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NATO Enlargement and the Baltic States: What Can the Great Powers Do?

Authored by Dr. Stephen J. Blank.

November 18, 1997

78 Pages

Brief Synopsis

NATO's enlargement has brought it to the borders of the Baltic states who covet membership in NATO. However, admitting them into NATO is one of the most difficult problems for the Alliance because of Russia's unconditional opposition to such action and because of NATO's own internal divisions on this issue. Nonetheless, a new regime or system of security for the entire Baltic region must now be on the U.S. and European agenda.

The key players in such a process are Russia, Germany, and the United States. Their actions will determine the limits of the possible in constructing Baltic security for the foreseeable future. Dr. Stephen Blank presents a detailed and extensive analysis of these three governments' views on Baltic and European security. Their views on regional security are materially shaped by and influence their larger views on their mutual relations and policy towards Europe. Their views also demonstrate the complexity of the issues involved in constructing Baltic, not to mention European, security. But because NATO enlargement is the most serious foreign policy and defense issue before Congress now, such an analysis can illuminate much of what is happening in the NATO enlargement process and why it has taken its current shape.

Summary

As NATO enlarges and approaches the borders of the Baltic states, it faces one of the most difficult and complex security challenges in contemporary Europe. While the Baltic states crave membership in NATO, Russia deems that outcome as unacceptable, threatens to break cooperation with the West in such an event, and NATO allies themselves remain divided over the wisdom of Baltic membership. The apparent irreconcilability of NATO's and Russia's positions, and the Baltic states' insistence upon consideration for their security interests, oblige both East and West to collaborate on devising a workable and acceptable security system for the region that respects both Russian and Baltic, not to mention Western, interests. Otherwise, this region might become the flashpoint of a political conflict that could eventually degenerate into a military one.

NATO must simultaneously deter Russia and reassure it and the Baltic states that their security will be enhanced. The key players in this process are Russia, Germany, and the United States. They have the means to shape the future parameters of any Baltic security system and are the principal players in Europe as well. And it is their policies that will define the limits of what can be done in the Baltic, as well as in much of Europe, since Baltic security is inseparable from that of Europe as a whole. Or, in other words, European security is indivisible, and Baltic security is part of it.
However, analysis of Russian policy through 1997 suggests that Russia remains fundamentally incapable of playing a constructive role in this process. Russian policies for Europe are incoherent and attached to models of European security that have little or no relevance to other states or that actually alarm them. Russia still disdains the small states, thinking them to be of no consequence, proposes infeasible and objectionable schemes of pan-European collective security that do not bind it but would bind NATO, and at the same time pursues unilateralist spheres of influence policies in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Russian policy is also frankly and openly revisionist, demanding border revisions and refusing to sign formal border treaties to recognize the post- 1989 changes in Central and Eastern Europe. Its spokesmen make demands for an exceptional position in Europe or for unworkable security systems that do little to advance faith in Russia's coherence or good will. Furthermore, its policy statements reveal a continuing addiction to old-fashioned doctrines of zero-sum games, of viewing everything in terms of correlations of antagonistic military forces, and of desires for exclusive rights over small states.

These obstacles to Russian success in Europe are prominent in Russia's Baltic policies. Russia continues to make threats against the Baltic states of economic war, of criminal subversion from without, and of refusing to recognize borders, while attempting to gain a veto over NATO's activities. Because Russia cannot carry out these threats, it only further antagonizes the Baltic states, makes them more intractable in their own anti-Russian policies at home and abroad, and only worsens the regional situation. Whereas 4-5 years ago Russia might have been able to achieve a genuine neutralization of the region, today that is impossible. Now many of NATO's members are involved in trying to secure the region. Until such time as Russia can devise coherent and responsible policies for Europe, it will continue to lose ground there and be seen as a threat more than as part of the solution.

However, it is precisely due to its military-political capability to be a threat that Germany has attempted to conduct a policy where, on the one hand, it wants to expand (or so it says) the European Union (EU) and NATO to the East but will otherwise do nothing that antagonizes President Boris Yeltsin and Russia. As a result, Germany has steadily backtracked since 1993 on Baltic admission into NATO and proposed terms for Russia's integration into NATO's policy process–the new NATO-Russia Council–that remarkably prefigured the final agreement on the Council in May 1997. Unfortunately, those terms went far beyond giving Russia “a voice but not a veto” and certainly made it clear that Germany will not accept Baltic membership in NATO anytime soon. Indeed, German Foreign Ministry officials speaking in Moscow openly alluded to the need not to do anything that wounds Russian sensitivities, explicitly giving Russia a veto on future expansion. Thus, it is unlikely that Germany will shoulder the responsibilities of helping to underpin a security regime that is viable for the Baltic. If anything, all the evidence suggests that Germany is trying to force the Nordic states, mainly Finland and Sweden, and the United States to bear this burden while it basically gets a free ride.

Accordingly, it falls to Washington to take the lead here, as it has done in the general process of enlargement. Washington has done so. It has crafted new political and institutional formulas for NATO within the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program that will enhance the scope of Baltic and other states' political and military participation in the alliance's activities. It is devising programs like shared air defense and the U.S.-Baltic charter to allay their security concerns while seeking to integrate Moscow through the Council.

Yet here, too, American policy seems to run into difficulties. Evidently, as cited below, many U.S. officials have come to view Article 5 of the Washington Treaty as having outlived its usefulness and as merely a part of the political superstructure needed for reassurance rather than as an operative, vital part of the Alliance. Washington has told Sweden, for example, that it looks towards a collective security system in which all the states of Europe can participate through the PfP program. The language of this program's founding documents is very close to that of Article 4 of the Washington Treaty that calls only for consultations in the event of a threat to security. Thus membership in the PfP program only gives states the right of consultation in the event of a threat to their security, it does not give them the security guarantee commonly held to derive from Article 5.

Even though the United States is the only state that is really trying to lead the formation of a regional and continental system, its approach attempts to advance NATO's enlargement while maintaining that a clearly increasingly anti-American and revisionist Russia is a democratic partner for Washington. This lack of realism betrays a substantial confusion in policy that is not warranted by Russia's truculent posture or Germany's interest in having others do for it what it will not do for itself, namely play a more active role in areas like the Baltic. While the innovations proposed by the United States to NATO and the PfP program are sound and will enhance Baltic security, it is not clear that they will go far enough to overcome regional tensions, unless the EU and Europe are also brought into the picture so that a true regional stabilization can occur. Likewise, we need to recognize that, however much Europe has changed since 1949, the pledge of collective defense to treaty members under Article 5 is still relevant, and that it is not at all clear if Russia truly has reconciled itself to the status quo. As President Clinton recently wrote to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas), we still need to guard against the possibility of a regression in Russian politics that would threaten the accomplishments of the last decade. Among those achievements is the independence of the Baltic states.

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