Opening NATO's Door How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era Ronald D. Asmus A COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS BOOK COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 176 The NATO-Russia Endgame complete this project—and ample opportunity for mistakes and failure. The stage was set for one of the most dramatic plays in NATO's history. In April 1997,1 switched from being a RAND analyst and State Department consultant to being a fulltime American diplomat when I joined the Department's European Bureau as a political appointee responsible for NATO issues and European security. Within days, I was off to Moscow as part of the team helping Secretary of State Albright and Deputy Secretary Talbott negotiate what would become the NATO-Russia Founding Act. From the ceremony launching a new NATO-Russia relationship in Paris in late May 1997, we went directly to the Alliance's spring Ministerial in the Portuguese city of Sintra where, for the first time, the latent differences between Washington and some of its allies over the scope of enlargement and its future broke into the open. In the ensuing weeks, U.S.-French differences over who should be invited to join NATO would escalate into a dramatic diplomatic shoot out between Washington and Paris at the Madrid summit. Following the summit, President Clinton went to Warsaw where he received a jubilant welcome from more than 30,000 enthusiastic Poles. Even more dramatic was the President's reception in Bucharest where an estimated 100,000 Romanians turned out to cheer Clinton and Romanian President Emil Constantinescu—in spite of Washington's rejection of Romania's bid for immediate NATO membership. Clinton wrapped up this week-long tour with a stop in Copenhagen where some 80,000 Danes turned out to cheer him as well. I, in turn, was part of the team accompanying Albright on a tour of Ljubljana, St. Petersburg, Vilnius, and her native city of Prague for an emotional homecoming. Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen completed the Administration's grand tour of Central and Eastern Europe, traveling to Budapest and Sofia, to show the U.S. commitment to building a unified Europe. Nearly everyone on Clinton's national security team dealing with European security issues had read former Secretary of State Dean Acheson's memoir, Present at the Creation, in which he eloquently describes NATO's founding.2 We shied away from saying it publicly for fear of appearing pretentious, but there was a very real sense of being present at and participating in the birth of a new NATO for a new Europe. Madrid was the culmination of years of political and diplomatic work involving some of the most far-reaching changes in NATO's history. But it was not an easy birth. Tlicw; six month* were filial with drama, diplomatic intrigue, and political confrontation—with the Russians as well as with some of our closest allies. Madrid was one of the muai Uujjurlant, and also one of the most contentious summits, in NATO's history. 1. MADELEINE'S VISION President Clinton's commitment to NATO enlargement was underscored IpE his decision to nominate Madeleine K. Albright as Secretary of State for S5 The NATO-Russia Endgame 177 second term. Perhaps no one better epitomized the U.S. commitment to overcome Europe's Cold War divide. A naturalized American citizen born in Czechoslovakia, Albright had come to the United States at the age of eleven after the communist coup in Prague that led her father, Josef Korbel, then the Czechoslovak Ambassador to Belgrade, to flee to the West. Albright was fiercely proud to be an American. Unlike many Democrats of her generation, her intellectual paradigm was Munich, not Vietnam. She did not harbor any doubts about using America's power to pursue U.S. diplomatic goals. Instead, she saw the U.S. as the "indispensable" nation when it came to advancing the cause of peace and democracy.3 Albright knew firsthand Europe's tragic recent history. As a child she had witnessed first Hitler and then Stalin's occupation of her native Czechoslovakia. Her academic training was in Soviet and East European studies at Columbia University, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on Czechoslovakia. Following a stint working as a legislative aide for Senator Edmund Muskie, she worked for Zbigniew Brzezinski's National Security Council staff in the second half of the 1970s, where she was in charge of legisliflve~afiiirs. From there she went to Georgetown University where she taught U.S. foreign^ policy and became the President of the Center for National Policy. In the mid-i98os, Albright started traveling back to Central and Eastern Europe where she met many of the dissidents in Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest. She became a friend of and eventually an informal advisor to Vaclav Havel. Following communism's collapse, she was part of a team of experts that examined public attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.4 Few Americans knew the region better than she did. By the time she became Secretary of State, Albright had become an enthusiastic champion of NATO enlargement. She saw it as a historic opportunity to anchor a democratic Central and Eastern Europe to the West once and for all. The purpose of enlargement," she said in her first statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 8, 1997, "is to do for Europe's East what NATO did 50 years ago for Europe's West: to integrate new democracies, defeat old hatreds, provide confidence in economic recovery and deter conflict."5 Her goal, she once hand-wrote on a memo that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Marc Grossman had sent her, was to ensure that Europe's future was safer than its past: "Let's develop a 21st century better than the 20th—the bloodiest in Europe's history."6 Albright also viewed enlargement as a moral imperative. It was an opportunity to erase the lines drawn by the armies of Hitler and Stalin and accepted by the West at Yalta. Following the Madrid summit, Albright spoke in Prague about how NATO's Madrid summit had framed her life and her life's work. She .||J|JL1| '"'I ' ■ HI I l = llTll ll-ll •ncirj:1.-- ment—her family's journey through war to the safe shores of America; Europe's 178 The NATO-Russia Endgame journey from total war and absolute division to the promise of a new unity; and the Czech nation's journey from independence in 1918 to subjugation in 1048 to taking what she described as "your rightful place in the family of European democracies—fully, finally and forever." NATO enlargement was "a moment of injustice undone, of promises kept, of a unified Europe begun." This single sentence encapsulated the reasons for Albright's commitment to NATO enlargement.7 But Albright's commitment to enlargement also reflected her vision of a new U.S.-European relationship. She believed that the U.S. and Europe remained natural partners in the post-Cold War world. NATO enlargement was important to make Europe's eastern half safe and secure. But it was also a stepping stone to modernize the Alliance for a future in which a secure Europe would join the U.S. in dealing with new threats beyond the continent. In the spring of 1997 Albright was reading a biography of former Secretary of State Pi;an Acheson.8 In meetings with her senior staff, she often compared the period following the end of the Cold War to the early post-World War II period. In the late 1940s, Truman and Acheson had committed the United States to remain in Europe. They had created NATO as a security umbrella against the very real Soviet threat and as the framework within which European reconciliation and integration could take place. In so doing, they had helped to define fifty years of U.S. international engagement. The task the U.S. faced, she told us, was to build on that legacy and accomplishment. Sitting with Albright in her private office one day in the suiing uf 1997, she said to me and other members of her senior staff: "The challenge we face is different than the one Truman and Acheson faced, riiaiik God we dun'l face the threat that Stalin posed or the danger of World War III." "But," she continued, ■ 1. iir, v. .1,-c die Ljueshdus Lite still tin;-viiutf What shape will this new Europe take? What role will the U.S. have? Will w« cuumiue to w iciest the foundation of this Alliance. J! wc^et it light, NATO will lasi !ui .mother riftv tears. And wt: will succeeded |u.M like ihe tuuiidiiig tatlima ol NATO did. If we don't, the U.S. and Europe are likely 'u slowly drift trpui .mJ the Alliance The NATO-Russia Endgame 179 will atrophy," she once told me. The problem, she often repeated to us, was that too many people on both sides of the Atlantic were complacent and took the U.S.-European relationship for granted.9 In the spring of 1997, Albright delivered the commencement speech at Harvard University—on the spot where 50 years earlier Secretary of State George Marshall had launched the Marshall Plan. Albright invoked the vision of Marshall and her own life experience to underscore the role that America still had to play in Europe and around the world. She recalled sitting in a bomb shelter in London during World War II praying for American help. But she also recalled the price the West paid for not being vigilant in standing up early enough to Nazi aggression. America, she underscored, had to continue to lead. A new generation again had to make the choice to lead and shape a new world just as Marshall's generation had done in their time. "Today," she told her audience, "the greatest danger to America is not some foreign enemy; it is the possibility that we will fail to heed the great example of that generation, that we will allow the momentum towards democracy to stall, take for granted the institutions and principles upon which our own freedom is based, and forget what the history of this century reminds us, that problems abroad, if left unattended, will all too often come home to America."10 Critics would at times accuse Albright of pushing for too much change too quickly, and hectoring or riding roughshod over our allies. But Albright was convinced the U.S. had a window of opportunity in which to lay the foundation for a new and transformed trans-Atlantic relationship. The danger in her eyes was not that the U.S. was too ambitious, but rather that it would become complacent. She wanted the U.S. to take the lead in consolidating the global triumph of democracy and forging new alliances to keep the peace as effectively as those of the Cold War. "We have a responsibility in our time, as others had in theirs," she said in her Harvard speech, "not to be prisoners of history but to shape history; a responsibility to fill the role of pathfinder, and to build with otrKv ers a global network of purpose and law that will protect our citizens, defend our interests, preserve our values and bequeath to future generations a legacy as proud as the one we honor today."11 Albright's vision of a unified Europe included a democratic Russia. For Albright, the Cold War had been a fight against communism as an ideology, not against the Kussian people. Following her nomination as Secretary of State, the Russian mctfl iiriiiaMv pom lived hei as a uiseiple or /.bignicw Bi/.cv.niAi uuU »11 unreconstructed anti-Russian Cold Warrior. They dubbed her Gospozha Stal or "Madam Steel"—a label she was actually fond of. But her commitment to bring Kiiiiid inlu ihe Western contiuui■ ■ L-- ul ii.uians enrncas □ suipiisc losomeutliei Russian interlocutors.12 In her first meeting with Russian President Yeltsin in February. Albright told him that he should not view her as a former Cold Warrior, but as an American version of Primakov—a tough but pragmatic de- 180 The NATO-Russia Endgame fender of national interests who was committed to building a friendlier U.S.Russia partnership. When Yeltsin told her that she needed to recognize that there was a new Russia, she asked Yeltsin to recognize that NATO, too, had changed. "I would like you to think," she told Yeltsin, "that there is a new NATO, not one of we versus you or you versus us, but one where we are on the same side."13 Some six weeks later, Albright was back in Moscow for a final round of negotiations on the NATO-Russia Founding Act She met with a group of Russian strategic intellectuals at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Albright made an impassioned plea for them to put aside Cold War stereotypes and bury their distrust of NATO.14 In the question and answer session, she talked about how both she and many of them had what she termed "Cold War libraries" filled with books on communism, arms control and the history of a divided Europe in the 20th century. "My library at home is a Cold War library. It is filled with books about totalitarianism, communism and arms control," she said. "I want to make it obsolete. I want people to look at these books and think they belong to ancient history because we have so changed our relations for the better."15 How important was Albright for NATO enlargement? Her role was critical for three reasons. First, her appointment was widely seen in Europe, Russia, and in the U.S. as confirmation of Washington's determination to see NATO enlargement through. While many conservative critics had openly questioned whether President Clinton was truly committed to enlargement, no one doubted her determination to seeing it through. She was the high-level champion on this issue the Administration needed at home and abroad. Second, while much of the conceptual work and diplomatic foundation was completed prior to her becoming Secretary of State, it was Albright who got the actual job done. Her relationship with Primakov helped broker the final compromises that made the Founding Act possible. She was critical in holding the line in favor of three candidates for NATO's first round at Madrid—and convinced skeptics that Washington's commitment to further enlargement was credible. To use an American football metaphor, she came in as the team quarterback in a red zone offense and put the ball in the end zone—a metaphor of the sort she teased her male colleagues for using. Third, Albright's passionate ability as a communicator made her the ideal spokesperson on NATO enlargement. She became uSe public hmu selling die policy to the U.S. public, to the Europeans, and to the U.S. Senate. She en-fpyed lakiti^ uu NATO ntlargcruoit's liiIili uid oijjLmiuig wlty. in Vici mtrds, a bigger NATO was a better one.i:' Shu could reach across the aisle to conservatives in a way that other Administration officials could not. Republicans who disliked President Clinton liked Albright, her patriotism and her defense ■ f America's role in the world—a\ ■.tuivii.ru Tn-i uutiMifTini.irrr.il h\ riic Semite. A picture of her holding hands with Senator Jesse Helms became a o ml gr The NATO-Russia Endgame 181 poster during the Senate ratification campaign. While Albright's star as U.S. Secretary of State would subsequently fade as criticism of her and her policies grew, she was at the top of her game during the first years of her tenure when NATO enlargement was implemented. 2. CHANCELLOR KOHL COMES THROUGH On January 6, 1997, Chancellor Helmut Kohl called Clinton with a firsthand account of his recent trip to Russia where he had met privately with Yeltsin at his country home in Zavidovo on January 4. It was Yeltsin's first meeting with a western leader since heart surgery two months earlier. Kohl had found Yeltsin looking older and frailer than previously. The Russian President had expressed his anger over what he referred to as the "monster" of NATO enlargement that "our friend Bill" had unleashed. Yeltsin appealed to Kohl to help him. "I have to be able to look my people in the eye and tell them that their interests are being protected," he said. "We can't keep cooperating with the West unless I can assure them of that."17 Kohl assured Clinton that he had stood firm on enlargement. But he described Yeltsin's position in vivid terms: "His position is quite clear; he is against it. He thinks it is unnecessary and fraught with enormous psychological problems. He is afraid that a new Cold War is imminent and that the people won't understand it." The Chancellor told the President he still supported NATO enlargement, but Western leaders had to deal directly with Yeltsin to reach an understanding and not rely on normal diplomatic channels or the NATO bureaucracy. Absent a deal with Yeltsin before the Madrid summit, he warned, there was a real risk of a breach in the West's ties with Moscow. The German Chancellor asked Clinton to send Talbort to Bonn to meet with him as soon as possible.18 Kohl's phone call came at a critical juncture. The wrestling match between Washington and Moscow over NATO enlargement was not over. Although Primakov had signaled to Washington in private that he recognized enlargement was going to happen, Moscow remained adamantly opposed in public. By this time, Yeltsin and Primakov had staked out such strong rhetorical and public opposition to NATO expansion that it was going to be difficult for them to back down without suffering political damage.19 Meeting with an American official in early 1997, Russian communist party head Gennady Zyuganov noted smugly that whereas in Washington there still appeared to be a range of views on enlargement, in Moscow there was only one view—everyone was opposed.20 That opposition continued to be accompanied by ominous hints at possible retaliatory steps. After a Kremlin meeting on NATO enlargement chaired by . Yeltsin on January 6, anonymous Defense Ministry sources were quoted in the Russian press as saying that the Russian President's advisors all favored "tough 182 The NATO-Russia Endgame countermeasures" against NATO. "If NATO moves eastward, Russia will move westward," one Kremlin source was quoted as saying. Moscow was also reportedly considering creating an anti-Western alliance with China, Iran, and India. Even if it could not stop enlargement's first round, the same source concluded, Moscow would reserve the right to use "any means" to prevent the Baltic states from "joining the military orbit of the U.S. and NATO."21 The endgame was starting. The Madrid summit was scheduled for early July 1997. NATO had six months to try to finalize a NATO-Russia deal and complete preparations for enlargement. But the gap between NATO and Moscow was still large. By this time Talbott had concluded that the only way to induce Moscow to work seriously to bridge that gap was to make it crystal clear that enlargement was going ahead, irrespective of whether NATO and Russia came to terms or not. Only the absolute certainty that enlargement was coming would lead the Russians to shift away from attacking enlargement and instead focus on what kind of relationship they wanted to have with an enlarged NATO. In other words, American diplomacy had to convince Moscow that the timetable and outcome of the Alliance's enlargement plans were set in concrete—and that the real choice facing Russia was whether it would protect its own interests by seeking a closer and cooperative relationship with the Alliance or watch enlargement go ahead without it. For that strategy to work, Washington needed to be confident that its allies would not blink if negotiations with Moscow stalled. But the U.S. was still not sure how solid Western European allied support was. The Russians had spent almost four years trying to convince the Europeans that expansion would destroy Moscow's relationship with Europe. NATO Secretary General Solana had warned Ambassador Hunter in early November that European support for enlargement remained weak. Faced with conflicting choices, he said, some Europeans seemed prepared to choose Moscow as their fint priority.22 Solana repeated that concern to Senator Bill Roth (R-DE) later that month. If the Europeans had to choose between NATO enlargement and conflict with Russia, the Secretary General said, NATO enlargement might just lose.23 The Administration faced a paradox. To get the allies on board it needed a NATO-Russia agreement—"r .it least 10 be able lo demonstrate lh.it il had done everything possible lo try to get one. But lo get Moscow lo ticgoliulc seriously on j NATO-Russia agreement, it needed to convince Moscow tlutl allied support was solid and enlargement inevitable. The Administration alio needed a mechanism tor negotiating with Moscow thai included the allies but wm not overly cumbersome. Kohl hud lold I'tesident Clinton that llus issue wa? Iod impeirlatil I . ,;f Vim U-r.. ..„.-r;,fr 7r„t ll.-.t I.- wl if h.llld|ri| |.|-- lJl 111 vately among the U.S., the major European powers and the Russians. Talbott, too, had concluded that the NATO bureaucracy was not igrfe-enough for this effort, He was foolüng for 11 Vehicle llul wuuid put NATO, not The NATO-Russia Endgame 183 the U.S., in front yet still allow Washington to drive the process from behind the scenes. In early January 1997, Solana visited Washington. Talbott proposed empowering him to be the Alliance's point person in dealing with Moscow—with the U.S. playing an active behind-the-scenes-role. While Solana was open to the idea, he emphasized it would only work if the other NATO allies, especially France, went along with it. And Talbott's scheme was not the only one on the table. French President Chirac had suggested that the U.S., France, Germany, and the United Kingdom hold a five-power summit with Moscow to try to hammer out the details of a NATO-Russia agreement. The Administration was not enthusiastic. In talking to Chirac, the President had told him that he did not rule out such a meeting but wanted to try to first make progress in the U.S.Russia channel.24 One week later Talbott departed for London, Paris, and Bonn. His mission was to get Washington's closest allies to agree to the Administration's proposed strategy and mechanism for negotiating a NATO-Russia agreement. He arrived in London on January 13 for meetings with British Foreign Secretary Rifkind and senior British officials. They made it clear to him that London supported Washington's approach and was prepared to let Solana and the U.S. take the lead in hammering out a NATO-Russia agreement. While underscoring the British interest in reaching an agreement with Moscow, London also signaled that it was prepared to go ahead with enlargement with or without a NATO-Russia agreement.25 Crossing the channel, however, Talbott arrived to a chillier reception in Paris. While President Chirac was more supportive on NATO than his predecessors, Paris' reticence to follow the U.S. lead en principe was also well known. From the beginning, France had been the most reluctant of Washington's major allies on enlargement, and Chirac had already floated the idea of postponing the Madrid summit with Polish President Kwasniewski some weeks ear-li'T Chirac had his own, often strongly held, views on how to deal with Moscow, too. Complicating matters, the White House and the Elysee were conducting quiet back-channel talks between Sandy Berger and Jean-David Lcvittc, President Chirac's diplomatic advisor, to explore a compromise that would in I.' bring France back into NATO's integrated military command by Madrid. Il was a delicate moment in US-French relations. In the Elysee, the French President listened politely as Talbott argued that only a tlcai and unified allied position would induce Moscow to seriously negotiate a NATO-Russia agreement before Madrid. Chirac's response made it clear that he saw the problem lying not only 111 Moscow, but in Washington as The problem was 1 "fundamental lack of understanding between Russia T jjiJ the VuHial SlJLh," the French President said. He disapproved of what he termed a bd of American "finesse ' n. iie,ding \\\[][ [lie Rusiiany "My convic-" *h;" mg *f'S. docs not talie full account of Ktu>uui ^iiJiti..l.es." he said. 184 The NATO-Russia Endgame "The Russian people are profoundly hostile to NATO enlargement. It reflects a fear of encirclement—a traditional fear of the Russians—as well as a fear of humiliation." He recalled running into a busload of forty Russian babushkas in Paris who had told him that NATO was encircling Russia and had asked: "What will Yeltsin do when American nuclear weapons start falling on Moscow and St. Petersburg?" Chirac warned that if Washington simply went ahead and enlarged NATO, the consequences could be the collapse of the Yeltsin government. "If one imposes NATO enlargement on the Russians, the Yeltsin regime will not be able to resist the public reaction and will not remain in power for very long," the French President suggested. Washington could not simply impose NATO enlargement on Russia and not worry about consequences that would be felt first and foremost by the Europeans. "Do not forget that it is we Europeans who are Russia's neighbors and who are most concerned about the consequences," Chirac concluded. 