IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANS-ATLANTIC RELATIONS
142. The implications of enlargement for the future
of NATO's transatlantic relations are difficult to determine at
this stage. The three new members, particularly Poland, will add
some military assets to the collective pool from which the European
members of NATO can draw, and are all looking for opportunities
to emphasise their commitment to the Alliance and to appropriate
participation in NATO's contemporary peace support operations.
In adding three Central European members to the Alliance, the
Europeans have that much more weight within the 19, and the new
members will be anxious to demonstrate their transatlantic credentials
and will be pleased to constitute some of the new fabric that
will help hold Europe and the US together in the future.
143. On the other hand, there are a number of ways
in which the enlargement of NATO could make transatlantic relations
more problematical, and create difficulties particularly for Europe's
policy planners. The NATO consensus will be more difficult to
achieve at 19, especially where issues may verge on the direct
interests of the new members who have common borders with Ukraine,
Belarus, Serbia and some of the unsuccessful NATO candidate countries.
As members of the Committee learned on their recent visit, the
best of intentions at this stage in Budapest do not disguise the
fact that the problem of the 3.5 million Hungarian nationals living
outside the country remains a prickly one for the Hungarian government
and for its bilateral partners such as the UK.
144. A NATO of 19 will embody a more diffuse set
of European interests and perspectives which, on some issues,
may become a good deal more delicate. It might become more difficult
to establish and maintain a firm strategic purpose for the Alliance,
which involves setting its internal defence and management requirements
in the context of a conscious external security strategy, of which
further enlargement is now a part. The danger could be a NATO
that was so intent on internal political compromise that it lost
effective touch with a firm strategic purpose in relation to the
rest of Europe.[267]
All this could be more likely in the event that widespread crises
in Russia, Belarus or Ukraine put immediate pressure on the security
interests of the new members and exposed them to the ripple effects
of any upheavals. The credibility of the Alliance, and its cohesion,
will depend on its alertness to the needs of new members, as well
as its ability to act with despatch and decisiveness to the challenges
they face. In the immediate afterglow of the enlargement ceremonies,
a honeymoon period with the new members may be anticipated. They
can all prove themselves to be valuable allies in addressing the
crisis in Former Yugoslavia, where their principal interests are
not directly threatened. But in more extreme circumstances, the
new members are likely to regard the backing of the US as their
only viable reassurance, and be sceptical about any subtle adjustments
of a delicate Euro-American transatlanticism. They have been anxious
to join NATO for a mixture of reasons, one of the most prominent
of which has been to get as close as possible to the US in their
own security environment. In a situation of real pressure they
would not be likely to be sympathetic to the gradual, courtly
dance of transatlantic diplomacy that has become so familiar to
the core European members of the Alliance over the last 50 years.
145. The United Kingdom has a potentially important
role to play in preventing dislocations of this sort in the future
and helping to build on the positive aspects that a NATO of 19
will offer. It can do this through the influence it derives among
the new members from its military prowess—especially in
peace support missions where it has established the standard that
other European-NATO members seek to emulate; through its ability
to offer training and military education to the new members through
the medium of English—which has become the essential pre-requisite
for them to operate within NATO command structures; and through
its natural transatlanticism—which has provided it with
some acumen in anticipating how the US and other NATO members
may react to events as they emerge.
267 Hans Binnendijk and Richard Kugler, 'NATO After
the First Tranche' Strategic Forum, 149, Oct. 1998, p 2 Back
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