Clinton Fiddles While NATO Disintegrates

This is one of those weeks when the Clinton administration does not seem to be inhabiting the same planet as the rest of us. The NATO alliance is falling apart in Bosnia, as even the ever-loyal British start wooing the French on defense cooperation, increasingly doubtful of America's commitment to the Atlantic alliance.


But while four decades of NATO's solidarity crumbles, the Clinton Administration is drafting high-minded speeches about the future of the alliance and the need to widen it to eastern Europe.


The United States is planning to spell out its criteria for new NATO members at the NATO ministers' conference this weekend, while at the same time trying to reassure Russia before the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe summit in Budapest on Wednesday


President Bill Clinton will fly to Budapest to join Britain and Russia in signing the new security guarantees for Ukraine, the price agreed for the Ukraine's decision to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. His deeper purpose is to convince Russia that the United States will take the CSCE seriously as part of a new European security system.


But under the old rule of watch what they do, not what they say, Russian diplomats should take a close look at one of the last bills which Clinton signed into law before the elections.


It is dubbed the International Narcotics Control Corrections Act, which sounds harmless enough. But tucked away in its text is something rather different, called the NATO Participation Act, which authorizes the supply of U.S. weaponry "to assist the transition to full NATO membership."


Aimed at increasing the interoperability of NATO military equipment with the would-be new NATO members, the new law provides for the transfer of excess U.S. defense stocks, using funding from the Foreign Military Finance Act.


The process has already begun. Hungary has already received technology that will make its warplanes appear as "friendly" on NATO radar screens. Similar avionics are being sent to Poland and the Czech and the Slovak Republics. For the eastern Europeans, these military transfers are crucial symbols of their shift from a Russian-based security system.


Former U.S. Ambassador to Bonn, Richard Holbrooke, now plotting out NATO's future at the State Department, this month told the Poles that they were slated to receive U.S.-made F-16 warplanes "as one of the first beneficiaries" of the new program. The Czechs in their turn are hoping to sell their Soviet-supplied MiG-29s and use the proceeds to buy second-hand F-16s from Belgium.


From Moscow's point of view, the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe has always been worrisome. What seems now to be happening is that a new kind of Berlin Wall, built on U.S. military technology and NATO interoperability, is being quietly but significantly erected.


"Drawing a new dividing line in Europe can only add fuel to the fires of nationalist forces in excluded countries," warns one trans-Atlantic think tank, the British-American Security Information Council, in a paper published this week. "The impetus and process for weapons transfers have thus been established with no attention paid to the negative consequences. Fueling an arms race will likely increase instability in an already troubled region, stimulate arms exports from partner countries, and create dangerous new divisions in Europe."