong on Vietnam. They think McNamara's presence among the NATO critics undermines their credibility.
The critics of NATO enlargement say it is bad for NATO: "It will inevitably degrade its ability to carry out its primary mission." Second, it is bad for Russia: "It will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition." Third, it is bad for Europe: "It will draw a new line of division between the 'ins' and the 'outs' and foster instability." Fourth, it is bad for America: "It will call into question the U.S. commitment to the alliance."
The Clinton team's argument is that the old NATO is outdated, and it must evolve into something more than an alliance. The goal is for the enlarged NATO to anchor a structure of collective security, one that Clinton optimistically hopes we all have a chance to expand as NATO ceases to be a military camp aimed at Russia and becomes a trans-Atlantic security system that includes it.
Clinton's grand strategy for the future is to repeat the way that Germany after 1945 was brought into the civilizing institutions and prosperity of the West, and help do the same for the long-suffering East Europeans and eventually for the Russians as well. Clearly, this will also require a parallel and measured enlargement of the European Union. But for Clinton and the baby boomers the choice is clear: between a NATO that grows into an amicable and cooperative future, or the elder statesmen's understandable nostalgia for an alliance that sticks with McNamara's grisly militarism of the past.
Original cold warriors like Paul Nitze and arms-control experts like Paul Warnke joined retired senators like Sam Nunn, Gary Hart and Mark Hatfield to warn that it would be a "policy error of historic proportions."
They were reinforced by the two U.S. ambassadors to Moscow in the closing years of the Cold War, Arthur Hartman and Jack Matlock, former CIA director Stansfield Turner and an array of foreign policy grandees like Edward Luttwak, Michael Mandelbaum and William Maynes.
Their collective eminence and reputations guarantee a hard-fought policy debate next year, when the amended NATO treaty to absorb the new East European members goes to the Senate for ratification. And they are determined to provoke a foreign policy confrontation unprecedented since the U.S. Senate rejected President Woodrow Wilson's treaty to join the new League of Nations in 1921.
This will also be a generational clash. Overwhelmingly from the Cold War generation, the campaigners contain few of the younger foreign policy experts who grew up in opposition to the Vietnam War and now dominate the strategic councils of the Clinton administration.
This brings us to the crucial name: Robert McNamara. Defense secretary from 1961 to 1968 under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and later president of the World Bank, McNamara and his reputation have never quite recovered from his central role in the Vietnam War.
President Bill Clinton and his fellow baby boomers know that McNamara has been wrong before, and they have been little mollified by his belated apology for being wrong on Vietnam. They think McNamara's presence among the NATO critics undermines their credibility.
The critics of NATO enlargement say it is bad for NATO: "It will inevitably degrade its ability to carry out its primary mission." Second, it is bad for Russia: "It will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition." Third, it is bad for Europe: "It will draw a new line of division between the 'ins' and the 'outs' and foster instability." Fourth, it is bad for America: "It will call into question the U.S. commitment to the alliance."
The Clinton team's argument is that the old NATO is outdated, and it must evolve into something more than an alliance. The goal is for the enlarged NATO to anchor a structure of collective security, one that Clinton optimistically hopes we all have a chance to expand as NATO ceases to be a military camp aimed at Russia and becomes a trans-Atlantic security system that includes it.
Clinton's grand strategy for the future is to repeat the way that Germany after 1945 was brought into the civilizing institutions and prosperity of the West, and help do the same for the long-suffering East Europeans and eventually for the Russians as well. Clearly, this will also require a parallel and measured enlargement of the European Union. But for Clinton and the baby boomers the choice is clear: between a NATO that grows into an amicable and cooperative future, or the elder statesmen's understandable nostalgia for an alliance that sticks with McNamara's grisly militarism of the past.