Moscow had little leverage to begin with. The Warsaw Pact is dead, and NATO is poised to expand eastward–with or without Moscow’s OK. Despite critics’ threats of a nationalist backlash, Russian President Boris Yeltsin decided “we simply can’t afford a big row with the West,” said one of his aides. Last week Primakov and NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana agreed to set up a joint council granting Moscow a voice–not a veto–in alliance decisions. And next week Yeltsin meets Clinton and other NATO leaders to sign the new modus vivendi. That smooths the way for NATO to admit new members for the first time in 15 years, an effort State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns called “our single most important foreign-policy initiative since Clinton came to office.”
The news helped reassure Central Europeans who’ve wondered, “Does the West really care about us?” as Czech President Vaclav Havel put it last week while visiting Washington on a pro-NATO crusade. The alliance will unveil its new invitees at a July 9 Madrid summit. “It’s striking how NATO membership has become a status symbol, like owning a Gucci handbag,” confided one senior administration official. The Czechs, Poles and Hungarians are the only shoo-ins. But others, especially the Romanians and Slovenians, are scrambling to join them.
The race kicked off in 1994, when Clinton said the question of NATO expansion was “not if, but when.” The following year, at a multinational peacekeeping exercise in Ft. Polk, La., a platoon of Hungarian soldiers grabbed their chance when U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili dropped by to chat. The Hungarian public-affairs officer suddenly shoved into Shali’s hands some bumper stickers adorned with Hungarian flags. “They’ve even got their own bumper stickers,” mused Shali as he strode off. “Who says they’re not ready to join NATO?” Some countries, such as strife-torn Albania, clearly are not. NATO requires democratic and free-market reforms and improving relations with neighboring countries.
As recently as 1995 Slovakia was a leading contender. But last month its delegation left Washington disappointed. U.S. officials have not been impressed by the autocratic habits of Slovakian Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar. “We’re facing reality,” said one Slovakian official glumly as he cooled his heels in the White House reception room. “Even so, our economy’s doing great,” added one of his ever-hopeful colleagues. The Romanians “have come on like gangbusters,” acknowledged Nicholas Burns. Bucharest invited Romanian King Michael back from his 50-year exile and dispatched him to lobby the crowned heads of Europe. (“Every little bit helps,” said Burns with a chuckle.) Even Washington Bullets star Gheorghe Muresan—the NBA’s only Romanian–wrote Clinton on Bucharest’s behalf. The 7-foot-8 player’s biggest frustration, he grumbled, was that “nobody in the NBA knows where Romania is.”
NATO parliaments, including Congress, must approve the new invitees, a two-year process with outcomes “we can’t take for granted,” admitted a U.S. administration official. Selling the new NATO may be easier if Romania and Slovenia, which have some alliance critics, don’t make the first cut. That also keeps alive hopes for future invitations to the world’s most successful defense alliance. Even in traditionally neutral Austria, officials like Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schussel are eying the action: “This is a huge opportunity, and we should seize it.” Such emotions have spawned a new “anthropology of NATO expansion,” one Russian academic told Albright in Moscow. Better that, she answered, than the “archeology” of the cold war. And no one wants to be left behind in the dust.