'You should not blind yourself to the possibility that this could lead to a resurgence of deep-rooted Russian nationalism." Instead, Clmae wanted Kiaiice and Germany lu step in and act as an honest broker. 'Yeltsin needs a meeting with me and Helmut Kohl because Russia knows that France and Germany understand the situation better than others." The French President returned to the idea of a Big Five summit with Moscow. It was also an attempt to reduce Washington's role and leverage. And ii completely cut out NATO Secretary General Solana from any official role. Wheu Talbott asked what the summit's goal would be, Chirac responded tri.it "whatever solution we arrive at must not be imposed on the Russians." It was the opposite of what Washington wanted. Talbott asked what France would do if such a strategy failed. Was 'Pat a pic-pared to go ahead and enlarge NATO if it proved impossible to conclude a NATO-Russia agreement? Chirac dodged the question: "1 cun'l imagine tuilmc. If we failed, it would raise questions in France as to whether we were back to square one. We will not fail if we approach the issue with finesse. failure a unthinkable. If there were some fundamental reasons why the Hum urns wcic opposed to enlargement, we would have to confront some serious questions. But surely most of the problem is based on misunderstandings." Washington and Paris were clearly not on the same wavelength. Talboti Jrs-agreed with Chirac's analysis—01'Russia, oi the U.S.-Kussia relationship and of the tactics on how to deal with Moscow in the months ahead. He told 11 it Wrench ['resident ihial lie thought il was qoile possible that Russia would no* fee willing or able to negotiate a NATO-Russia deal by July—even ii it wanted to, which was not at all clear. 'The Russian side is all screwed up," Talbott told Chirac, having "gone through one uf the greatest tiauinas in history, with more sudden change in their internal order, external relations and Hrr-'ugy.....d m_ their definition of statehood, than any country which has not lost a major r i uinni-ued. Failure on NATO enlargement would only encourage that trend. "If wc fail," Kohl concluded, "aiLi^iwill iimi r 1 ■ ■ - Aiih-mi-.hu.vi- m.t tlnm- mcuki A mm thr-,, .nil niy rl-i it Mf 111 11 il krilil was anrl <:lioi ilrl iirm l'i.ii-r- \f \ ll happen. Finally the French will say that they knew better ill die tunc U» the Americans would not listen." The NATO-Russia Endgame 187 He did not want that to happen, Kohl added. "If NATO enlargement fails now, we will have a dismal situation for many years. Again the Americans will be blamed and the President will be blamed. Certain circles will make much of the failure. Please tell Bill Clinton as a friend: I don't want that to happen. I want to use these four years to capitalize on American leadership." Kohl now told Talbott that the time to enlarge NATO had arrived. "We can't tell the Poles and the Czechs that they are not welcome [in the West] after what they did to survive communism." But NATO enlargement was also a question of German national interest, especially in terms of Germany's relations with neighboring Poland, Kohl added. "This is not just a moral issue," he said, "it's in our self-interest to have this development now and not in the future." Kohl was well known for his strong European credentials. European integration, he underscored, was of "existential" importance to Germany. Many in Western Europe, he added, were hypocritical about their support for Central Europe, especially in the EU. "If there were today a truly secret vote among my EU colleagues, I am not sure we would have a majority for expansion." The Chancellor brushed aside arguments that EU membership could serve as a substitute for NATO. "Even if the EU could manage expansion, it would not be enough to stabilize Central and Eastern Europe. My clear position is that EU is no substitute for NATO enlargement. It is important that you understand that this is our clear position." 'Time is running out," the German Chancellor continued. There were two kev reasons why the Alliance bad lo act now. The nrit was iliat lieniis in Russia were pointing in the wrong direction. "The situation in Russia is getting more difficult all 'lie time, both concerning NATO and in other areas. New waves of nationalism are mounting in Russia." The problem was the psychology of the Russian people trying to recover from the debris of seven decades of communism "You can make politics with a people's psychology—just look at 20th-ueiilurv Germany" The second reason was that it was not clear how much longer Yeltsin would be around. Yeltsin was "Ihc best of the current political figures ihpt iinelit come tu pohvui' in Russia—but not the only one imaginable. "I don't think Yeltsin will List out his term" Kohl said. He recalled how moved Yeltsin had been to 5«: h tm and how the Russian President had confided in him that he had underestimated the seveiilv of his. illness and was not sure huw long tic would live His last meeting with the Russian President in Moscow had been an emotional ntie. "I am no doctor but I believe we should make good use of the time remaining. If the elm nee* aie going tu he good, it is now." _ The Chancellor was flexible on the modalities for moving forward. The key ■ llnrii; mi-. ílrit Weiitv-in Ljulij ^i-ir.Lihui-ctlin n; a small group with Yeltsin. He underscored the importance ot giving Fiannc and Chirac 0 special role, but made it clear he was not opposed to using Solana as NATO's lead negotiator if 188 The NATO-Russia Endgame Moscow accepted that approach. The important thing was to move while | Yeltsin was in office and make him feel included in the decisionmaking process. "We have to give priority to embracing Yeltsin in the positive sense of the word—and we have to do so before July, well before July. Time is running out on us." Yeltsin should be able to say afterwards, Kohl concluded, "that he played a special role in the process. He can say: 'I helped decide. I am a big guy.' That's i very important to him." If Yeltsin knew that NATO would proceed with or without a NATO-Russia agreement, he would "join us rather than turning his back j to us or letting himself be left behind as Europe moved forward without him."27 Talbott left Bonn relieved. The German Chancellor had endorsed the ] essence of Washington's strategy. Chirac and France would still require special handling, but Washington had enough support from Solana and key allies to launch the effort. The U.S. Deputy Secretary returned to Washington on January 16 to report to the President and his national security team in the ; Cabinet Room on his trip. Sandy Berger, now sitting opposite President Clinton at the cabinet table as the President's National Security Advisor, warned the President that the road ahead would be difficult. Managing the twin commitments to enlarging NATO and sustaining cooperation with Russia, he said, was going to be like Scylla and Charydbis and among the most difficult foreign policy challenges Clinton would face as President.28 3. THE ROAD TO HELSINKI Clinton and Yeltsin were scheduled to meet in Helsinki in March. Over the next two months a frenzied set of negotiations took place in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington. In late January Talbott and Gore's national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, visited Moscow for three days of intense discussions. "Our conclusion is that, after three years of fighting the problem of NATO, the Russians may finally be prepared to join us in solving it," they wrote upon their return. "This is partly because they seem to have realized that despite their opposition to enlargement and their best efforts to derail the process, Madrid is a fixed point on the horizon—and on the calendar—and they must navigate accordingly." Russian attitudes had not changed, Talbott and Fuerth noted. "From the Russians' perspective, what will happen in Madrid remains a thoroughly ugly fact. But they are no longer devoting quite so much energy to trying to talk us out of enlargement, or to split us from our Allies. Nor are they quite so baldly threatening to restart the Cold War in retaliation for enlargement." Instead, Moscow seemed to be groping for a way to insulate the U.S.-Russia relationship and its ties with the West from the fallout of enlargement. "The devil, however, is not just in the details—it's in the fundamentals," the memo continued. Moscow was still insisting on demands that were complete The NATO-Russia Endgame 189 iiun-*taiieri Left to their own devices, Primakov and Rodionov were unlikely to neonate a deal 011 NATO's tinwUwr. They were too interested in haggling over the details, especially regarding the military details of enlargement. But the auud rjuwuwas LiiiitCheiiiuiiiviiiiij ami Yeltsin win: 1 nt-icasjngjy uwoived—and iiixf had difleieiit cDRKiru that were eaujer (or tin: U.S. to address. Their priority win thill [hey fveutbly Lnj able tu elami In rhcu Own ueupte itm spnng [Jul thw have defended Russia':, acvuufr and honor in the face of a looming development that their domestic political adversaries will characterize as a defeat and humiliation."29 Shortly thereafter, Yeltsin sent out the first feelers suggesting he wanted a deal. Ill a Seller in C tin tun mi January 30, the Ruiiian Prep idc il L LI ndcj 1 uii trie need to ensure that the U.S.-Russian partnership remained "irreversible." He noted lhat both siun were "deadlocked" on the issue of NATO expansion, but i want a canLrornatjou wdh ihe West. But he underscored that diceinnmiiriist-lcdopiiujilioii in &iv Duma 'will take advantage of anything" to try lo "change ilie w'(nAc regime."32 Flying to Chicago with Gore the next day, ■ Chernomyrdin told him: "I understand that the decision [on enlargement] has . been made; and we know you can't reverse it. But we need help on managing ;■ our own domestic politics on the issue." Gore responded: "Victor, we'll do that, i so long as you can find a way to declare victory in what we can offer."33 It was now clear that Moscow wanted to negotiate with the U.S., not Paris or ■: other European capitals. For all of his previous efforts to exploit divisions between Washington and its European allies, Primakov now referred to Solana ■ and Washington's NATO allies with contempt. He would continue to talk to others, he told Talbott, but he considered Solana a "stool pigeon" and the role ' of countries like France "ornamental." Moscow knew who was making the real decisions. "That's why we'd rather talk directly with you. We're not so naive as to think that you don't call the shots. Sure, I'll keep talking to Solana, but just so we all understand that a deal depends on the U.S. and Russia coming to 250 Head-to-Head at Madrid Helmut Kohl for the role he played at the Madrid summit. In a meeting with German President Roman Herzog in Washington later that month, Clinton bubbled over with praise for the German Chancellor. "1 would do anything for Chancellor Kohl—even jump off this building—since he has done so much for the United States," the President gushed. Clinton said that some in Europe were criticizing the U.S. for the way it had handled NATO expansion, and that the French were feeding that feeling. "All that I can tell you," he said, "is that I have supported a strong European Union, a European defense identity within NATO, and the expansion of the European Union. On occasions, there will be differences, but I have no interest in trying to use the fact that, at the moment, we are doing well economically. I have to deal with an isolationist Congress but my goal is not to throw our weight around. I favor partnership," the President said. "Therefore, I invite you to treat us as friends with whom you can be honest and not to see us as a country that is trying to be both isolationist and arrogant at the same time. I regret how some of the issues played out, but please understand that I see our future in continued partnership, shared responsibility and shared decision-making."5' Book VIII THE POLITICAL BATTLE One major hurdle remained. NATO enlargement required ratification by all the allies. In the United States, this meant a two-thirds majority vote in the U.S. Senate. While the U.S. was the NATO ally most committed to enlargement, it was also paradoxically the country where enlargement was most vulnerable politically. The U.S. constitution, by requiring a two-thirds Senate majority, set a higher bar for ratification than that faced by most other allies. And the independent traditions of the Senate inevitably made the task even harder. At first glance, the Administration had several key advantages. Both Republicans and Democrats supported NATO enlargement in their party platforms and several votes on nonbinding resolutions on the Senate floor had produced a solid majority in favor of enlargement.1 The final 80-19 Senate vote suggested an overwhelming victory over enlargement opponents. But the actual political fight was closer and harder fought than those numbers suggested. The Administration's support was broad but often shallow and was not locked in until late in the game. One week after the final vote in the spring of 1998, President Clinton admitted to Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi that the final vote was "a little misleading" and that the outcome of the enlargement battle was closer than it looked. "A lot of people who voted with us were reluctant," the President said.2 252 The Political Battle The reasons were apparent. NATO enlargement to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland involved the biggest increase in the U.S. security commitment to Europe in decades. The Clinton Administration also insisted that the first new members would not be the last and that enlargement could eventually embrace countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea. This ambitious agenda was put forward at a time when foreign policy was seen as a less pressing national priority, and when the American public appeared skittish about new commitments abroad and Congress was less prepared to be deferential to the President. Generational turnover and the decrease in the authority of the key Congressional committees had also undermined the traditional levers for the Senate leadership to ensure building bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.3 While both Democrats and Republicans supported enlargement in principle, there were also important differences between them that needed to be reconciled. The Clinton Administration had embraced enlargement as part of a broader overhaul of the Alliance to help unify Europe and create a new trans-Atlantic partnership oriented toward new threats. It emphasized that enlargement was part of a broader effort to create a "new NATO" for a new era. In contrast, many Republicans were inclined to support enlargement as a geopolitical hedge against Moscow. They were suspicious of, if not opposed to, negotiating the NATO-Russia Founding Act. They were skeptical about NATO assuming new missions such as peace support operations and uncomfortable that the Administration put emphasis on such missions beyond NATO's borders. Lurking behind these questions was the broader issue of why the U.S. remained in Europe after the end of the Cold War and what NATO was for in the future. Partisan politics was also a factor—and increasingly so. The President's avoidance of the draft, his handling of gays in the military, and what Republicans perceived as his unsteady record on the use of force had all contributed to Republican ciititisiij oi Clinton's handling ot (oieigu ailairs. 1 lie biť ter debates over Bosnia policy had also left political kju uu livth mdcs. While the Monica Lewinsky scandal would not break until early 199a, the increasingly bitter tenor of Washington polities made it difficult la knit together bipartisan cooperation in any area, including foreign policy. After the end of the Cold War, politics no longer stopped at the water's edge, if it ever had. Even Republicans inclined to support enlargement nevertheless asked why tlicy ijiuiild help the Clinton Administration achieve .1 major foreign policy victory. Opposition to enlargement was also passionate. The opponents n id mini many well-known and respected figures in the U.S. foreign policy Liublu.li ment. George Kennan, A key architect of post-World War II iľoiiíainnii-iii policy, attacked the decision to enlarge NATO as "the most fateful error oi American policy in the entire post-Cold War era."4 John Lewis Caddis, tlw well-known diplomatic historian, wrote: "I can iuluI] 1:0 ullmr niuiimnt io m\_ rm-i w-v^rTii-in-r- i:i prn iTFin^ tTisTi iti;ti 11' M'ÍTý-íi rliť'Tr* f>;v>. uiTp^nfr The Political Battle 253 the community of historians, for an announced policy position."5 The New York Times issued one editorial after another opposing enlargement and urging Congress to do the same. Critics openly predicted that support would collapse once it was exposed to public scrutiny. Some suggested that enlargement would never be ratified. The stage was set for a major political battle. 1. CREATING A COMMAND POST: THE BIRTH OF S/NERO Recognizing the challenge the Administration faced, President Clinton and Secretary Albright decided to create a special NATO Enlargement Ratification Office to spearhead the ratification effort. Like everything in the State Department, it had to be reduced to an acronym—S/NERO—which in State Department-ese meant that it answered directly to the Secretary of State. But the acronym led to more than one quip about whether we truly wanted a name that many people associated with the hubris and fall of the Roman Empire. While located in the State Department, this office was to be the command post for coordinating the entire Administration's political effort to ensure enlargement's ratification. The Administration turned to Jeremy Rosner to head this office. Rosner had been a senior NSC aide in charge of legislative affairs and speechwriting in Clinton's first term and had written the President's January 1904 Prague speech on enlargement. After leaving the White House, he had gone to the Carnegie Endowment, a leading Washington-based think tank, to write a book on why some foreign policy issues become relatively easy successes on Capitol Hill and others fail.6 One of the first books Rosner read was Stull Holt's Treaties Defeated by the Senate which traced the history of the Senate's handling of treaties in explaining the demise of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.7 Rosner immediately saw parallels between the League of Nations' defeat and the kenning battle 'ivL-r NATO enlargement. In both cases, the Administration was trying to push a treaty through the Senate involving a major new U.S. commitment following victory in a war but at a time when there were real pressures to ictreiiLli from international commitments and refocus on domestic issues. Rusnm was convinced enlargement ratification was a wiunable proposition and that public support I01 it enisled. But the more fvusnci looked at the parallel between the League or Nations and NATO cn]aij;eiiiuiit. the more 1 nnvinced he became ilint the Administration etnild lusc this battle if it adopted ,1 "business ns usual" uppiuach in the uncertain political environment of the post-Cold War era—a point he made in an article in Foreign Affairs and pressed with both Lake and Bcrger in private in the fall uf 1996 - : Rosner believed that the main political danger facing the Administration was ivn the right. Democrats seemed less enthusiastic about enlargement at first 254 The Political Battle glance but at the end of the day were unlikely to desert their President on this issue in spite of their qualms. Republicans, in contrast, seemed more supportive on paper but, Rosner noted, they were deeply uncomfortable with the Administration's enlargement rationale, its policy on Russia, and the implications for NATO's effectiveness as a military alliance. In a memo to Berger in early 1997, Rosner laid out four scenarios detailing how the Administration might lose the ratification battle. In the first scenario, Republicans defected from the pro-enlargement coalition because the Administration was viewed as having gone too far in accommodating Moscow's concerns. In a second scenario the pro-enlargement coalition splintered over cost and burden-sharing issues. A third scenario envisioned Republicans deserting the President because Democrats tried to monopolize the political credit for enlargement. Rosner's final scenario foresaw the Senate turning down enlargement because it felt it had not been given an adequate say in the process, as was the case in part with the League of Nations.9 To avoid these pitfalls, Rosner believed the Administration had to reach out to the conservative Republicans and pursue a "center out" as opposed to "left in" strategy. In other words, it had to start by locking in political support among both internationalist Democrats and Republicans in the center and then build out toward both political extremes. On February 26, 1997, Rosner sent Berger and Albright a private memo outlining his strategy. The stakes involved were high, he argued. Success "would give NATO, Europe and general U.S. foreign policy an important boost." But a loss "would be League of Nations II with grim consequences for NATO and the ability of the U.S. to pursue its goals abroad." The Administration therefore needed a "good win" in the Senate "on a comfortable, larger-than-expected margin rather than simply winning 67 votes by the skin of our teeth."10 To get this "good win," Rosner concluded, the Administration had to pursue the ratification effort "aggressively, broadly and doggedly" and knit together a coalition spanning divergent groups—"hawks and doves, Russo-phobes and NATO-philes, Democrats and Republicans." It also had to recognize just where its political Achilles' heel was: "While most of the votes we need to pick up at this point are from Democrats on the left, the most serious prospect for defeat entails a broad defection by Republicans on the right." This meant that a focal point of our strategy had to be winning over conservative Republican figures like Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, hardly beloved figures for most Democrats. Some senior White House officials initially strongly opposed the notion of giving Senate Republicans preferential treatment. One week later, however, Rosner received a copy of his memo dated March 3 with a handwritten note scrawled on it by National Security Advisor Berger: "I agree with this approach." Rosner's strategy required three ingredients if it were to work. The first was a close working relationship with the Republican Senate leadership, especially The Political Battle 255' the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had formal jurisdiction over the issue. That meant dealing with the Committee's Chairman, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). Albright was already working hard to establish that relationship. In her confirmation testimony, she had pledged to be nonpartisan, joking that she had had her partisan political instincts surgically removed when she became Secretary of State. Albright journeyed to Wingate, North