Monday, May 19, 1997

Expanding NATO: More members not the key

By DANIEL T. PLESCH

and KIRSTEN RUECKER

For Scripps Howard News Service

President Clinton flies to Europe over the Memorial weekend to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan and to cast NATO expansion as its successor.

This anniversary will coincide with the Madrid Summit, where NATO will invite new candidates to formally apply for full Alliance membership, most likely the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia. The administration has consistently made the analogy that NATO expansion is the Marshall Plan of the 1990s.

The administration's analogy, despite being well intentioned, is fallacious and deeply misleading.

The Marshall Plan was a program of economic support for Western Europe amounting to some $100 billion in current money. It served to prime the pump for industry and agriculture in a continent where factories, roads and railways had been devastated in World War II. Underpinning the Marshall Plan was the belief that peace in Europe could only be ensured by an investment in liberal democracy.

Contrary to the liberal market objectives of the Marshall Plan, NATO expansion is a solely military project estimated to cost anywhere between $27 billion and $125 billion.

The expansion project will fund the modernization of the new members' militaries, including assistance to purchase fighter jets, air bases and infrastructure. Most of the money will be spent on U.S. equipment, producing a net drain on the cash resources of the new democracies of Eastern Europe. At best it will create new military industries in the countries, adding to the existing global glut in military production. There is no military threat to Eastern Europe and no need for a military buildup.

Now that we have a cost estimate for NATO expansion, it is time to make a comparative cost-benefit analysis. The question for Western leaders is whether the money could be spent in better ways to improve the security of Central and Eastern Europe.

The United States and European states are already providing some financial support for the region's infrastructure, and it would, on balance, be far better if they strengthened that type of assistance to the region. The economic outlook may be good now, but West European economies are sluggish; and unless Alan Greenspan has abolished the business cycle, the United States looks set to slip into recession in the next year or two, hurting the European economies.

The key to social stability is economic stability and vice versa as events in Albania have shown all too clearly. The challenge of restabilizing societies that have degenerated into anarchic-like conditions, including Albania, is immensely greater than those needed to prevent disintegration.

In Eastern Europe, the West's priority should be to fill stomachs, not arsenals.

The Marshall Plan remains one of the positive legacies of American foreign policy in the 20th century. Making the analogy that NATO expansion is the Marshall Plan of the 1990s distorts the vision and the nature of peace-building that informed the rebuilding of Europe and misinforms the American public about the objectives of extending a military alliance further east.

Daniel T. Plesch and Kirsten Ruecker, are director and research assistant, respectively, at the British American Security Information Council.