ACCESSION NUMBER:302892
FILE ID:EUR411
DATE:09/09/93
TITLE:EXPANDED NATO MEMBERSHIP "RIPE FOR DISCUSSION" (09/09/93)
TEXT:*93090911.EUR
*EUR411 09/09/93 *
EXPANDED NATO MEMBERSHIP "RIPE FOR DISCUSSION"
(Senator Lugar in Hudson Institute address) (600)
By Jim Shevis
USIA Staff Writer
Washington -- United States Senator Richard G. Lugar (Republican-Indiana)
says the question of expanded membership in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) is "ripe for discussion, and I believe it must be
discussed."
Lugar told an audience of government policymakers, high-level diplomats,
corporate executives and journalists he hopes the United States will put
the membership issue on the agenda at the NATO summit meeting scheduled in
Brussels around the end of this year.
"If there is not U.S. leadership on this, it won't happen," said Lugar, a
senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Lugar made his remarks in a September 8 address at the Hudson Institute's
annual national policy forum here. The Hudson Institute is a nonprofit
policy-research organization headquartered in Indianapolis that focuses on
national and international security issues.
Recently returned from a two-week trip to NATO countries and countries in
Eastern Europe, Lugar advocates strong U.S. participation in revitalizing
NATO by adding new member states and redesigning its mission.
In his speech, Lugar spoke of his meetings with presidents and foreign and
defense ministers in Croatia, Macedonia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech
Republic, Germany and France, as well as with senior NATO and U.S. military
officials in Naples and Brussels.
He said he also visited American troops in Macedonia, and Americans in
Croatia.
Lugar noted that the 15-nation NATO was founded at the end of World War Two
because of a threat from the Soviet Union. "The Soviet menace was held at
bay and receded," he said. "Now, the threat comes in other forms."
"We must learn the sobering lessons of Bosnia, and make plans now to
forestall an unraveling of the stable Europe we have come to take for
granted," said Lugar, who is widely regarded as one of the Senate's leading
foreign policy experts.
"Western diplomatic and military continuity are not the only potential
casualties if we do not think ahead together promptly," he said. "Domestic
prosperity in the United States depends upon greater exports across open
seas to friendly allies."
Poland is a "logical" future NATO member because of its location and success
in transitioning from a command economy to a market system, Lugar said.
Russia has signaled that it has no objections to Poland joining the
alliance, he said.
1
Hungary and the Czech Republic also are likely candidates for membership, he
said.
While the question, "What does Russia think of this?" is heard about an
expanded NATO membership, "the question most of our allies ask is, 'What
does the United States think of this?,'" Lugar said.
"For there cannot be security there in Europe without Americans there," he
said.
Following Lugar's address, Director R. James Woolsey of the Central
Intelligence Agency presented the Hudson Institute's James H. Doolittle
award to Paul H. Nitze for his "outstanding contributions to the national
security" of the United States over the past five decades.
Among his achievements, Nitze headed the U.S. negotiating team at the Geneva
arms control talks in the 1980s and helped found the Committee on the
Present Danger, a nonpartisan group formed in 1976 that argued a strong
U.S. defense capability was needed to balance a massive Soviet arms
buildup.
Previous Doolittle award winners were former President Ronald Reagan, former
Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and industrialist David Packard.
Since his State Department retirement in 1989, Nitze has been
diplomat-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced
International Studies.
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