Carolina in fete March 1997 to visit Helms on his home turf where he had attended college. A picture of Helms and Albright holding hands on the stage at Wingate University would later become a popular poster of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO in the campaign for Senate ratification with the slogan: "Let's Do It Right. Secure the Peace. Expand NATO." Helms was an especially harsh critic of the Clinton Administration. But he liked Albright's straightforward style and her anti-communist credentials. He was inclined, at least initially, to give her the benefit of the doubt. But Helms was not yet locked in as a supporter of enlargement. While he had voted in favor of several nonbinding resolutions supporting NATO enlargement, his staff also made it clear that he was reserving final judgment and that he had concerns that needed to be addressed. Pro-freedom and anti-Yalta, he was also skeptical of entangling alliances and overseas commitments. Indeed, during the actual Senate vote on ratification, Helms would say to one of his top aides, Steve Biegun: 'You don't know how big a shift this was for me. I was a supporter of the Mansfield amendment"—a reference to the attempt to pull U.S. troops out of Europe in the mid-1970s."11 The Administration also needed a mechanism for generating bipartisan support for enlargement in the Senate and spanning the five different committees that could potentially claim a stake in the issue. It got it when on March 21,1997 Majority Leader Senator Trent Lott announced the creation of a Senate NATO Observers Group (SNOG) for what he called "the painstaking effort" to build support for ratification.12 Lott had been a member of the Arms Control Observer Group as a member of the House, which in turn served as a model for the SNOG. The idea of creating such a group had originally been floated with the Administration by Ian Brzezinski, an aide to Senator William Roth (R-DE), in December 1996. Roth, who was also President of the North Adantic Assembly (NAA), became chair of the SNOG. It started work on April 22,1997 with 28 Senators as members. Other private groups also stepped forward to reach across the political aisle. Perhaps the most important was the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO (USCEN). It was the brainchild of several Republican supporters of enlargment who had worked together in the Dole Presidential campaign: Bruce Jackson, a former Defense Department official in the Reagan Administration who had become a Vice President at Lockheed Martin; Steve Hadley, a lawyer and well-known figure in the strategic community who had been Assistant Secretary of 256 The Political Battle Defense in the first Bush Administration and would become Deputy National Security Advisor in the second Bush Administration; and Julie Finley, a prominent Republican philanthropist and fundraiser whose foreign policy views had been shaped by the late Senator Henry M. Jackson (D-WA). Along with Paula Dobriansky, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bob Zoellick, they had helped ensure that the Dole campaign and the Republican Party platform took a strong stance in favor of NATO enlargement in the summer and fall of 1996 and defeated the more isolationist sentiments in the GOP. Once it became clear that Clinton was going to be reelected, Finley, Hadley, and Jackson reached out to centrist Democrats to create what they envisioned as a bipartisan "citizen's initiative" to support NATO enlargement.13 They approached Greg Craig, a well-known Democratic lawyer at the law firm of Williams & Connolly who had worked for Senator Ted Kennedy and would become Albright's first head of Policy Planning before going on to defend President Clinton during his impeachment hearings. They asked Craig to join them in a bipartisan effort to support enlargement. On November 1,1996 the Committee was established with a bipartisan Board of Directors and a group of senior advisors, including strategic heavyweights like Richard Holbrooke, Anthony Lake, as well as Wolfowitz and Zoellick. On November 12,1996, one week after Clinton's reelection, Jackson sat down with NSC Senior Director Dan Fried at the Metropolitan Club to discuss the Committee's plans to help build bipartisan support for enlargement.14 Jackson became the Committee's President. He had initially been skeptical about NATO enlargement, but Hadley had convinced him that it was the logical extension of Ronald Reagan's support of Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s and George Bush's unification of Germany in NATO.15 Jackson had been involved in the bitter fights within the Republican Party between the internationalist and isolationist wings prior to Pat Buchanan's departure from the Party. He believed the key to ensuring Republican support for enlargement was to lock in conservative stalwarts like Senator Helms and Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles (R-OK) to form a firewall against isolationists within his own party. In a memo to the members of the Committee Board in March 1997, he wrote that "the greatest threat to a successful ratification of a treaty expanding NATO lies in the potential defection of conservative Republicans" led by "national security conservatives and Rocky Mountain unilateralists."16 Jackson also believed that NATO enlargement ratification required freezing out the isolationists in both political parties. He called it the "wing nut strategy." It meshed well with the "center-out" approach Rosner was developing. As a Reaganite Republican, Jackson also had the credentials to bring conservative Republicans on board in favor of enlargement. When Senator Bob Smith (R- NH) said he would "never" vote for any initiative pushed by "that--- Arkansasan," Jackson told him that "you may be shooting at Clinton but you are hitting Reagan." In the spring of 1998, he went to see Nickles to follow up on a The Political Battle 257 commitment the Senator had made the previous year to support enlargement. Jackson reminded him of his pledge and underscored how critical his support was in securing conservative support. Nickles told Jackson he was a man of his word and the Committee could count on his vote. But he added: 'Young man, don't ever come back in my office asking for a favor for Bill Clinton."17 In early 1997 the Committee hosted the first of many dinners at Finley's residence. At the suggestion of Kozminski, it invited Adam Michnik to be the guest of honor at a dinner designed to showcase Poland's case for Alliance membership. Michnik was a well-known former Polish dissident who had gone on to become editor-in-chief of Poland's first independent newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. The dinner was held on February 18. Finley and Jackson waited nervously for Michnik to arrive for a dinner of red wine and lamb chops with a select group of Washington's power elite. Michnik arrived late, dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket—and having clearly already had a few drinks. He proceeded to sit down and, while chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking scotch, mesmerized his audience with a two-hour discourse on Poland's tragic history, his own incarceration and torture by the communist police, and how NATO membership was the logical culmination of Solidarity's struggle for democracy and freedom. The audience was overwhelmed. Finley's stately home on Woodland Drive soon became a kind of salon where both Republican and Democrat activists rubbed shoulders with Central and East European intellectuals-turned-diplomats and former freedom fighters. Political gossip was exchanged on who was on board and who was not and NATO enlargement lobbying efforts were coordinated. Central and East European Foreign Ministers vied with one another for invitations to meet Senators and members of Congress to make the case for their entry into NATO. Craig noted jokingly in a fax to Finley on March 6,1997 after receiving requests from several Central and East European Foreign and Prime Ministers for dinner during the same week: "Well, now I know (finally) what it is like to be in demand. We are really where it is at in Washington these days!"18 Jackson became a well-known figure who could almost always be found at the Metropolitan Club after work comparing notes and discussing tactics with Administration officials and Central European diplomats on the most recent twist and turn in the debate. At a time when partisanship in Washington was on the rise, the Committee was one of the few examples of bipartisan foreign policy in practice. At a time when the Administration needed to shore up support on the Hill, the Committee members helped reach out to the target audience the Administration needed most—conservative Republican Senators. By early June 1997, the Committee had met one-on-one with some 25 Senators, along with the staff of 15 others.19 The third piece of Rosner's strategy was to make it easy for Senators to vote in favor of enlargement. One way to do that was to signal that this was a top 258 The Political Battle Administration priority that the President was prepared to go to the mat over. By sending that message early and often, the Administration wanted to deter potential opposition. NATO enlargement was the topic of Clinton's only foreign policy speech during the 1996 Presidential campaign and listed as the first priority in Clinton's January 27,1997 State of the Union speech. Along with the creation of a special envoy, these steps were also designed to underscore that the Administration's commitment was serious. Another way was to line up as many public endorsements of enlargement as possible. The debate over enlargement was always going to be predominantly an elite issue. But Rosner was determined to change the face of the issue— from its perceived image as an "ethnic issue," into a broad-based "American" issue by lining up a broad and diverse set of supporters. When a Senator subsequently focused on the issue, he or she would almost inevitably take a look at who was in favor and who was against. If the list included groups whose views the Senator considered important, it eased the way for that Senator to join the "yes" column. Rosner's first step in setting up S/NERO was to hire as his right-hand man Dr. Cameron Munter, a talented foreign service officer who had served in Poland and the Czech Republic. Munter was not only Rosner's eyes and ears but also the point person in organizing a domestic coalition supporting NATO enlargement. S/NERO staff crisscrossed the country doing briefings on NATO enlargement for state and local politicians, business councils, etc. They accompanied religious, ethnic, and veterans leaders on visits to the candidate countries; arranged for Administration representatives to go on public call-in radio shows; and worked tirelessly to enlist support from veterans' groups, business associations, labor leaders, local politicians, as well as the American Jewish community and other representatives of the religious and values community. By the time of the Senate vote in the spring of 1998, S/NERO staffers had visited more than 40 states to brief local leaders and editorial boards, and to meet with a variety of groups representing different segments of American society. When, in the spring of 1998, opponents would claim that enlargement had not been debated and did not have the support of the U.S. public, they were confronted with evidence of public support in the form of endorsements from more than 60 organizations. In a flyer circulated to Senators, the Committee estimated that these organizations represented more than 10 million Americans. In early March 1997, however, the Administration still had a long uphill struggle ahead of it. Much of the foreign policy establishment was still skeptical of, if not hostile to, the Administration's policy. In a widely publicized debate at the Council on Foreign Relations in December 1996 between former Assistant Secretary Holbrooke and NATO enlargement critic Michael Mandelbaum, an informal vote taken at dinner following the debate clearly favored the opponents of enlargement.20 As Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington Post, The Political Battle 259 "Holbrooke lost the debate—not to mention, on occasion, his temper." Whether the audience was predisposed to oppose enlargement or won over by Mandelbaum's arguments was not important: "Whatever the case, NATO lost—and lost big," Cohen noted. "If a bunch of internationalists feel this way, how's NATO expansion going to play in Peoria?"21 Support on Capitol Hill was also broad but often shallow. The Senate had overwhelmingly passed several non-binding resolutions in favor of enlargement, but these were precisely that: non-binding. They were important as a barometer of sympathy and an indication of which way Senators were leaning. But at the end of the day they did not mean that the Administration had the votes of these Senators locked in. A closer look at the views of the heads of several key committees revealed that the Administration still had work to do, even among its own party faithful. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE), signaled his unease with the Administration's policy in January 1997 as well. "I have serious reservations about NATO enlargement," Biden told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. Anyone assuming that Congress was on board for enlargement, the Senator emphasized, "was making a big mistake."22 In early March Rosner set up shop in a dingy State Department office. He and Munter put up a calendar on the wall mapping out what needed to be accomplished by when. On March 5, Rosner's first day in the job, Albright called him up to her office. The Secretary had testified on Capitol Hill earlier that day and had found herself criticized from both the left and the right and by Democrats and Republicans on NATO enlargement. Albright was no newcomer to the job of dealing with Congress, having worked as Seantor Ed Muskie's chief legislative assistant and having been NSC Senior Director for legislative affairs in the Carter White House. Her message to Rosner was clear: we're behind the curve on this. She emphasized to Rosner the need to develop a clear and crisp message on enlargement and to have answers for the barrage of questions she was being confronted with—and quickly.23 2. THE CAMPAIGN STARTS The Administration's campaign to sell enlargement started in earnest in late April 1997 when Albright and Cohen were scheduled to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Albright had asked Rosner and me to arm her with the best arguments in favor of enlargement. We had both joined the Administration within weeks of each other with the same mandate: to successfully enlarge NATO. We both believed that this debate was not just about adding new members to an existing Alliance. Instead, it would be about why the U.S. should remain in Europe following communism's demise and what kind of NATO made sense in the post-Cold War era. Even before joining the State z6o The Political Battle Department, we had discussed at length how to integrate the policy and politics of enlargement. We often joked that my office did the "engineering" of enlargement while Rosner's did "sales." Our staffs would work together closely and avoid the normal bureaucratic frictions and rivalries that often plagued policymaking in the Department. Albright wanted to clearly lay out the Administration's vision of Europe and our rationale for enlargement as the centerpiece of a broader Alliance overhaul. Whereas critics were portraying enlargement as a radical and potentially dangerous step, the Administration saw it as the logical adaptation of the Alliance to a new Europe. Albright also wanted us to convey our view that if the Alliance did not adapt to the needs of modern-day Europe, it was doomed. Rosner and I decided on an approach that drew on an argument I had picked up at RAND— namely posing and then answering the question of what kind of NATO we would want if we were building it over from scratch. It was an attempt to get people to think beyond the status quo. If NATO did not exist, would we create it and what would it look like?24 Our answer was that of course we would still want to have a strategic alliance between the U.S. and Europe to defend our common interests against future threats. But it was also obvious that such an alliance would look quite different—and would have new members and be focused on a different set of missions. Ergo, enlargement was part of the natural transformation and modernization of NATO for a new era. Albright liked the argument and asked us to work it into her testimony. It was a way to underscore that the changes we were making in NATO were a commonsensical adaptation of the Alliance to a new post-Cold War world. On April 23 Albright and Cohen appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Albright led off her testimony by stating that the Administration's goal was "to build, for the very first time, a peaceful, democratic and undivided trans-Atlantic community" that would do for the eastern half of the continent what the Alliance had previously done for the western half—namely provide peace and prosperity. But Albright immediately framed the issue of enlargement as the centerpiece of a broader effort to transform the Alliance for a new era. "The debate about NATO enlargement is really a debate about NATO itself. It is about the value of maintaining alliance in times of peace and the value of our partnership with Europe." "Clearly, if an institution such as NATO did not exist today, we would want to create one," Albright insisted. "Just as clearly, if we were creating a new alliance today, we would not make the old Iron Curtain its eastern frontier. We would not leave a democratic country out in the cold because it was once, against the will of its people, part of the Warsaw Pact." The key question, she said, was the following: "Which democratic nations in Europe are important to our security and which are willing and able to contribute to our security?" S;ic The Political Battle 261 urged the Senators not to be confined by the old thinking of the Cold War and to think in terms of what an Alliance between the United States and a Europe whole and free should look like. Albright listed four reasons why NATO enlargement was in America's interest. First, it was the best way to prevent another war in Europe. Second, it was the best way to consolidate Europe's gains toward democracy, peace, and integration. Third, it was needed "to right the wrongs of the past" and to allow Europe's new democracies to join the old ones as American allies. Finally, the Secretary insisted that enlargement would also strengthen NATO by adding new, capable allies. The issue, she concluded, was "whether the people who knocked the teeth out of totalitarianism in Europe and who helped to liberate us from the Cold War are worthy members of history's greatest democratic alliance."25 But the responses of many of the Senators were skeptical. One Senator after another now asked whether enlargement would not create a new dividing line in Europe, whether it wouldn't weaken and dilute NATO and who would pay for it. The Chairman of the Committee, Senator John Warner (R-VA), summed up his concerns at the end of the hearing by saying: "I come from the school 'if it's not broken, why try and fix it?'" By the end of the hearing Albright was forced to concede: "In listening to you," she said, "there is no question that we have a very difficult job ahead of us." 26 New York Times columnist and enlargement opponent Tom Friedman gloated that the Administration had run into bipartisan skepticism from some of the Senate's most knowledgeable defense experts. "Imagine," he wrote, "what happens when the 'know nothings' in Congress start debating expansion."27 The committee hearings were also a reminder of the tensions within the coalition we were trying to knit together. Democrats on the left were worried that enlargement would damage Russian democracy and arms control. The Administration's most effective political weapon in addressing these latter concerns was Talbott, whose commitment to Russian democracy and reform was beyond question. Throughout the spring of 1997 he met with numerous Democratic Senators and Members of Congress to explain why the Administration believed it could pursue both NATO enlargement and support Russian reform in tandem. Talbott corresponded privately with a number of critics, including George Kennan, to explain Administration policy. Diplomatic breakthroughs at Helsinki and the NATO-Russia Founding Act helped lock-in Democratic support, including that of Senator Joseph Biden (D- DE), the ranking Democrat on the SFRC But Republican critics now lashed out at the Administration for going too far in NATO's relations with Russia. Perhaps no one was more outspoken than former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Whereas the Administration saw the NATO-Russia Founding Act as a major accomplishment that preserved our re- 262 The Political Battle lations with Moscow, shored up support for enlargement among the allies, and secured our liberal political flank at home, many Republicans, led by Kissinger, belittled these accomplishments and accused the Administration of granting Moscow too much say in the Alliance's inner workings and trying to turn it "into a U.N.-style system of collective security."28 The former Secretary of State's argument that enlargement was a good idea done wrong was exactly the kind of critique that Rosner feared could lead to the defection of conservative Senators. But Albright fought back, defending the Administration's approach. She told one visitor after another: "Henry just has his facts wrong on this one." Administration officials fanned out to meet with key Senators and other influential Washington individuals to explain the safeguards we had built into the NATO-Russia Founding Act. We also got some help from Czech President Vaclav Havel who defended the Administration's attempt to shift NATO away from a focus on a Russian threat in The New York Times. "Some people simply want to continue fighting the cold war and consider Russia their chief enemy; they see the threat of Russia as the reason to enlarge NATO," he wrote. Such thinking, Havel underscored, underestimated the range of dangers facing the Euro-Atlantic region. NATO needed to focus on these new threats or else it would turn "into a hopelessly antiquated club of cold war veterans."29 The Administration was also determined to blunt suggestions that it was afraid to talk about the risks enlarging NATO involved, above all the pledge to go to war to defend Central and Eastern Europe if need be. There was no better way to kill this argument than to have President Clinton address the issue himself. The venue chosen was the U.S. military academy at West Point. After all, it would be these young cadets who were likely to command the U.S. troops who might be called upon to defend Central Europe at some point in the future. Addressing the graduating class of West Point on May 31, 1997, Clinton told them that he was proposing to expand NATO "to make it less likely that that you will ever be called to fight in another war across the Atlantic." But, looking directly at the graduating cadets, the President acknowledged that enlargement was not risk free and that enlargement "means that you could be asked to put your lives on the line for a new NATO member, just as today you can be called upon to defend the freedom of our allies in Western Europe."'0 But nowhere was the President more effective than in dealing directly with key Senators himself. On the evening of June 11, the SNOG leadership was invited to the White House for consultations before Clinton made a final decision on the countries the U.S. would support inviting to join NATO at Madrid. But it was also an opportunity for the President to gauge the overall level of support among the Senators on enlargement. Clinton opened the session by laying out his arguments in favor of inviting just three countries—the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. "You know from press reports that I favor a smaller expansion," he told the Senators. "These three countries are the best prepared. The Political Battle 263 Extending a security guarantee is important. No NATO member has ever been attacked." He also underscored the need to avoid creating a new dividing line in Europe that could jeopardize the Baltic states or Ukraine. "If you take a smaller number, we have a better chance to keep the Europeans in line for a second round of admissions. It will also keep people from going nuts on the Baltic issue. We need to keep a certain amount of ambiguity here. If we take five, we are just creating a new dividing line. But we want to keep the door open," Clinton told the group. "The Europeans originally did not like enlargement," the President added. "But now they think it is their idea. They think the easier thing to do is to just let everyone in. But if we listen to the JCS and their arguments, I'm tilting to three. I know there's a lot of support for Slovenia and maybe even Romania. But I'd like to hear your views." Roth, as Chairman of the SNOG, responded first. He supported four candidates including Slovenia—and handed Clinton a letter signed by 11 Senators backing that small Balkan country's candidacy.31 Biden also supported Slovenia and argued that including it would have a positive effect on stability in the Balkans. But he agreed that Romania was not ready and would be a problem on the Hill. "If Romania is the price for Slovenia, I wouldn't do it," he concluded. The President thanked Roth and Biden. Noting that the two SNOG leaders both came from the small state of Delaware, the first to ratify the Constitution, he quipped: "All of us who come from other states appreciate that Delaware supported enlargement in the United States." Senator Helms was next. "Mr. President, I think you have sized it up just right." He was unimpressed with the argument that the Alliance had to bring Romania in because it was fragile. "That is not a good reason to bring them in. NATO is not a therapy group. Romania's reforms are great, but they are not yet locked in. It would be very tough politically to do 4 or 5." As they went around the table, there were a variety of views. Senators Gordon Smith (R-OR) and Dan Coats (R-IN) underscored their support for Romania. The President then turned to Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC). Thurmond, the 95-year-old Senator who had recently broken the Senate's record for the longest term in office, responded with remarkable succinctness: "I'd stay with three and do it quickly and by doing that it will lend hope to the others." There was a wave of laughter, as everyone marveled at his insight and brevity. The President quipped: "Strom, this is the first time I have spoken to you since you broke the longevity record. If I could say so much so briefly, they'd repeal the 22 amendment!"—a reference to the two term limit for Presidents. But several Senators fired warning shots across the President's bow on the wisdom of enlarging NATO at all. The strongest warnings came from Republican Senators Warner and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). As Chairman of the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees respectively, each was a political powerhouse in his own right Each of them had traditionally been a 264 The Political Battle strong proponent of NATO throughout their careers in Congress. They were potentially dangerous opponents if they publicly opposed enlargement. And both were leaning in that direction. Warner told the President that he had come to learn. "But I have strong concerns," he added, signaling that he was not on board. "We have to make sure we're not ruining the best military alliance in history." Stevens echoed that sentiment. He asked how we could be expanding U.S. commitments at the same time we were shrinking the size of the military and our defense budgets. The way the debate was being conducted made it sound like joining NATO was joining a political club, Stevens continued. "I have not opposed enlargement publicly," he added, but he feared it would ruin the Alliance. A younger generation of U.S. politicians would not pay for it. He was also not convinced it was in the U.S. interest to go forward with enlargement in light of other global defense commitments, particularly those in Asia, a region that the Senator from Alaska had long urged the U.S. to pay more attention to. The President responded first to Warner. "What's the option if we don't expand? If you believe that we and the Canadians have an interest in staying engaged in Europe, I guess we could dress up PfP and leave that as our strategy. But one thing I learned as a result of Bosnia is that the bottom line for us is that we should have the broadest and deepest alliance with the democracies of Europe." Addressing Stevens, Clinton said. "Your point is that we may need our defense resources in Asia. I agree with that. We need to be honest about providing what we need to fund defense, including in Asia. But my thought has been that if we could get a good deal with Russia, strengthen NATO and PfP, then we could eliminate the possibility of a major upheaval in Europe. Even if things happen on the edges of Europe—like in Bosnia—we would have a mechanism, the allies and the resources to handle them. So I see this as freeing up resources for Asia. But you are right we have to be honest about the defense dollars." But Stevens warned: "I expect another Mansfield amendment [on withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe]. If Europe is ready to have a collective defense mechanism, why not let them do it without us. They all talk to me about interoperability, but it only means more U.S. dollars." Berger broke in to say: "We're more vulnerable to the Mansfield Amendment if we freeze NATO in Cold War amber. I think we are more likely to have public support if we keep it as a strong collective defense pact but one which is also helping to bolster new democracies." Clinton agreed that the Europeans should do more for their own defense. "That's why we support ESDI," he said. "But," he told Stevens, "if we were not there, Bosnia would still be going on."32 Meanwhile, Rosner was also looking for a way to put a human face on the enlargement issue. He had asked both Munter and Roger Kaplan in the Defense Department whether Polish or Czech forces had fought alongside the The Political Battle 265 U.S. during World War II. They pointed him to John Keegan's Six Armies in Normandy which describes a battle where U.S. and Polish forces fought side by side in Normandy after the D-Day invasion. Outside the French city of Chambois, several German tank divisions were encircled when the U.S. Army's 90th Infantry Division met up with the Polish 1st Armored Division to close the last escape route—the so-called Falaise Gap. Over the next few days, the Polish units held their ground against a series of bloody German counterattacks while awaiting Canadian reinforcements. In the days after the battle, the bodies of 325 Polish soldiers were buried in makeshift graves. A Canadian unit subsequently placed a sign in English on the French farmland that read "A Polish Battlefield."33 Rereading Keegan, Rosner realized this battle could offer a way to remind an American audience that Poles had already proven their worth as allies in Europe's last great war. The American soldier who had made the first contact with the Polish 1st Armored Division in closing the Falaise Gap had been U.S. Army Captain Laughlin E. Waters. Rosner asked Kaplan in the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office to track him down. They found Waters in Los Angeles, where the 82-year-old Waters was a retired federal judge—and a Republican. Rosner called him to inquire whether he would be willing to introduce President Clinton at a NATO enlargement event at the White House. "That's a pretty broad invitation to extend to a Republican," quipped Waters, but he agreed to do it.34 On July 3, Judge Waters introduced President Clinton at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. In his remarks, the President noted that for more than five decades U.S. soldiers had labored for the goal of an undivided, democratic and peaceful Europe. That goal, he noted, was now "within reach" as the Alliance prepared to expand to Central and Eastern Europe. "Judge Waters," the President concluded, "your presence here today 53 years later reminds us of the character of these we are about to add to NATO." Taking on those critics who claimed that adding these countries as allies would weaken NATO, the President added: "They, too, have fought and died for freedom and democracy, for ours as well as their own. Our ties have been forged in blood. And just as they were strong allies in World War II, they will be again."35 But the opposition was organizing as well. On June 16, the first news wire reports crossed our desks announcing that a group of prominent foreign policy figures were denouncing NATO enlargement in an Open Letter to the President. Led by Susan Eisenhower, the granddaughter of the late President Dwight Eisenhower and the ultimate icon of America's ties with Europe, the group consisted of nearly 50 foreign policy experts, retired diplomats, senators, and senior military officers spanning the political spectrum from left to right. Among the signatories were former Senators Bill Bradley, Gary Hart, Gordon Humphrey, Mark Hatfield, and Sam Nunn, as well as former Secretary of Defense Robert 266 The Political Battle McNamara, Ambassadors Paul Nitze and Jack Matlock as well as Professors Michael Mandelbaum and Richard Pipes. The letter attacked NATO enlargement "as a policy error of historic proportions." It claimed enlargement would undercut Russian reform, degrade NATO's primary mission of self-defense, diminish the security of countries not in enlargement's first round, and extend a U.S. guarantee "to countries with serious border and national minority problems and unevenly developed systems of democratic government." The letter concluded by stating that enlargement was "neither necessary nor desirable and this ill-conceived policy can and should be put on hold."36 Several signatories made their case at a press conference on June 26. Matlock, former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, warned that an enlarged NATO would be too "preoccupied with its own navel and its expanding waistline" to carry out its mission. Asked whether it was not too late to stop enlargement, Mandelbaum insisted that the end of the Cold War meant that U.S. credibility was no longer on the line in the same way. "The world is now safe for the United States to recognize its errors and correct them."37 Even more worrying was a letter to President Clinton dated June 25, 1997 and signed by 20 Senators. It had been organized by enlargement skeptic Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). While careful not to explicitly oppose enlargement, it listed more than one-and-a-half pages of concerns and questions that could not be read as anything but a warning light. The letter was signed by twice as many Republicans as Democrats.38 The most troubling name on the list was that of Senator Helms. The doubts of Warner and Stevens as the Chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees were known to the Administration, but Helms's signature came as a surprise. The conservative bite noire was thought to be in the pro-enlargement camp. His defection would have been a major boost for the opposition. Along with Warner and Stevens, it would have meant that the Chairmen of all three key Senate Committees on foreign, defense, and appropriations opposed enlargement. Jesse Helms's shadow seemed to follow us on the road as we departed for the Madrid summit. As part of its outreach effort, the President had invited a SNOG delegation led by Senator Lott to accompany him to Madrid. We had also arranged for SNOG Chairman Roth to address the summit in his capacity as head of the North Atlantic Assembly. After Madrid, the President arrived in Warsaw for a stop intended to be the trip's emotional highlight. President Clinton and the entire U.S. delegation received an emotional reception from a crowd of more than 30,000 Poles in Warsaw's Castle Square. I watched as Poles spontaneously went up and hugged a U.S. military officer who was in the crowd. Our jubilant mood was punctured when, on the moniiuji of luly k **i: »uU-up in Warsaw to read an op-ed by Senator Helms in the European cdilinn of The Wall Street Journal. In it, he launched a frontal assault on our NATO policy The Political Battle 267 by throwing almost every conceivable conservative criticism at us. The Administration was accused of pursuing a "dangerous and ill-considered plan for NATO transformation" that was a combination of "nation building," and "an exercise in the appeasement of Russia." The editorial ended on a threatening note: "If the Clinton Administration views NATO not as a tool to defend Europe, but as a laboratory for social work, then NATO should not only eschew expansion, it should declare victory and close shop." Helms's op-ed demanded that "dramatic changes must be made" before he would support enlargement— and listed nine conditions that the Administration had to meet to gain his support. 39 We were stunned. Had Helms defected to the opposition? Or was he merely firing a warning shot across our bow? Rosner called Helms's press spokesman, Marc Thiessen, from his cell phone while standing on Warsaw's Castle Square. He told Thiessen that the President and Secretary Albright had read the Senator's op-ed, but were also seeing news reports suggesting that the Senator had come out against NATO enlargement. Rosner asked whether the latter reports were accurate. As Thiessen wrote in an email to Bud Nance later that day: "I told him the news reports were inaccurate, and that Helms's position is what he wrote in the op-ed: he is inclined to support expansion but has a number of serious concerns that need to be addressed." Rosner, Thiessen wrote, had responded that he thought the Administration could "meet Senator Helms's conditions." When Senator Helms saw Thiessen's e-mail, he wrote in hand on it: "Bud, Marc handled this just right." It was the start of a careful dance between the Administration and Senator Helms that would lead to a set of understandings that, in turn, became a cornerstone of the Senate ratification effort. We needed Helms's seal of approval, both as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a conservative icon to lock in conservative Republican votes—and he knew it. We were willing to address his concerns—but not at the expense of reversing core policy decisions, alarming the allies or reopening the NATO-Russia Founding Act with Moscow. Given the other tensions in the pro-enlargement coalition, we had to be careful that whatever moves we made in the direction of Helms did not alienate those Democratic Senators whose votes we needed, too. 3. DANCING WITH JESSE HELMS We returned to Washington from the President's Madrid trip to find the critics of enlargement keeping up a steady drumbeat of attacks.40 The Council for a Livable World, a liberal anti-nuclear group that opposed enlargement, issued a vote count showing 49 Senators leaning in favor of enlargement, 26 against and the rest undecided. It underscored that in spite of the Madrid summit the opposition was only 8 votes shy of the 34 votes needed to defeat enlargement.41 268 The Political Battle Especially worrisome were signs of erosion of support in Republican ranks more generally.42 Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), one of the staunchest supporters of enlargement, sent National Security Advisor Sandy Berger a private memo warning that the Administration was in danger of losing the battle in the Senate.43 In late July, Rosner sat down to assess where the Administration stood politically. Paris and Madrid had consolidated support among some Senate Democrats. The Senate Republican leadership was still solidly behind enlargement although there were signs of erosion in Republican support. Rosner himself counted fewer than 40 Senators as confirmed supporters. The danger the Administration faced, he wrote Albright, was that Senators with very different concerns would coalesce into a bloc to provide the 34 votes needed to defeat enlargement.44 But the first fruits of the Administration's outreach strategy were also starting to come in. In late June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the American Jewish Committee endorsed enlargement. Throughout the summer and early fall a series of veterans organizations came out in favor as well—the Reserve Officer's Association, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Jewish War Veterans and the American Legion. In early September the Administration got a major boost when the New Atlantic Initiative (NAI) issued a pro-enlargement letter signed by more than 130 figures from the foreign policy establishment—including former secretaries of state, five former national security advisors, six former secretaries of defense, eight former senators, and two former vice presidents. It was presented in early September by Republicans Jeane Kirkpatrick and Paul Wolfowitz, along with Democrats Tony Lake and Richard Holbrooke, in the Andrew Mellon Auditorium of the State Department45 But the key to the Administration's strategy was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which would make the initial recommendations to the Senate as a whole and draft the resolution of ratification, and in particular Senators Helms and Biden.. With the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees chaired by skeptics, we needed Helms and Biden to cheerlead enlargement in the Senate. Over the summer Rosner met regularly with Helms's and Biden's chiefs of staff, Bud Nance and Ed Hall, as well as the key European-foreign-policy aides of the two Senators—Steve Biegun and Mike Haltzel. Randy Scheuneman from Majority Leader Lott's staff and Ian Brzezinksi from Senator Roth's staff also played a key role. We agreed to a series of fall hearings focusing on the rationale for enlargement, new members' qualifications, and burden-sharing as well as NATO-Russia relations. On August 28, Rosner reported to Albright on how the planned hearings fit into the Administration's strategy. He underscored Albright's crucial role in aggressively addressing Helms's concerns during the hearings—while at the same The Political Battle 269 time working to bring skeptical Democrats on board. NATO planned to sign the protocols of accession at its Foreign Ministers meeting in December. The tentative window for the vote in the Senate was in March 1998. The clock was starting to tick. Therefore, the autumn hearings were key to locking in the Senators' support.46 The following week, Helms' staff sent him a parallel memo proposing the fall hearings as initiating the formal process of Senate advice and consent. The Senator agreed to chair the hearings, and circled on his copy of the memo the issue of burden-sharing and writing: "This should be number one."47 But Helms was still being lobbied by conservative opponents of enlargement to reconsider his position. On September 2, Helms wrote Jude Wanniski, a friend of the Senator and patron saint for conservative supply side economists, denying that he had irrevocably committed himself to expansion. "My only firm public position is that I do not favor further soaking the American taxpayer for any NATO expansion (and I do favor diminishing our enormous outlays as quickly as may be possible)." When Helms' staff saw the letter, they realized their boss had still not yet fully made up his mind. They requested a meeting with the Senator to clarify his views on enlargement. In preparation for that meeting, they sent him a memo on September 8 arguing that enlargement was a conservative idea that came from anti-communist leaders like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel who feared Russian encroachment. They noted that it was supported by key U.S. conservative figures such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, and Dick Cheney and had been part of the Republican "Contract with America." The message was clear: enlargement had a solid Republican pedigree. The Clinton Administration, the memo alleged, had initially opposed enlargement for fear it would offend Russia. "Clinton political advisors," it noted, had "belatedly accepted the issue of NATO enlargement and tried to claim credit for the initiative." But the memo admitted that Albright's appointment as Secretary of State "has put the United States on a clear course toward NATO enlargement." Republicans, the memo noted, had three concerns about the Administration's handling of enlargement. One was the Clinton Administration's reticence to justify NATO enlargement as a military response to a residual Russian threat. The second was the NATO-Russia Founding Act's provisions on potential joint decisionmaking. The third was the costs of enlargement. "Notwithstanding some of the unfavorable inclinations of the Clinton Administration, NATO enlargement can be done right," the memo concluded. "For the somewhat moribund though still formidable military alliance of NATO, enlargement will be a certain improvement. For the legacy of Yalta it will be a reversal, and for the future stability of Europe it can build upon the fifty years of the NATO alliance which kept the United States out of yet another world war in Europe."48 270 The Political Battle Helms signed off on the memo—and in favor of enlargement. One week later Helms went public with his support—but also with his qualifications. In a letter to Secretary Albright, he wrote: "I have arrived at my decision to support enlargement based on my belief that this is a worthwhile endeavor. However, my support remains conditioned upon our ability to work together to include proper safeguards." Those safeguards, he continued, needed to include "a clear, military rationale for NATO enlargement," agreement in advance on the costs of enlargement, and assurances to U.S. taxpayers as to costs, and clearly delineated limits to Russia's role in NATO decisionmaking. The letter concluded by stating: "The alternative is for the process of NATO enlargement to fail upon the very concerns that I have outlined above. We must not let that happen" [emphasis in original].49 Rosner and I were greatly relieved. While each condition required meshing different political impulses, we felt the Administration could meet them. In terms of the military rationale for NATO enlargement, the Administration recognized that a revanchist Russia might someday again threaten Central and Eastern Europe. We thought the chances of that happening were low and that engaging Moscow through a cooperative NATO-Russia relationship could make that probability even lower. We also wanted a rationale for NATO that went beyond a hedge against Russia and that was based on what we were for, not only what we were against. We thought NATO should focus on all the possible threats to its allies. Russia was one of those but not the only or even the most likely one. Republicans, in contrast, saw enlargement primarily as a hedge against Russia. They thought the Administration was ducking the issue of Russian nec-imperial ambitions and too focused on new missions like peacekeeping. Many Republicans were comfortable with NATO assuming a more active war-fighting role out of area, but wanted to avoid messy and at times ambiguous peacekeeping operations—i.e., they wanted an Alliance that could deploy to the Persian Gulf but not get bogged down in Bosnia. In contrast, the Administration saw peace support operations as important in their own right and as a stepping stone for our allies to embrace other, more ambitious post-Cold War missions. There was common ground here between Republicans and Democrats. But finding it in the politically heated context of the NATO enlargement debate was not always easy. Republican skepticism on Russia lay behind Helms' demand that clear limits be set on the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council. Above all, Helms wanted it to be clear that NATO would always have a common position before it sat down in the PJC to talk with Russia. Helms wanted this safeguard on the record in a clear way. He and his staff repeatedly told us that they wanted to tie not only our hands, but those of future Administrations as well. One day in mid-September Steve Biegun from Helms' staff called Rosner with the idea of a cho- The Political Battle 271 reographed exchange between Albright and Helms to clarify what the PJC would and would not do. Among other things, the exchange would underscore that NATO would always have an agreed position before sitting down with Moscow. He then proceeded to read a question slowly so Rosner could take down every word. Rosner came to see me and we spent the next couple of days clearing an answer Albright could give Helms. When we first showed Albright our proposed answer, she said, "It's not tough enough," and added several sentences drawing the line even more firmly against Russia having too strong a voice in the North Atlantic Council (NAC). Shortly thereafter, however, Talbott, who was out of town, called in to complain that our proposed response sounded too anti-Russian. So we added yet another paragraph that addressed his concerns as well. Rosner then called Biegun back: "Of course, you understand that I can't predict what the Secretary will necessarily say, but what do you think the reaction would be if her response was as follows?" He then read the carefully scripted response. Biegun responded: "I think if the Chairman asked that question, and the Secretary gave that answer, the response would be very positive." The day before the hearings Biegun faxed Rosner a piece of paper with the question he had provided Helms. "This is what we gave the Senator," he wrote on the fax. "I cannot guarantee 100 percent that he will ask it" [emphasis in original].50 The third of Helms' concerns was on the costs of enlargement. Here the Administration was in a quandary of its own making. NATO did not have an agreed upon methodology for measuring the costs of enlargement. Initial studies by RAND and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had produced a wide spectrum of estimates ranging from as little as $10 billion to more than $100 billion.51 A Defense Department study issued in February 1997 had estimated the costs of enlargement—for the United States, other current allies, and the new members—to be between $27-35 billion over a ten year period. This estimate was premised on the assumptions of the NATO enlargement study— i.e., that no immediate military threat existed and that NATO could rely on a reinforcement capability to carry out new commitments. It also made the point that such costs spread out over a 10-year period were modest in an Alliance where European allies spent $160 billion per year on defense—and were in any case much lower than what these countries would spend if they were providing for their own national defense.52 Politically, these numbers nonetheless created sticker shock across the continent—and promised to hand our opponents at home an issue with which to attack us. Allies were under pressure to meet the fiscal criteria for the European Monetary Union and in no mood to increase defense spending. They accepted U.S. thinking on the military requirements for enlargement—i.e., what kind of forces were needed to defend these countries—but not our methodology for costing out those requirements. Instead, they wanted to limit those costs to what 272 The Political Battle NATO would spend on its common budget on for infrastructure. This was less than half of one of the categories the Administration had identified in its cost study. They wanted to stretch even those costs over a longer period and fund them through reprioritization and reallocation. At Madrid, we squeezed a statement out of our allies that they would provide the resources needed for enlargement—but it had been like squeezing blood out of a stone.53 The Administration had a political problem. Isolated in NATO, it had little choice but to give in to the allies. As a result, NATO's official cost estimates were going to be a fraction of what DoD had estimated some eight months earlier. We had to explain why the Administration had decided to go with new, much lower numbers measuring a different, and much smaller, piece of the NATO enlargement pie. Such an approach promised to make the cost numbers so small that they ceased to be an issue for some—but it also opened us up to the charge of either having been incompetent in grossly overstating the costs initially or as having capitulated and accepted lower figures under political pressure from free-riding allies. On the eve of Albright's committee appearance, Rosner and I laid out our private thoughts in a memo to her. 'The set of hearings you will kick off on Tuesday offer an enormous opportunity, but also distinct dangers. If we handle the hearings right, we could be well on our way to generating the momentum we need to assure both the ratification of NATO enlargement and the absence of harmful reservations. You are the key asset, because you can speak with great credibility to the concerns of both the anti-communist-right and the too-worried-about-Russia-left." Momentum was building in our favor, we emphasized, but events were still fluid and there was plenty of room for mistakes. We still had less than fifty confirmed votes in our favor. The vote count was not our only concern, however. "The danger here is not simply falling short of 67 votes, although that remains possible. The larger danger is that we will face a raft of reservations and conditions, and each of which only needs 51 votes to become binding." While some amendments were unobjectionable, others were potential "killer" amendments we would need to defeat—and would need a bloc of cohesive voters to do so. "Thus, the stakes are high," the memo concluded. "If this month's hearings go badly, we will face a long sustained fight, particularly over reservations. But if you hit a home run, we could start to see more critics folding their hands, more undecideds declaring support, and more reporters and observers concluding that this fight may not be much of a fight after all."54 On October 7, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee kicked off the first of nine full committee hearings on enlargement over the next thirty days before three different Committees—Foreign Relations, Appropriations, and the Budget Committee. Albright led off the first hearing before the Foreign Relations Committee on the morning of October 7. In her testimony, she di- The Political Battle 273 rectly addressed the concerns that Helms had laid out in his letter the previous month. Why, she asked, was the U.S. so focused on enlarging NATO at a time of relative peace when there was no immediate military threat in Europe? "The answer," she said, "is that we want the peace to last. We want freedom to endure, and we believe there are still potential threats to our future emanating from European soil." "Let us not deceive ourselves," she said. "We are a European power. We have an interest in the fate of the 200 million people who live in the nations between the Baltic and the Black Sea. We waged the Cold War in part because these nations were held captive. We fought World War II in part because these nations had been invaded. If there were a major threat to the security of their region, we would want to act, enlargement or no enlargement. Our aim must be to prevent that threat from arising." One of the threats NATO enlargement was designed to address, she told Helms, was Russia's uncertain future. "We want Russian democracy to endure. We are optimistic that it will. But one should not dismiss the possibility that Russia could return to the patterns of the past. By engaging Russia and enlarging NATO, we give Russia every incentive to deepen its commitment to peaceful relations with neighbors, while closing the avenue to more destructive alternatives." While there was no way to predict what dangers might arise in or to Europe in the decades ahead, we did know the following, she said: "whatever the future may hold, it will be in our interest to have a vigorous and larger alliance with those European democracies that share our values and our determination to defend them." "A larger NATO," she concluded, "will make America safer, NATO stronger and Europe more peaceful and united. That is the strategic rationale."55 Helms then read Albright the exact question on the NATO-Russia relationship that Biegun had previewed with Rosner, adding, "A pretty hefty question but I know you can handle it." Albright reiterated that the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council did not give Russia "any role in decisions the Alliance takes on internal matters, the way NATO organizes itself, conducts its business, or plans, prepares for and conducts those missions which affect only its members." The independence of the North Atlantic Council was sacrosanct, she underscored. Russia would never have a veto over internal NATO decisions and NATO-Russia consultations would only take place after NATO had first set its own policies. After she finished, Helms replied: "That is a very good answer to my question and I appreciate it." Senator Biden made it clear that he, too, supported enlargement, but that the Administration still had to convince the American public that enlargement was needed. Americans wanted to know, he insisted, why NATO was still needed after the end of the Cold War. "The thing I hear my colleagues say is, 'Damn it, Joe, why can't they do it?' " 3 274 Political Battle "I believe very strongly," she responded, "that this is a very smart additional preventive measure because history has shown us that we will go into Europe when we see massive wars that involve people we are closely related to, and when it involves our economic and strategic interests." Other Senators asked Albright a series of questions about different aspects of enlargement, but it was also clear that the majority of Senators on the Committee were now inclined to support the Administration. After the hearings Biden said: "I think I've got the votes but I'm not sure."56 In the following weeks, critics of enlargement such as Ambassador Jonathan Dean, Ambassador Jack Matlock, and Michael Mandelbaum also had their say before the Committee. But they received a critical reception from both Helms and Biden. Biden in particular dismissed the arguments of Dean and Mandelbaum against enlargement as "dead wrong." He described the suggestion that U.S.-Russian arms control agreements could be in trouble because of enlargement as "a perversion of recent history" and suggested that to not enlarge NATO because there was no immediate Russian threat was "a prescription for paralysis." There was no longer any doubt on which side of the issue the Democratic Senator from Delaware stood.57 The Albright-Helms exchange also took much of the sting out of conservative complaints about the NATO-Russia Founding Act. In a special session set aside to explore the NATO-Russia issue, Henry Kissinger stated that he was reassured by the Albright-Helms exchange on the PJC and that enlargement should proceed with bipartisan support.58 When Moscow was briefed by American diplomats about the restrictive interpretation of the Founding Act that the Administration and the Senate had agreed to, it was not pleased.59 The cost issue, in turn, was tackled on October 21 before Senator Ted Stevens' Appropriations Committee, where Albright appeared along with Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Stevens had called the hearing because he believed the Adrninistration's assumption on both costs and troop deployments was too rosy. He believed that the demands on U.S. forces would be greater and that the end result would be a further erosion of U.S. military readiness when the main strategic threats to the U.S. were in Asia. Shortly before the hearing started, Cohen turned to Albright and said "Let me handle this. I know these guys and can talk to them." It was one of many moments where Cohen's credentials and support were invaluable in terms of winning over skeptical Republican Senators. A Republican and former member of the Armed Services Committee himself, he enjoyed great respect among his former colleagues. Stevens opened the hearing by reading Albright Dean Acheson's unfortunate response to Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) at the 1949 hearings when Acheson had stated that the U.S. did not intend to deploy substantial numbers of U.S. troops in Europe on a more or less permanent basis.60 Stevens The Political Battle 275 I now asked whether Albright could assure him that the U.S. was not repeating the same mistake. Albright responded by carefully explaining why NATO did not see the need to deploy any additional U.S. troops in Europe in the existing environment—and argued that enlargement was the best way to lock in the peace and prevent the U.S. from fighting a future European war. But it was Cohen who bore the lion's share of the burden in explaining why the Administration's cost estimates had changed so dramatically. He put his prepared statement aside and addressed the Senators as their former colleague. He laid out the reasons why the initial U.S. estimate was so high and why NATO's own estimates were going to be lower. He explained that NATO assessment teams had found that the infrastructure in these countries was in better shape than expected. And he assured the Senators that, based on his discussions with his colleagues in NATO, that the allies would pay their fair share.61 Cohen concluded by quoting President Eisenhower that a soldier's pack is not as heavy as a prisoner's chains. "That is something that these three countries have endured for too many decades." They have had to carry around the weight of prisoner's chains. They now have an opportunity to join the most successful military institution in the history of the world, and to secure their security, and to promote their prosperity and stability. That is in our vital interest and we should ratify for those reasons alone."62 At a final hearing before the SFRC in early November, nongovernmental and other organizations were offered an open mike to go on the record either supporting or opposing enlargement. Representatives of some fifteen groups testified, including the Atlantic Council, Freedom House, the American Jewish Committee, trade unions, veterans and ethnic groups—with twelve of the fifteen supporting enlargement. The broad-based coalition of enlargement supporters was starting to come together. S/NERO's work in encouraging many of these groups to get involved was paying off. Bipartisan support was growing— and Senators were starting to pay attention.63 4. NEW MEMBERS AND NEW MISSIONS In mid-November Helms and Biden issued a joint "Dear Colleague" letter summarizing the SFRC hearings. "We are convinced more than ever," the two Senators wrote, "that the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary is the correct policy for the United States to pursue." Many of the principles upon which the Administration's policy was premised, they noted, had gone largely uncontested in the hearings. But their concluding paragraph was the key one politically: "We believe that NATO enlargement, arguably the most important foreign policy initiative for the country in many years, is an issue that transcends partisan poli- 276 The Political Battle tics. Both of us are firmly convinced that enlargement is squarely in the American national interest and we anticipate that the Senate debate before the ratifications vote early next year will validate our conclusion."64 With this seal of approval from the leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a cornerstone of the Administration's strategy was in place. A month later, Albright joined her NATO colleagues in Brussels to officially sign the protocols of accession. Albright signed the document using her full name: Madeleine Korbel Albright. Afterward she turned to Rosner and me and noted that she rarely signed her name that way but wanted to do so on this document as it would bring the homeland of her father into NATO. We returned home to find on our desks the most recent vote count of the Committee to Expand NATO from mid-December. It showed 66 Senators inclined to vote yes, 13 inclined to oppose, and 21 undecided. We had turned the corner and were well on the way to consolidating the two-thirds majority we needed in the U.S. Senate. In the meantime, an important piece of our open door strategy had also fallen into place with the completion of negotiations on a U.S.-Baltic Charter. On her plane after visiting Vilnius during the Administration's post-Madrid tour of Central and East European capitals, Albright had turned to me and said: "Ron, that was a great speech but where is the strategy to turn it into reality?" With a direct mandate from Albright, I had spent much of the summer working with my colleagues at State, the Defense Department, and the White House to develop our Baltic strategy. If the Charter were going to provide the perspective of NATO membership, we needed an action plan. Major General "Buzz" Kievenaar at DoD took the lead in developing a plan to help the Baltic states reform their militaries so that they would become NATO compatible. In early September, Assistant Secretary of State Marc Grossman had unveiled a new U.S. "Northern European Initiative" at a meeting with Nordic and Baltic Foreign Ministers in Bergen, Norway which embraced the idea of an expanding regional cooperation around the Baltic Sea, including with Russia.65 It was a part of a broader strategy to help re-create the spirit of the old Hanseatic League, where all of those countries were connected by commerce and regional cooperation. In mid-October, a final round of negotiations between the U.S. and the Baltic states held in the State Department produced a common text. 'I Tit distrust from the previous spring had dissipated as we all sat wuuiiJ u table wwl a Thesaurus looking for the right adjectives to resolve final wording issues. When the White House schedulers postponed llie initial signing date for the Charter, National Security Advisor Berger called in the three Baltic Ambassadors to reassure them that everything was on track. To everyone's surprise, he revealed that hia iiiiteitois were hum Riga arid ijuiuped that lie was (lie first Baltic-American National Security Advisor of the United States. The Political Battle 277 In an emotional ceremony held in the White House on January 16, 1998, President Clinton and the Presidents of the three Baltic states met to sign the U.S.-Baltic Charter. Clinton pledged to the three Baltic Presidents that the U.S. would never consider Europe to be fully secure until they, too, were secure. He underscored the importance of NATO's open door policy and underscored that the United States was "determined to help create the conditions under which Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania can one day walk through that door."66 Albright turned to Grossman and me and said: "It doesn't get much better than this. This is what we all signed up for." At a reception at Blair House, conservative Republican supporters of the Baltics mixed with Democrats, another sign of the bipartisan support that was starting to emerge. At the same time, the Senate hearings from the fall and the public debate on NATO were changing. Increasingly, we were no longer confronted solely or even primarily with questions on the pros and cons of enlargement Instead, the debate was shifting from the question of NATO's future roster to rationale—i.e., what was an enlarged NATO for and what would its future mission be? The question was not a new one. The Administration had fought bitter fights over whether the Alliance should intervene in Bosnia and whether U.S. troops should be deployed as part of a peacekeeping mission on the ground. More generally, the Administration had argued that in a post-Cold War world the Alliance had to be prepared to intervene beyond its borders to defend its members against new and different threats. This debate over NATO's future missions had been percolating in the strategic community. In early 1997 a group of RAND analysts published a book putting forth the thesis mat the U.S. and Europe should embrace a new global partnership in which NATO should refocus on threats to common trans-Atlantic territory and interests that could come from beyond Europe in the form of weapons of mass destruction or terrorism. The argument was simple but controversial: as Europe became increasingly stable and the Russian threat continued to wane, the traditional U.S. role of defender of Europe was becoming less relevant. As opposed to viewing Europe as a place the U.S. had to defend, we needed to think of it as a partner with which we tackled new threats to our common interests together. This meant that NATO had to shift its focus away from Russia to the most likely military threats of the future—many of which were likely to be beyond Europe.67 Prior to joining the State Department, I was among those arguing for NATO's "double enlargement" of new members and new missions.68 At the rime, such views were dismissed by many in the U.S. government as beyond the pale in terms of what the U.S.-European relationship could handle or our European allies would ever embrace. But Albright was open to this kind of rethinking. It resonated with her belief that we had to modernize NATO for 278 The Political Battle a new world in which we would confront very different threats than during the Cold War. That view was also shared by her new Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, and my new boss, Marc Grossman, who had arrived to take up the reigns of the State Department's European Bureau that summer. Grossman had spent much of his diplomatic career going back and forth between diplomatic assignments in Europe and the Middle East. As Ambassador to Turkey, he had seen how events in one region increasingly affect the other, and how the neat bureaucratic distinction between European and Middle Eastern or Persian Gulf security often broke down in the real world and how events in one region increasingly affected the other. Within the State Department, Albright's new chief of Policy Planning, Greg Craig, was also pushing for a more radical rethink of NATO's core missions in conjunction with enlargement. Craig was one of the founders of the Committee to Expand NATO and had independently come to the same conclusion that NATO needed to be overhauled if it was to remain relevant.69 Grossman encouraged me to pursue my ideas in private, as well as in collaboration with Dan Hamilton from Craig's staff. A strong advocate of enlargement, Grossman nonetheless realized that size was not the same as purpose. Madrid had clarified NATO's future roster, but not its future role. Grossman wanted NATO to remain a strong and effective military alliance. He had started his career as the special assistant to NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington and had remained a staunch Atlanticist. One day he confided to me that his nightmare was that we would wake up in ten years and find that NATO had begun to look like the EU or the OSCE as it competed with these institutions for something meaningful to do. In the fall of 1997 and early 1998, Grossman and I exchanged a series of notes in which we debated those issues. Should the prime focus of U.S. policy be simply to continue the enlargement process eastward? Or was it more important to refocus the Alliance on addressing new threats of instability in the south, including potential threats from weapons of mass destruction coming from beyond Europe? Or should we try to do both in parallel? Grossman called it the "mega-question" in U.S. policy on NATO.70 We concluded that we needed a NATO that both helped to build a Europe whole and free that also served as a stepping-stone for a broader partnership. The question was how both to enlarge the Alliance and to reorient it to face the missions of the future—and prevent it from becoming a politically weak and militarily impotent organization as it grew in numbers. The best way to avoid this dilemma, Grossman believed, was to make sure NATO was focused on real military missions in a new post-Cold War environment. NATO, he emphasized, had to remain focused on what it did best—deterring and, if need be, fighting wars. If those threats came from new sources or beyond Europe, the Alliance had to reorient itself to meat them. The U.S., he The Political Battle 279 believed, should view NATO as "the institution of choice" when the U.S. and Europe would have to act together militarily. If the residual Russian threat continued to wane, NATO had to focus on the new threats to our territory and interests. This meant the Alliance had to rethink what Article 5 meant in a new era and prepare for missions that would take the Alliance beyond its own territory. But it had to do it in a step-by-step fashion that did not fracture the Alliance's consensus. At Madrid the Alliance had decided to rewrite its strategic concept. In the fall of 1997 the Administration was starting to define its own goals for this exercise. At first there was little appetite in the U.S. government for an ambitious rewrite of the strategic concept as it promised to be divisive with the allies. But Albright firmly believed that NATO had to start to tackle such issues as Saddam Hussein and his attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction. At the December NAC, she publicly called on NATO to "start a discussion" on the challenge posed by the growing spread of weapons of mass destruction to the Alliance and the need to think about new threats to Alliance security that could come from beyond Europe. Those remarks dominated the headlines of the December 1997 Foreign Ministers' meeting but it was clear that most of our allies were not yet ready for such a discussion.71 Following our return from the December Foreign Ministers meeting, Grossman raised the need to focus on the issue of NATO's future missions in a memo to Albright.72 In parallel, he asked me to prepare a presentation for him to make at Albright's annual strategic retreat in early January.73 In making our case, we were joined by Craig. Grossman and Craig made their pitch to Albright on January 9,1998 at the Secretary's annual retreat with her senior advisors. Albright was supportive and asked us to develop our views further. On January 15, Grossman sent her a note suggesting the U.S. consider using 1999 to define a new U.S.-European bargain for the 21st century premised on the U.S. and Europe working together in an expanded trans-Atlantic framework to solve problems both in and outside of Europe. This would require a new NATO with expanded missions, the reorientation of US-EU relations to global challenges, and a retooled OSCE to promote democracy throughout the Euro-Atlantic region. Grossman suggested using major summits that each of these institutions had scheduled for 1999 to push for this new U.S.-European bargain. He had a name for it—the trifecta. Albright wrote back on the note: "Good idea. Let's develop a 21st century better than the 20th—Europe's bloodiest."74 It was a green light to make this a top policy priority—but after the ratification vote. We wanted to avoid provoking a debate on this sensitive issue prematurely. In mid-December, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger sent President Clinton a memo laying out an endgame strategy for NATO enlargement ratification. It emphasized that the Administration was in good shape in the Senate, but pointed to the failure to obtain fast-track authority for a new free trade 280 The Political Battle round as an example of the need not to take things for granted. Even though a two-thirds majority in the Senate appeared increasingly likely, the memo warned that support for enlargement in the Senate was still tepid; the Administration would face battles over key amendments. It urged early Presidential involvement to strengthen the Administration's hand early in the endgame, generate political momentum, and create the solid victory that would strengthen Clinton's future prerogatives and those of his successor.75 President Clinton kicked off the campaign by highlighting his commitment to enlargement in the State of the Union address in late January. On February n, he officially transmitted the protocols of accession from the executive branch to the Senate. He was joined by the three Foreign Ministers and the Senate leadership for a ceremony in the ornate Franklin Room of the State Department. The President delivered his remarks in front of a full-size photo replica of the Berlin Wall, which Rosner had borrowed from the Pentagon for the event. As he finished his remarks, the President pointed to the display and said: "Behind me is a picture of the wall that for so long represented the false and forced division of the European continent. NATO cannot maintain the old Iron Curtain as its permanent frontier. It must and can bring Europe together in security, not keep it apart in instability." As they left the ceremony, Vice President Gore reminded Senator Biden that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Yalta conference that had started to cement the original division of Europe—and that the West was now overcoming.76 Events were now breaking our way. In late January the AFL-CIO came out publicly in favor of the Administration's policy, following meetings between both Albright and Clinton with the organization's president, John Sweeney.77 A few days later, a group of sixty senior retired military commanders—including five former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—endorsed enlargement in an effort organized by Steve Hadley of the Committee to Expand NATO.78 It all seemed almost too good to be true. On January zo, Polish Ambassador Jerzy Kozminski sat down to write a cable identifying what could still go wrong for Warsaw. He sketched out several scenarios in which NATO enlargement might still be derailed. The first was a crisis with Russia in the Balkans or elsewhere that would lead Western leaders to rethink enlargement. The second was a crisis in one of the candidate countries that might disqualify it or lead to new doubts about their qualifications. A third was something happening in the U.S. that damaged the President's ability to get enlargement through the Senate. The next day, January 21,1998, Rosner walked into my office with a copy of The Washington Post and pointed to a story alleging that President Clinton had had an affair with a young intern by the name of Monica Lewinsky and had tried to cover it up. We were probably the only people in the world thinking about the connections between Lewinsky and NATO enlargement. We were lucky that the President's im- The Political Battle 281 peachment hearings, as well as the war in Kosovo, did not unfold until one year later. Ratifying enlargement against that backdrop of either would have been much more difficult and perhaps impossible. The opposition had not given up either. In late January, we received reports about a new anti-enlargement group, the Coalition Against NATO Expansion (CANE). It consisted of political groups from both ends of the political spectrum, from the Free Congress Foundation and Eagle Forum on the right to the Union of Concerned Scientists and Council for a Livable World on the left. CANE's Founding Declaration claimed that NATO enlargement amounted to a "Gulf of Tonkin" resolution that would entangle the U.S. in ethnic conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe and soak the U.S. taxpayer of billions of dollars. Claiming that enlargement was being driven by Washington elites out of touch with the American public, they called for exhaustive hearings and an extensive floor debate with no vote before mid-1998, alleging that plans for an earlier vote were "railroading the issue."79 Similarly, we also picked up reports of growing internal debate and opposition to enlargement within conservative Republican circles and the board rooms of think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation who officially supported enlargement. Both ends of the political spectrum, it seemed, had their own Russia-firsters. Later that spring CANE was joined by the Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities (BLSP) whose President, Ben Cohen, was a co-founder of the Ben and Jerry's ice cream empire. BLSP was committed to shifting U.S. government spending from defense to domestic needs. It would fund a series of ads that opposed enlargement and showed the mushroom-shaped clouds of nuclear explosions and warned that NATO expansion could alienate Russia and rekindle Cold War tensions. They were focused in states where Senators had yet to announce their positions on NATO enlargement. But the opposition was unable to make significant political inroads—either in the Senate or in the broader public. They were not well organized politically, too disparate in their ideological composition, and unable to put together a broad-based coalition. Above all, they could not enlist a critical mass of political leaders, neither on Capitol Hill, nor more generally from the political center—which the Administration had assiduously cultivated. By this time S/NERO had become a kind of a political rapid reaction SWAT unit. Every time Rosner received a report that a Senator might be wavering, he immediately arranged for a phone call from the President or from Albright, Cohen, or Berger addressing his or her concerns. A team of senior officials was often dispatched to follow-up with a briefing for the Senator or staff. Rosner and I met regularly with the Ambassadors of the three invited countries over breakfast to compare notes and were on the phone several times a day with USCEN exchanging notes on how to counter the critics. Rosner joked it was like playing the game "whack-a-mole"—every time an opponent popped up, the Administration tried to bat down what it considered a bad idea. 282 The Political Battle But it was a two-front struggle. While waging the public battle, the Administration was also engaged in intense and at times contentious talks with the Republican staff from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over the language of the resolution of ratification. It was the vehicle through which Senators could attach reservations or amendments that could constrain future Administrations or, in the worst case, force the Administrations to abandon the treaty. By mid-February we had had several difficult rounds of contentious talks but were finding common language on many key issues: Russia, costs and burden-sharing, the open door, CFE, intelligence sharing with new members, POWs, and Jewish property restitution. On February 19, Helms' staff sent him an updated draft resolution of ratification. Helms sent it back with his comment: "Looks good to me!" Two days later, Rosner and I sent our assessment to Talbott concluding that we could work with the SFRC draft as well.80 5. THE ENDGAME The SFRC was scheduled to hold the last in a series of seven hearings concluding the formal testimony record on NATO enlargement on February 24. The day before, February 23, we got the SFRC's latest draft of the resolution of ratification. We were narrowing the gap.81 That same day the results of a new poll on U.S. public attitudes on enlargement showed that public support was high and unchanged from the fall of 1996. It belied the argument of the critics that once Americans became more familiar with the issue support would fall. The poll showed that 61 percent of Americans supported adding the first three members, and 50-43 percent supported adding additional states after the first three. As Rosner underscored in an e-mail, virtually all the pro-enlargement arguments tested had gained support whereas nearly all the anti-enlargement arguments had lost support.82 The next morning Albright made her final appearance before the SFRC. In addition to repeating the Administration's arguments in favor of enlargement, she took aim at some of the proposed amendments that enlargement opponents were starting to circulate. The signing of the U.S.-Baltic Charter two weeks earlier had opened another line of attack from enlargement critics who now claimed the Administration's open door strategy was reckless. In a New York Times editorial in early February, four well-known opponents of enlargement-Howard Baker, Sam Nunn, Brent Scowcroft, and Alton Frye—called for "a definite if not permanent pause in this process" after the first enlargement round.83 It was quickly embraced by Senator Warner in the form of an amendment.84 The Administration believed that a "pause" on enlargement was unnecessary because the U.S. already had a de facto veto over further invitations, and it was dangerous because it could undercut democratic reforms in the region. Albright, who was already on record opposing the amendment before Warner The Political Battle 283 officially offered it, wanted to lay down a marker that we were going to fight hard against Warner in her final testimony.85 She pointed out that NATO had already enlarged several times in its history and had become stronger, not weaker, each time. She insisted that an open door policy was "central to the logic" of a new Alliance that would help knit Europe together. "A mandated pause," Albright told the gathered Senators, "would be heard from Tallinn in the north to Sofia in the south as the sound of an open door slamming shut. It would be seen as a vote of no confidence in reform-minded governments from the Baltics to the Balkans."86 The Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened on March 3 to vote on the resolution of ratification. The vote was 16-2 in our favor. Rosner's "center-out" strategy had worked. We had the support of all but the most conservative and liberal Senators on the Committee—Republican John Ashcroft (R-MO) and Democrat Paul Wellstone (D-MN). But several Senators had made it clear that they were uncomfortable over where NATO was headed. In a memo to Albright that evening, Rosner and I wrote: 'Today's meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on NATO enlargement was intellectually and politically fascinating, and holds many lessons. The 16-2 margin clearly bodes well for the final tally. But the substance of the Committee's deliberations suggest the debate has gone beyond the merits of enlargement to these first three states, and has moved to broader issues: NATO's future orientation and new missions; future rounds of enlargement and the European security strategy beyond NATO." We warned Albright that a number of Senators still had concerns and were likely to try to use amendments to put their imprint on enlargement. 'Today's meeting," the memo stated, "does nothing to diminish our confidence that we will obtain the needed two-thirds vote. But it does suggest that if the ultimate vote is going to stand as a broad affirmation of our vision for NATO and Europe, we have work to do."87 The next morning, March 4, the USCEN issued an informal vote count that had 72 Senators voting yes, 13 opposing and 15 undecided. By this count, we had crossed the hurdle of 67 votes required for ratification. We could now focus on the endgame. In a subsequent memo we underscored: "How this ends—the final margin, the amendments that prevail, the post-mortems by the press—will all color our ability to pursue the next phase of policy toward NATO and Europe."88 The Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote was a major victory for the Administration. The critics were furious. The New York Times charged that, "Rarely has such an important matter seemed headed for approval with so little enthusiasm or attention."89 Tom Friedman accused the SFRC of putting on a "shameful performance." In a column in The New York Times, he complained, "Senators Jesse Helms, Joe Biden & Co. rolled over like puppies having their bellies rubbed when Clinton officials explained their plans for NATO expan- 284 The Political Battle sion by dodging all the hard questions."90 Other major newspapers, including The Washington Post, praised the SFRC vote 91 And on March 13, The Chicago Tribune reversed its previous position opposing enlargement and now came out in our favor—a reversal that followed an intense effort by S/NERO to get at least one major editorial board opposed to enlargement to change its position 92 Sensing that momentum was rapidly building on our side, enlargement opponents urged a postponement of the final Senate vote. Seventeen Senators sent Lott and Daschle a letter asking that the vote be delayed until June 1. Former Senators Sam Nunn and Howard Baker also wrote the Senate Armed Services Committee criticizing the SFRC resolution and calling for additional hearings and a delay in the vote.93 When Albright heard about their request, she rolled her eyes and reminded us that during the four years we had been debating enlargement the founding fathers of NATO had not only created the Alliance but also already enlarged it once. Pro-enlargement Senators countered with their own letter, and President Clinton weighed in with Lott to urge him to stick to the planned schedule.94 Helms, in turn, defended his handling of enlargement in an op-ed.9S The Senate floor debate on enlargement started on March 18 but then, faced with the need to address a pending education bill, Lott postponed it until after the Senate's Easter recess. While disappointed, this was a pause we could live with. With the final floor fight now scheduled for late April, we had a chance to step back and review the order of battle. The fight was now over amendments. More than a dozen Senators had signaled their intention to offer amendments, often more than one. The amendments we worried about most were those proposed by Ashcroft, Harkin, Hutchison, Levin, Moynihan, Stevens, and Warner. They were proposing amendments ranging from restricting bilateral assistance to new members, a cap on U.S. contributions to NATO budgets, limits on new missions, creating a new conflict resolution process within the Alliance for Central Europe, to a suggestion that we create a way to eject allies from the Alliance if they did not meet our standards.96 While the Administration was determined to fight each of mem, two were at the top of our list of "must wins." The first was Senator Warner's "pause" amendment. The second was an amendment Senator John Ashcroft had announced to limit any future out of area role for NATO. The Senator from Missouri was considering a run for the Presidency and positioning himself as the candidate of the right wing of the Republican Party. He had launched a mean-spirited attack mischaracterizing Albright's views on NATO's new missions. Albright had written him explaining in detail why his characterization of her views was wrong, but Ashcroft had ignored her explanation and instead accused the Administration of trying to distort the intent of the Washington Treaty 97 But Ashcroft had his history wrong—and the consequences of his amendment were potentially far-reaching and dangerous. The Washington Treaty was The Political Battle 285 clear that NATO's collective defense commitment was limited to the North Atlantic area as defined in the treaty in geographic terms. But it had left open the option of NATO members coming together voluntarily under other articles of the Treaty to defend their common interests outside of that area. Acheson had made these points quite clearly in March 1949 in public interviews in which he had explained each Article of the Washington Treaty. We had dug the Department's summary of those interviews out of the archives and circulated it as part of our effort to defeat the Ashcroft amendment, which we feared would prevent NATO from being able to address new threats from beyond Europe in the future.98 On April 21 Albright met with the Democratic Caucus to shore up their support. She told the gathered Senators that the enlargement vote was one of the most important they would cast. It was a chance to truly end the Cold War—"to put it in concrete"—and to overcome Europe's divide. "I hope you would view it as an honor to vote for enlargement—to make these three countries part of the best Alliance in the world," she told them. Even at this late stage, however, it was clear that a number of Senators still had doubts centering largely on enlargement's impact on Russia and arms control. Albright went out of her way to address them: "I want you to know how committed the President and I are to making our relations with Russia work." The Russians did not like enlargement but they had accepted that it was going to happen, Albright said. There were still problems in U.S.-Russian relations, but it was a mistake to blame them on enlargement. "That's like blaming everything on El Nino," she quipped. A number of Senators said they were going to support the President—but without enthusiasm.99 On April 24, 1998 Senators Roth, Lieberman, and McCain sent around a "Dear Colleague" letter urging their colleagues to vote in favor of enlargement. They noted that enlargement enjoyed wide bipartisan support and had been endorsed by three former Presidents, eight former secretaries of state, seven former secretaries of defense, five former national security advisors and sixty former senior flag officers in the U.S. military. In addition, enlargement had been endorsed by 13 state Senates and House of Representatives, the U.S. conference of Mayors, the National Governor's Association, the Council of State Governments, the AFL-CIO, numerous veterans groups, and 26 ethnic, religious and humanitarian organizations. "These endorsements," they concluded, "are a powerful reflection of the broad consensus affirming that NATO enlargement is in America's national interest and deserves the full support of the Senate."100 The final floor debate opened on a slightly nervous note on April 27,1998. Only a few days earlier Senator Lott had publicly urged the Administration not to take anything for granted. "I told the White House for the third and last time, 'If you don't pay attention to this bill this thing could get away from us,'" the Mississippi Republican told reporters. "The odds are we're going to get over 70 286 The Political Battle votes, but there's not a lot of enthusiasm in here," he warned.101 The pro-enlargement forces were led by Senator Biden who took over the role of floor manager and became in many ways the key figure in managing the Senate debate. The opposition was de facto led by Senator John Warner. By the evening of the first day some fifteen Senators had spoken—ten for, five against and one undecided. Behind the scenes, the President, Albright, Cohen and Berger worked the phones to line up the votes to defeat the amendments the Administration was fighting. SACEUR General Wes Clark pitched in by calling a number of Republican Senators to explain why the Ashcroft amendment was damaging to NATO. The rest of us spent most of the day working with SFRC staff to answer the concerns of individual Senators and to field requests for last-minute phone calls to help get them on board. A Democratic whip count found that there was almost no support among Democrats for the Ashcroft amendment—but that there was support for the Warner "pause" amendment. Secretary of Defense Cohen me,t privately with Senator Stevens to convince him to withdraw his amendment. The first amendments came to the Senate floor for votes on April 28. Senator Harkin's amendment proposing limits on bilateral assistance to the new members was defeated 76-24. Senator Jon Kyi (R-AZ) offered an amendment suggesting guidance for the rewrite of the strategic concept which made clear that NATO's future missions would not be limited to peacekeeping. It was a vehicle to deflect support away from Ashcroft by allowing Senators to underscore their support for NATO's core mission of collective defense and to note their reservations about peacekeeping while keeping open the option of more ambitious out-of-area war fighting missions. The Administration eagerly supported it. It passed overwhelmingly 90-9. We also enlisted the support of Zbigniew Brzezinski and senior Republican strategists to lobby against the Ashcroft amendment. In a memo written late on the evening of April 28, Rosner wrote: "Today was a good day." The political battle was now being fought on the editorial pages of the major U.S. newspapers. The New York Times' ongoing opposition to enlargement was relentless.102 Anticipating that the Times would issue a final blast against the Administration on the day of the vote, Albright submitted her own ttititnia! making the case for enlargement. On April 29th, we woke up to see the two contrasting editorials on The New York Times editorial page. As expected, the Times' editorial attacked enlargement as a mistake of historic proportions. "It is delusional," they wrote, "tu believe that NATO expansion is 1 lot at its luic an act thai Knssin wiil regard as hostile."1'" hi cm 1 irast, Albright entitled her editorial "Stop, Worrying about Russia"• inti iirgeti her rejders roslnn newni"; Central Knmpe :lu~ugh thi' pii.irn of Rhvim Hi:: BgteW think ut UlU.'jti crmntnu, .Hi indu|:uiiilu:n imúuus wiru wanted tu be Amenta's allies. EuiiiiKiiig. NATOt she argued, would The Political Battle 287 be a sign that we understood the world had changed and the Cold War was over.104 A group of us headed over to the Senate to help head off any last-minute surprise challenges before the final vote. A highlight came when Dan Fried, who had since moved on to become U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw, phoned to tell us about an amusing incident he had experienced earlier in the day. While visiting the Jasna Gora monastery in southern Poland, the home of the famous Black Madonna icon, Fried had been approached by one of the Fathers—complete in white robe and cell phone—who said: "We know you are having some problems in the Senate." He then pointed to the ceiling and said: "We're willing to provide a little help." The day was filled with political skirmishing before the final vote. In the Senate, a series of last-minute maneuvers was underway. At one point enlargement opponents suggested that the vote be put off because Helms was scheduled to undergo surgery the next day. But Helms called their bluff by saying he was prepared to debate through the night if necessary. Lobbying by Biden along with Berger and Talbott helped convince Democratic Senators Leahy (D-VT) and Bingaman (D-NM) to withdraw amendments on CFE and the Baltic states. Biden and Helms urged their colleagues to fold as many other amendments as possible into a single manager's amendment to get to a final vote. But we still faced a number of potentially dangerous amendments, above all those being pushed by Ashcroft, Moynihan, Stevens, and Warner. When David Gompert, a senior NSC official responsible for European affairs in the Bush Administration, wrote an op-ed criticizing Ashcroft, we made sure it was faxed to every Republican Senator's office.105 Voting on amendments started at 3:30 P.M. There were now seven of them. Ashcroft and Warner had each asked that their amendments be considered last. It was an attempt to gather the protest votes of those Senators who had supported enlargement but still wanted to signal that their support of our policy was not carte blanche. But the momentum was now clearly on the Administration's side. Moynihan's amendment linking EU and NATO enlargement was defeated 83-17 in spite of an emotional warning from the New York Senator that the U.S. was re-creating the hair-trigger tensions that existed at the height of the Cold War.106 Senator Hutchison's amendment on a new conflict dispute resolution was defeated 62-37. Warner continued to argue against enlargement as committing the U.S. to a "blank check" for an ill-defined military alliance. "We'd be creating through this expansion a 911 organization," he argued claiming that NATO was in danger of becoming "Dial a cop, dial a soldier." But his "pause" amendment also went down to defeat, 59-41.107 Throughout the day Ashcroft bargained with Lott over how much debate time should be set aside for his amendment. Lott wanted to wrap up the vote that evening and became increasingly irritated with Ashcrofťs demand for sev- 288 The Political Battle eral hours of debate at prime time when other Senators were getting much less. Finally, fed up with Ashcroft's tactics, he walked over to ask Senator Biden to move to table Ashcroft's amendment. It was a parliamentary maneuver to kill it before it even reached the floor. Biden agreed—but only if Lott would second his motion to make it clear that this was not a partisan move. After hesitating for a minute, Lott concurred. As Ashcroft walked back into the Senate chamber, he saw his amendment, which the Administration feared would be the most dangerous and closely-voted amendment, go down to defeat 82-18 without ever having reached the Senate floor. At 8:30 P.M. the final floor debate commenced. The vote started at 10:25 P-M-Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVA), invoking an old Senate tradition for votes on grave matters of state, insisted that the Senators remain at their desks and rise one at a time to have their votes registered. There was a hushed silence in the chamber as each Senator rose with his "yea" or "nay." The final vote was 80-19 with 45 Republicans and 35 Democrats in favor. Rosner was called into another room to take a congratulatory call from the President. Senators Lugar and Biden came over to congratulate us. Standing outside the visitor's galley in the corridors of the Senate, we saw the 84-year-old Jan Nowak walking toward us swinging his cane like a spry youngster with a big smile on his face. "I never thought," he said, "that I would live to see the day when Poland is not only free—but safe." The next day Secretary Albright issued a statement on the vote. "The Senate has done the right thing at the right time. For this is a moment of relative peace in Europe, a time when freedom is ascendant. Now we can be that much more confident that peace and freedom will endure." Albright underscored the broader implications of the vote for U.S. foreign policy. "Today's vote sends a message to our old and new allies that America will continue to defend its interest in the peace and security of Europe. It will reassure all of Europe's new democracies that we are not going to treat them as second class citizens in the future just because they were subjugated in the past. It is a signal that America will defend its values, protect its interests, stand by its allies and keep its word."108 CONCLUSION At NATO's founding on April 4,1949, President Harry S. Truman described the creation of the Atlantic Alliance as a neighborly act taken by countries deeply conscious of their shared heritage as democracies that had come together determined to defend their common values and interests from those who threatened them. The Washington Treaty was a very simple document, he noted. But it was a treaty that might have prevented two wars had it existed in 1919 or 1939. Its goal was to establish a zone of peace in an area of the world that had been at the heart of those two wars. Protecting this area, the President said, was an important step toward creating peace in the world. And he predicted that the positive impact of NATO's creation would be felt beyond its borders.1 Fifty years later, NATO decided to extend that zone of peace and stability from Western to Central and Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. It opened its door to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as part of a strategy of uniting Europe and recasting the Alliance for the post-Cold War era. By underscoring that NATO's door remained open to other European democracies willing and able to meet the criteria set out in the Washington Treaty, allied heads of state affirmed their wish to extend that zone even further in the future. NATO enlargement, in President Clinton's words, was designed to ensure that the eastern half of the continent 344 6. The NATO-Russia Endgame book vi. the nato-russia endgame 1. See Clinton's State of the Union Address, February 4,1997. 2. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969). 3. See "Statement By Secretary of State-Designate Madeleine Korbel Albright Before The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Wednesday, January 8,1997. 4. The study was commissioned by the Pew Trust and released in the fall of 1991. See Donald S. Kellerman, Andrew Kohut, and Carol Bowman, The Pulse of Europe: A Survey of Political and Social Values and Attitudes (Washington, DC: Times Mirror Center for The People & The Press). 5. See Albright's January 8, 1997 testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 6. See Albright's handwritten comments on Grossman's note to her entitled 'Thinking About 1999" and dated January 15,1998. 7. See Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Address to the People of Prague, Obecni Dum, "A Moment of Celebration and of Dedication," Prague, Czech Republic, July 14,1997, http://secretary.state.gov/www/statements/9707L4.html. 8. The book was James Chace's Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created The American World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). 9. As Albright put it in her first speech as Secretary of State at NATO Headquarters in Brussels: "Today we are privileged to live in a time of relative stability and peace. But we know from history that we cannot take the extension of these blessings for granted. Peace is not a gift. It must be earned. And if it is to last, it must be constantly reinforced." See "Statement By Secretary Madeleine Albright At The North Atlantic Council Special Ministerial Meeting," NATO Headquarters, Brussels, February 18, 1997. 10. See "Commencement Address by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright at Harvard University," Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 5,1997. 11. Ibid. 12. In his memoirs, former Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov writes that he was initially worried about Albright as U.S. Secretary of State but was pleasantly surprised to discover that she, while a vigorous defender and promoter of American interests, was committed to finding common ground with Russia as well. See Yevgeny Primakov, Gody v Bolshoy Politike (Moscow: Sovershenno Sekrerno, 1996), p. 272. 13. See the Memorandum of Conversation entitled "The Secretary's Meeting with President Yeltsin," February 21,1997. 14. See Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, "Opening Statement at the Carnegie Roundtable Discussions," Carnegie Moscow Center, Moscow, May 2,1997. 15. These quotes come from my notes from the meeting. 16. See Madeleine K. Albright, "Why Bigger is Better," The Economist, February »5. *997- 17. Kohl's National Security Advisor, Joachim Bitterlich provided a read out of the conversation to Talbott as well as to the U.S. charge in Bonn, J.D. Bindenagel. See 6. The NATO-Russia Endgame 345 "Kohl's Telephone Call with the President on January 6"; and "Kohl's suggestion on NATO-Russia Relations," Bonn 00102, January 6,1997. 18. The phone call took place on January 6, 1997. See Memorandum of Conversation Between the President and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, January 13. *997- 19. See "Report Card on Primakov: B Plus on Process, C Minus on Substance," Moscow 01151, January 17,1997. 20. See "February 21 Meeting with Communist Leader Zyuganov, State 032968, February 22,1997. 21. The article was written by the pro-communist Duma staffer and security expert Anton Surikov in the January 15 edition of Pravda Pyat. See "Duma Staffer Surikov Describes Recent Presidential Meeting on Response to NATO Expansion," Moscow 001403, January 22,1997. 22. See "SYG Solana on AFSouih, Ministeriah, Bosnia," USNATO 003863, November 5,1996. 23. See "Senator Roth's u/26 Meeting with NATO Secretary General Solana on NATO Expansion," USNATO 000307, January 31,1997. 24. See the Memorandum of Telephone Conversation between Clinton and Chirac from January 30,1997. 25. See "Deputy Secretary's 1/13 Meeting with Foreign Secretary Rifkind and Foreign Office Officials," London 000657, January 17,1997. 26. See Memorandum of the Conversation between Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott and French President Jacques Chirac, January 14,1997. 27. See Memorandum of Conversation between Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, January 15,1997. 28. Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 224. 29. See Talbott and Fuerth's Memorandum for the President and Vice President dated January 24,1997. 30. See Yeltsin's letter to Clinton dated January 30,1997. 31. See "Primakov Publicly Commits to Negotiations with NATO," Moscow 003619, February 14,1997. 32. See the Memorandum of Conversation between Clinton and Gore with Chernomyrdin, entitled "Meeting with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin: March Summit, GCC Results, European security, START, Economics," The Oval Office, February 7,1997. 33. See Talbott, The Russia Hand, p. 233. 34. See the Memorandum of Conversation between Deputy Secretary Talbott and Russian Foreign Minister Primakov, March 6,1997. 35. See the Memorandum of Conversation entitled "The Secretary's Meeting with President Yeltsin," February 21,1997. 36. See Henry Kissinger, "Helsinki Fiasco," The Washington Post, March 30,1997. 37. See Talbott's Note to Albright dated March 14,1997 and entitled "The NATO-Russia Charter as time-released medicine." 346 6. The NATO-Russia Endgame 6. The NATO-Russia Endgame 38. See the Memorandum of Conversation between Deputy of State Strobe Talbott and Russian Foreign Minister Primakov, Moscow, July 15,1996. 39. See the Memorandum of Conversation between Deputy Secretary Talbott and Russian Foreign Minister Primakov, March 6,1997. 40. See the scorecard entitled "A NATO-Russia Understanding" dated January 27, 1997. See also the updated written version from February 8 entitled "From Helsinki to Madrid: A Scenario" which lays out internal U.S. thinking on how to bring NATO-Russia talks to closure in the run-up to the Madrid summit. 41. For background on how NATO strategy has evolved see Richard L. Kugler, Commitment to Purpose: How Alliance Partnership Won the Cold War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1993). 42. For an example of Moscow's attempt to define "offensive infrastructure" see "Russians Identify 'Infrastructure'," Vienna 001791, March 11,1997. 43. See Final Communique' issued at the Ministerial Meeting of the North AÜantic Council, Brussels, Belgium, December 10,1996. 44. See also NATO/CFE: Feb. 17 HLTF Agrees on NATO Position on Adaptation," USNATO 000509, February 19,1997. 45. This sentence went through a number of iterations. The version Vershbow wrote on March 5 is quoted verbatim from Talbott's memo to Albright from March 7, 1997. See "My Meeting with Primakov—and Yours," March 7,1997. 46. Ibid. See also the Memorandum of Conversation between Talbott and Russian Foreign Minister Primakov, March 6,1997. 47. As quoted in William Drozdiak, "Poland Urges NATO Not to Appease Russia: The Smell of Yalta is Always with Us,' " The Washington Post, March 17,1997. 48. See "The Secretary's Meeting with Polish Foreing Minister Rosau," State 056869, March 27,1997. 49. Speaking before the press with Rosati, Albright underscored that Poland would be a full NATO member: "They will be full allies in every sense of the word. Every important decision which will be made by NATO's 16 allies is made in full consultations with our partners. And there will be nothing about you without you." See Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Polish Foreign Minister Dariusz Rosati, Remarks at photo opportunity, Washington D.C., March 13, 1997, . 50. See "Statement by the North Atlantic Council, March 14, 1997," . 51. See Memorandum of Conversation between Secretary of State Albright and Russian Foreign Minister Primakov, March 15, 1997. This description also draws on Talbott's notes of the meeting. 52. See Talbott's typed up notes of the meeting between Berger and him with Mamedov on the morning of March 16,1997. 53. Obtained from Strobe Talbott's personal papers. 54. See Memorandum of Conversation Between the President and Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov on March 17,1997. 55. See Talbott, The Russia Hand, p. 237. 56. See the memcon entitled "Morning Meeting with Russian President Yeltsin: NATO-Russia, START, ABM/TMD," March 21,1997. 57. See Talbott, The Russia Hand, pp. 241-242. 58. See "Press Conference of President Clinton and President Yeltsin," Kalastafa Torppa, Helsinki, Finland, March 21,1997. Author's private copy. 59. See "Russian Reaction to Helsinki," Moscow 007281, March 25,1997. 60. Finnish President Ahtisaari briefed U.S. Ambassador Derek Shearer on his conversation with Yeltsin in Finnish-Russian talks the day after the U.S.-Russian summit had concluded. See "The Morning After: Russian/Finnish Post-Summit Bilaterals Focus on the Baltics," Helsinki 001550, March 26,1997. 61. Naumann was in Moscow March 23-26, 1997. See "NATO-Russia: CMC Chairman Briefs the NAC on his Russia Visit," USNATO 01212, April 14,1997. 62. See "Russia's Foreign Policy Malaise," Moscow 010483, April 25,1997. 63. See "SYG Solana's Debrief of His 4/15 Meeting with FM Primakov," USNATO 1231, April 15,1997. 64. See Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (New York: Random House, 1984). 65. See the paper entitled "A Menu of Scenarios for Your May Day in Moscow: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," April 25,1997. 66. Talbott called Albright from Moscow to convey this message to her during the flight. It is also contained in a memo drafted summarizing the first day of talks in Moscow and sent to Albright's plane. See Memorandum to the Secretary From Strobe Talbott in Moscow, April 30,1997. 67. See Talbott's "NATO-Russia Midnight Update" faxed to Albright on her plane en route to Moscow, April 30,1997. 68. See "Secretary's Meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, May 1,1997, Moscow," State 084836, May 6,1997. 69. See Talbott, The Russia Hand, pp. 244-245. 70. See "Secretary's Meeting with Russian Foreign Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, May 1,1997, Moscow," State 84836, May 6,1997. The results of the Albright-Primakov conversation on May 2 are described in a confidential summary of their conversation. Albright also describes the meeting in a Night Note to the President sent later that day. See the Secretary's "Night Note" sent to the President on May 2,1997. 71. "Night Note," Ibid. 72. See "NATO/HLTF: May 6 HLTF Meeting-Allies Support Albright Primakov Paper on CFE," USNATO 085231, May 6,1997. 73. See "NATO-Russia: NAC Discusses NATO-Russia relationship Before SYG Meets Primakov," USNATO 1506, May 6,1997. 74. See "Deputy Secretary's Letter to DFM Mamedov," State 084033, May 6, 1997. 75. See "NATO-Russia: Debrief of May 6 Solana-Primakov Meeting," USNATO 1531, May 7,1997. 76. For the U.S. instruction to Hunter for the final NAC on May 13 see "NATO-Russia: Guidance on Section V for 5/13NAC, "State 088990, May 13,1997. 348 6. The NATO-Russia Endgame 77. See "Letter from the Deputy Secretary to DFM Mamedov," State 86892, May 9. *997- 78. See the Official Informal from Tefft to Talbott entitled "For Deputy Secretary Only from Charge," May 12,1997. 79. See the guidance sent to Vershbow following the Vershbow-Edelman conversation entitled "NATO-Russia: Guidance to Close on March 14 Language/Flank Agreement." State 090106, May 14,1997. 80. See "Statement by the President on NATO Expansion," The White House, The Rose Garden, May 14,1997, . 81. See "Background Briefing by Senior Administration Officials," The Briefing Room, May 14,1997. Author's private copy. 82. See Yeltsin's letter to President Clinton from May 19,1997. 83. See Memorandum of Conversation of a Dinner Meeting Between Secretary Albright and Russian Foreign Mister Primakov, State 110688, June 12,1997. 84. See "Remarks by President Clinton at the Signing Ceremony of the NATO-Russia Founding Act," Paris, May 27, 1997, . 85. See "Remarks by Russian President Yeltsin at the Signing Ceremony of the NATO-Russia Founding Act," Paris, May 27,1997, . 86. See the Memorandum of Conversation of the Clinton-Yeltsin meeting held at the American Ambassador's Residence in Paris on May 27,1997. book vii. head-to-head at madrid 1. This did not mean that the U.S. had given up on Slovakia. In the spring of 1997 Albright asked Talbott to come up with a strategy to encourage Bratislava to return to a reformist track. See Deputy Secretary Talbott's memo entitled "A Strategy for Slovakia" dated April 21,1997. 2. In a memo to the NATO Ambassador in February, Solana wrote: "In order to avoid a prolonged public debate before the summit, there should be no formal discussion either in Council or at the spring Ministerial and no recommendations on which country or countries to invite at the summit to start accession negotiations with the Alliance. We should rather aim at a late and quiet process of consensus building between the Sintra Ministerial and the summit. I would be prepared, if you agree, to sound out nations individually by mid-June and present a consolidated overview to Permanent Representatives at a private luncheon or an informal meeting which would allow nations to consult bilaterally on different views. A few days before the summit we should aim to arrive, in an informal meeting, at unanimous recommendations to be submitted to heads of state and government. Any leak or advance notice to the "selected" countries or to the "non-selected" must be strictly avoided." See "NATO: Enlargement Preparations for the Madrid Summit, USNATO 000430, February 12, 1997. 3. At the NATO December 1996 Foreign Ministers Ministerial, the U.S. had been unable to gain acceptance of the relatively anodyne statement: "The first shall not be 7. Head-to-Head at Madrid 349 the last." See Hunter's assessment of the weakness of allied support for the "open door" policy in "NATO in 1996: Beyond Architecture to Action," USNATO 000056, January 6,1996. 4. Speaking before the NAC in Brussels on February 4, 1997, President Constantinescu said that his government had promised the Romanian people three things: democratic stability, economic prosperity, and Euro-Atlantic integration. He concluded his speech by saying that if any of these goals were not achieved, quoting Titus, "the day is lost." See "Romanian President Constantinescu Meets the NAC," USNATO 000426, February 12,1997. 5. But Chirac also noted that "the greatest difficulty" would be to convince the United States to support Romania's candidacy. See "Chirac Visit to Bucharest," Bucharest 001247, February 27,1997. For an internal assessment of French thinking on Romania in the spring of 1997 see "France and NATO: Plugging for Romania," Paris 010053, May 2,1997. 6. See "NATO in 1997," USNATO 001053, March 28,1997. 7. On Perry's trip to Ljubljana see "What A Difference Ten Months Makes: Secretary Perry's July 3 Visit to Slovenia," Ljubljana 000756, July 5,1996. 8. In order to avoid leaks, these meetings were kept smaller and less formal than normal Deputy Committee meetings and were referred to as "rump DCs." My description draws on my own notes from these meetings. 9. Since these meetings were not official DC meetings, an official "Summary of Conclusions" of the DC process was never produced. The rationale for the U.S. decision is nonetheless contained in the paper entitled "Principals' Checklist of NATO Summit Issues," May 20,1997. 10. See Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, "NATO, Russia and Transatlantic Security in the 21st Century," The Atlantic Council, May 20,1997. 11. See Hunter's cable "The Sintra Ministerials," USNATO 001804, May 26,1997-See also my note to Albright entitled "What to Watch Out for on Enlargement Issues" dated May 23,1997. 12. See "Talking Points on Small First Group," May 28,1997. 13. Albright emerged from the lunch somewhat shaken and angry that she had so little support. Talbott sent me off to draft a memo listing the reasons why we were still in good shape. See my note to Albright entided "Thoughts on Your Lunch and Aftermath." 14. See Albright's Night Note from Sintra dated May 30,1997. 15. In a meeting with Italian Defense Minister Andreata, Cohen replied that if Slovenia had not been included by others with Romania, the U.S. decision might have been different. See "Defense Ministers Meeting at NATO HQ, Italian Bilateral, 12-13 June 1997," USNATO 002120, June 19,1997. 16. The conversation took place on May 22,1997. Clinton said: "The challenge at Madrid is to make sure the countries invited to join NATO can fulfill their obligations, so that it will be a credible alliance and not purely political." The two leaders agreed on the merits of such an approach in general, but did not discuss individual candidates. See the "Telephone Conversation with Helmut Kohl of Germany," State 107309, June 7,1997. 352 y Head-to-Head at Madrid following his return from Bonn. The Romanian President said that he had told the Chancellor he didn't want Romania to become the focal point of dissension in the Alliance but that he needed a specific reference in the communique. Otherwise—in his words—"I will have achieved nothing. Romania will be in the same position as Bulgaria. And I will have failed as a leader." See "President Constantinescu's Meeting with Chancellor Kohl," Bucharest 004204, July 3,1997. 54. See the Memorandum of Conversation entitled "Meeting with NATO Secretary General Solana," July 7,1997. 55. For a summary of the opening plenary session see "NATO Summit—Plenary Discussion of NATO Enlargement," SECTO 021007, Julylo> 1Q97- 56. See "EAPC Summit, July 9," Secto 021020, July 14,1997. 57. See "Memorandum of Conversation: President Clinton's Meeting with Romanian President Constantinescu," State 144970, August 22,1997. 58. See "Remarks by President Clinton and President . 59. See "Memorandum of Conversation Between the President and German President Herzog on July 24,1997," State 146743, August 6,1997. book viii. the political battle 1. For example, in the summer of 1996 the Senate passed the "NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act" by a vote of 81-16. See Vote Summary, July 25,1996 on S.Amdt.5058 to H.R.3540, . 2. See "Memorandum of Conversation, Expanded Meeting with Prime Minister Romano Prodi of Italy, May 6,1998,11:50 A.M.-i2:3o A.M., Cabinet Room." 3. On the changing role of the executive branch and Congress see Stanley Sloan, Mary Locke, and Casimir A. Yost, The Foreign Policy Struggle (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 2000). 4. See George F. Kennan, "A Fateful Error," The New York Times, February 5, 1997. 5. See John Lewis Gaddis, "History, Grand Strategy and NATO Enlargement," Survival 40, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 145-151. 6. See Jeremy D. Rosner, The New Tugof-War. Congress, the Executive Branch and National Security (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1995). 7. See William Stull Holt, Treaties Defeated by the Senate: A Study of the Struggle Between President and Senate Over the Conduct of Foreign Relations (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1933). 8. See Jeremy D. Rosner, "The Perils of Misjudging Our Political Will," Foreign Affairs 75, no. 4 (July 1996): 9-16. On public support for enlargement see Steven Kull and Jeremy D. Rosner, The American public, Congress and NATO enlargement, Part I: "Is there sufficient public support?" and Part II: "Will Congress back admitting new members?" in NATO Review 45, no. 1 (January 1997): 9-11 and 12-14, respectively. For the original Kull poll, see Principal Investigator Steven Kull, "Americans on 8. The Political Battle 353 Expanding NATO: A Study of US Public Attitudes Summary of Findings," Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), October 1,1996. 9. See Rosner's memo to Berger entitled "Legislative, Public Affairs and Diplomatic Priorities for the Next Six Months," January 16,1997. 10. See Rosner's memo to Secretary Albright, National Security Advisor Berger, Deputy Secretary Talbott, and Deputy National Security Advisor Steinberg entitled "Initial Thoughts on NATO Enlargement Ratification Strategy," February 26,1997. 11. Helms's then chief-of-staff, retired Rear Admiral Bud Nance, would play a key role in convincing the Senator to support enlargement. Nance had served at NATO SACLANT headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. He often remarked to visitors that one lesson he had learned while serving at SACLANT was that NATO's role was not only to deter the Russians, but to keep the peace among the European countries as well. 12. See Trent Lott, "The Senate's Role in NATO Enlargement," The Washington Post, March 21,1997. 13. For a portrait of Julie Finley see Jill Abramson, "The Belle of the Soft Money Soiree," The New York Times Magazine, February 20,2000. 14. The U.S. Committee to Expand NATO was incorporated as a 501 (C) (4) corporation on November 1,1996 in the District of Columbia. Jackson's role as President and his ties to Lockheed Martin led to accusations that it was a front for the U.S. defense industry to sell weapons to the region. The Committee's article of incorporation and bylaws emphasized the pro bono nature of the organization and a prohibition against accepting contributions from corporations or foreign nationals in accordance with the belief of its founders that it was an organization of individual American citizens supporting NATO enlargement. For an example of accusations that the U.S. defense industry was a major supporter of enlargement see Katherine Q. Seelye, "Arms Contractors Spend to Promote an Expanded NATO," The New York Times, March 30, 1998. 15. On Jackson's views see Bruce Pitcairn Jackson, "The Conservative Case for NATO," Policy Review, no. 94 (April/May 1999): 45-57. 16. See Jackson's memo from March 1997 entided "A Political Strategy for NATO Expansion" contained in the archives of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. 17. Interview with Bruce Jackson, August 16,2001. 18. Craig's fax went on to say: 'You will be pleased to know that this morning I received a call from the Slovenian Ambassador who told me that his Foreign Minister would be in town next week and was free for dinner on Tuesday. I went ahead and scheduled him in—and then, to my shock, recalled that yesterday, I had told the Ambassador from Slovakia, whose Prime Minister is also in town next week, that Tuesday could be his night at the house. Fortunately, the Slovaks—being particularly eager to please—were willing to reschedule to Wednesday. And just now, I got another call, this time from the Estonian Ambassador who was so excited he could hardly get the words out. He wanted to tell me that half the cabinet of Estonia was coming to town, that they were eager to talk to the Committee about NATO enlargement, and that they were free for dinner late Thursday night." Craig's fax to Finley dated March 6,1997 is contained in the archives of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. 354 8. The Political Battle 8. The Political Battle 355 19. See the memo from Jackson to the USCEN's Board of Directors dated June 9, 1997 summarizing the USCEN's activities November 1,1996-May 31,1997 contained in the archives of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. 20. See the transcript of the debate between Richard C. Holbrooke and Michael E. Mandelbaum entitled "Expanding NATO: Will it Weaken the Alliance?" December 9,1996. 21. See also Richard Cohen, "Endangered Expansion," The Washington Post, December 12,1996. 22. As quoted in "NATO or Tomato?" The New York Times, January 22,1997. 23. See the notes from the meeting by Cameron Munter dated March 5,1997. 24. This idea came from RAND President Jim Thomson. See JimThomson, "Perspective on NATO; Back to Square 1 With Einstein," Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1095- 25. See Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright's Prepared Statement Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, "NATO Enlargement," Washington, D.C., April 23,1997, . 26. See Senate Committee on Armed Services Hearing on NATO Enlargement, Senator John Warner (R-VA), April 23,1997, . 27. See Thomas L. Friedman, "Held Hostage," The New York Times, April 28,1997. 28. See Henry Kissinger, "Helsinki Fiasco," The Washington Post, March 30,1997 and "The Dilution of NATO," The Washington Post, June 8,1997. 29. See Vaclav Havel, "NATO's Quality of Life," The New York Times, May 13, 1997. 30. See "Remarks By the President At The United States Military Academy Commencement," Michie Stadium, West Point, New York, May 31,1997, Office of the Press Secretary, . 31. See "Dear Mr. President" letter dated June 11,1997. 32. This account is based on Rosner's notes from the meeting. 33. See John Keegan's Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris, June 6-August 25,1994 (New York: Viking Press, 1982), Chapter Seven, 'A Polish Battlefield,' pp. 249-282. 34. For further details on the Judge Waters event see George W. Grayson, Strange Bedfellows: NATO Marches East (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999), pp. 109-112. 35. See Remarks by President Bill Clinton at Veterans' Event, "NATO Enlargement," The White House, The East Room, Washington, DC, July 3, 1997, Federal News Service (Washington, DC: Federal News Service Group, Inc., 1998). 36. See "The Open Letter to the President," June 26,1997, . 37. See "Center for Political and Strategic Studies News Conference on NATO Enlargement," Speakers: Richard Davies, IISS Consulting Professor, Center for International Security and Arms Control, Stanford University; Stanley Rieser; Jack Matlock, Former Ambassador To The Soviet Union; Michael Mandelbaum, Professor, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, National Press Club, Washington, DC, June 26,1997, Federal News Service (Washington, DC: Federal News Service Group, Inc., 1997). 38. See "Letter to the President" by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and others, June 25,1997. 39. See Senator Jesse Helms, "Enlarging the Alliance: New Members, Not New Missions," Wall Street Journal, July 9,1997. 40. See Thomas L. Friedman, "Clinton's Folly," The New York Times, July 31,1997. 41. See the memo from John Isaacs from the Council for a Livable world dated July 14,1997, entided "Senate Vote Count on NATO Enlargement." 42. Memo circulated by the Committee to Expand NATO also warned that the Administration was in danger of losing key Republican supporters. See Jackson's memo entitled "The NATO Debate After Madrid," July 30,1997. 43. The letter was sent from Senator Lugar to Berger on July 28,1997 and included a 14-page memo entided "Strategy for Securing Senate Ratification of NATO Enlargement." 44. See Rosner's memo of July 25,1997 entitled "Update on NATO Enlargement Ratification." 45. See New Atlantic Initiative statement on NATO Enlargement, September 9, 1997. 46. See memo from Jeremy Rosner to Secretary Albright entitled "Strategy for Achieving Ratification" dated August 27,1997, and Rosner's outline for the meeting with Albright on August 28 entitled "MKA Meeting: Road Ahead on NATO+ Ratification." 47. See memo from Steve Biegun and Beth Wilson to Senator Helms entitled "Suggested Schedule of Hearings on NATO Enlargement, September 2,1997. 48. See the memo from Steve Biegun, Beth Wilson and Marc Thiessen to Senator Helms entitled "NATO Enlargement," September 8,1997. 49. See the letter from Senator Helms to Secretary Albright, September 17,1997. 50. See the fax sent from Steve Biegun to Jeremy Rosner dated, October 6, 1997 and contained in the S/NERO archives. 51. See Ronald D. Asmus and F. Stephen Larrabee: "What Will NATO Enlargement Cost?" Survival 38, no 3 (Autumn 1998): 5-26. See also Ivan Eland, "The Costs of Expanding the NATO Alliance," Congressional Budget Office Paper prepared for the House International Relations Committee, March 1996. 52. See "Report to the Congress on the Military Requirements and Costs of NATO Enlargement, February 1998, . 53. The Madrid Communique stated: "Admitting new members will entail resource implications. It will involve the Alliance providing the resources which enlargement will necessarily require.... We are confident that, in line with the security environment of today, Alliance costs associated with the integration of new members will be manageable and that the resources necessary to meet those costs will be provided." See Madrid Declaration on Euro-Atlantic Security and Cooperation as Issued by the Heads of State and Government, July 8, 1997, . 356 8. The Political Battle 8. The Political Battle 54. See memo from Ronald Asmus and Jeremy Rosner to the Secretary, entitled "Strategy (and one-liners) for SFRC Testimony," October 3,1997. 55. See Madeleine Albright, "Statement of Hon. Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State," The Debate on NATO Enlargement, Hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, October 7,1997,105 Cong, ist sess. (Government Printing Office, 1998), pp. 6-39. 56. As quoted in Pat Towell, "Albright Argues NATO Expansion Would Buttress Democracy," Congressional Quarterly, October 11,1997, p. 24. 57. See statement of Dr. Michael Mandelbaum, Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, October 9, 1997, 105 Cong., ist sess. (Government Printing Office, 1998) pp. 72-89. 58. See Henry A. Kissinger, "NATO-Russia Relationship-Part I," Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, October 30, 1997, 105 Cong., ist sess. (Government Printing Office, 1998) pp. 183-206. 59. When U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jim Collins briefed senior Russian officials informally in late February on the Senate resolution of ratification they were furious about the language. See "Mamedov Reacts Strongly Against Senate NATO Document," Moscow 004932, February 28,1998. 60. Hickenlooper had asked Acheson whether, under Article 3 of the Washington Treaty in which the parties pledged via mutual assistance to help develop the capacity to resist armed attack, the U.S. was "going to be expected to send substantial numbers of troops over there as a more or less permanent contribution to the development of these countries capacity to resist?" Acheson had replied that: 'The answer to that question is a clear and resolute 'No.'" To be fair to Acheson, this exchange took place at a time when the U.S. had no intention of forward deploying U.S. troops in Europe. It was not until a year later that NATO started to think of a unified command structure that could include U.S. defense forces. For Acheson's account see Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 285. 61. Cohen's argument was buttressed by an op-ed that appeared the morning of this hearing in which UK Defense Minister George Robertson stated that London would pay its fair share of additional enlargement costs. See George Robertson, "Redesigning NATO," The Washington Times, October 21,1997. 62. See William S. Cohen, "Statement of Hon. William S. Cohen, Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense," NATO Enlargement Costs, Hearings before the Senate Committee on Appropriations, October 21, 1997, 105 Cong., ist sess. (Government Printing Office, 1998) pp. i, 30, 35-41. 63. See "Public Views on NATO Enlargement," Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, November 5, 1997, 105 Cong., ist sess. (Government Printing Office, 1998) pp. 261-330, 537-552. 64. See letter from Senators Helms and Biden, dated November 10,1997. 65. See "EUR Assistant Secretary Grossman's Remarks at Bergen Nordic/Baltic Foreign Ministers Meeting," Oslo 04013, September 5,1997. See also the memo from Grossman to Secretary Albright, "Our New Northern Strategy," August 27, 1997. See also my public remarks on "The New Hanseatic League" delivered at a conference in Helsinki Finland on October 8,1997 sponsored by the U.S. Embassy and Nordicum. 66. See President Clinton's "Remarks at the Signing Ceremony for the Baltic Nations-United States Charter of Partnership," January 16, 1998, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 34, no. 4 (January 26,1998): 85-86. 67. See David C. Gompert and F. Stephen Larrabee, eds., America and Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 68. See Ronald D. Asmus, "Double enlargement: redefining the Atlantic partnership after the Cold War," in Gompert and Larrabee, ibid., pp. 19-50. See also Ronald D. Asmus, Robert Blackwill, and F. Stephen Larrabee, "Can NATO Survive?" The Washington Quarterly 19, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 79-101. 69. Craig view's are contained in a memo to Albright entitled "What Kind of NATO Do We Really Want?," January 8,1998. 70. See my memo to Grossman "Defining U.S. Interests: The Mega-Question" from September 8,1998. 71. See Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, "Statement at the North Atlantic Council," Ministerial Meeting, NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium, December 16,1997, . 72. See Grossman's memo to Secretary Albright entitled "Thinking About 1998," January 6,1998. 73. Grossman's briefing to Albright was entitled "NATO After the First Round of Enlargement: Next Steps?" 74. See Grossman's Note for the Secretary entitled "Thinking about 1999," January J5> *999- 75. See the memo from Samuel Berger and John Hilley to the President entitled "Strategy for Completing Ratification of NATO Enlargement" dated December 17,1997. 76. See "Clinton Letter Transmitting to the U.S. Senate Protocols to NATO Treaty," The White House, February 11, 1998, . Senator Biden would recall the discussion with the Vice President later that day in a statement on the Senate floor. See Congressional Record, February u, 1998, P.S076. 77. See AFL-CIO endorsement, "A Declaration of Support for NATO Enlargement," January 20,1998. 78. "The upcoming Senate vote," the statement read, "is fundamentally a test of whether the U.S. will remain engaged in the Europe of the 21st century. Since the end of World War II, our nation has extended an enormous effort to build a Europe of free and democratic states at peace with one another. For the first time there is a realistic possibility of achieving this goal. Now is not the time to rum our back on this great project." See Statement of 60 Retired Military Officers, February 3,1998. 79. See "Founding Declaration of the Coalition against NATO Expansion," Council for a Livable World Education Fund, Briefing Book on NATO Enlargement (Washington, D.C.: Council for a Livable World Education Fund, April 1998), pp. 69-72. 80. See the memo from Rosner and Asmus to Talbott entitled "NATO+ Resolution of Ratification" dated February 21,1997. 81. See Rosner's memo "Initial Comments and Issues on SFRC's NATO Enlargement Resolution of Ratification, Draft #2," February 23,1998. 358 8. The Political Battle 82. See Rosner's e-mail to Ron Asmus, Dan Fried, Jamie Rubin and others, entitled "New NATO+ pollings #s," February 23,1998. 83. See Howard Baker, Jr., Sam Nunn, Brent Scowcroft and Alton Frye, "NATO: A Debate Recast," The New York Times, February 4,1998. 84. Senator Warner first indicated publicly his support for a "pause" amendment in a statement he put in the Senate record on February 10,1998 in connection with the NATO expansion amendment. See Congressional Record, February 10,1998, p. S584. 85. In her speech before the New Adantic Initiative on February 9,1998, Albright had stated: "This Administration opposes any effort in the Senate to mandate a pause in the process of NATO enlargement." See Albright's "Remarks Before the New Atlantic Initiative Conference: NATO Expansion." 86. See Statement by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, "Testimony Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on NATO Enlargement," February 24,1998. 87. See our memo to Albright entitled 'Today's SFRC Hearing on NATO enlargement and the Road Ahead," March 3,1998. 88. See the memo from Rosner and Asmus to Albright entitled "Status of NATO Enlargement Debate," March 12,1998. 89. See "NATO Myopia," The New York Times, March 5,1998. 90. See Thomas L. Friedman, "Ohio State II," The New York Times, March 3, 1998. 91. See "The NATO Dispute," The Washington Post, March 11,1998. 92. The Chicago Tribune initially took a position opposing enlargement in an editorial on February 1,1998 entitled "A case of less is more with NATO." On March 13, it reversed itself. See "The Case for NATO Expansion," The Chicago Tribune, March 13, 1998. 93. See the letter from former Senators San Nunn and Howard H. Baker, Jr. addressed to Senators Thurmond and Levin. 94. See "Dear Mr. Leader" letter from President Clinton, The White House, March 14,1998. 95. See Jesse Helms, "The New NATO: NATO Expansion Has All the Safeguards it Needs," The Wall Street Journal, March 23,1998. 96. In early April Rosner noted that S/NERO knew of 23 potential amendments. See his memo entitled "Update on Timing of Amendments," April 6,1998. 97. Albright wrote Ashcroft on March 12 explaining her views and making it clear that Ashcroft had misrepresented her thinking. See Rosner's memo "Letter to Senator Ashcroft (and Contingency Letter to Senator Helms) on NATO Enlargement," March 9,1998. Ashcroft ignored the letter and instead continued to attack the Administration. Speaking on the Senate floor on March 19, Ashcroft stated: "I will be submitting an amendment for consideration by the Senate to make it clear that collective security will remain the heart of NATO, and that this is the only mission allowable under the treaty." See Congressional Record, March 19,1998, S2284. 98. See the memo from Asmus and Rosner to Secretary Albright entided "NATO Enlargement and the Ashcroft Amendment," April 23,1998. See also the paper entitled "Why the Ashcroft Amendment is Harmful to the U.S. and NATO," which was circulated to both Senate staff and influential members of the foreign policy establishment. Conclusion 359 99. The description of this meeting is taken from Rosner's notes from the meeting. 100. See the "Dear Colleague" letter signed by Roth, Lieberman and McCain dated April 24,1998. 101. As quoted in Reuters, April 23,1998. 102. In the mn-up to the final vote on April 30, Tom Friedman had dubbed enlargement "Gulf of Tonkin II" and likened enlargement to "a car with no brakes on a slippery slope to trouble." See Thomas L. Friedman, "Gulf of Tonkin II," The New York Times, March 31,1998. 103. See "NATO and the Lessons of History," The New York Times, April 29,1998. 104. See Madeleine K. Albright, "Stop Worrying About Russia," The New York Times, April 29,1998. 105. See, for example, David Gompert, "A Vote Against NATO," The Washington Times, April 29,1998. 106. See Senator Moynihan's statement in the Congressional Record, "Protocols to the North Adantic Treaty of 1949 on Accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic," Senate, April 27, 1998, p. S3610, . See also Senator Moynihan's speech entided "Could NATO Expansion Lead to Nuclear War?" delivered to the lfiftieth Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Associated Press in Dallas, Texas on April 20,1998. 107. For the final vote totals on the amendments see "US. Senate Roll Call Votes," 105th Congress—2nd Session (1998) in Thomas, . 108. See Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright "Statement on the Senate Ratification to NATO Enlargement," Washington, D.C., April 30, 1998, . conclusion 1. See President Truman's "Address on the Occasion of the Signing of the North Adantic Treaty, April 4, 1949," Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman 1949 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 196-98.