Opening NATO's Door

How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era

Ronald D. Asmus

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9780231502399
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

How and why did NATO, a Cold War military alliance created in 1949 to counter Stalin's USSR, become the cornerstone of new security order for post-Cold War Europe? Why, instead of retreating from Europe after communism's collapse, did the U.S. launch the greatest expansion of the American commitment to the old continent in decades? Written by a high-level insider, Opening NATO's Door provides a definitive account of the ideas, politics, and diplomacy that went into the historic decision to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the still-classified archives of the U.S. Department of State, Ronald D. Asmus recounts how and why American policy makers, against formidable odds at home and abroad, expanded NATO as part of a broader strategy to overcome Europe's Cold War divide and to modernize the Alliance for a new era.

Asmus was one of the earliest advocates and intellectual architects of NATO enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s and subsequently served as a top aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott, responsible for European security issues. He was involved in the key negotiations that led to NATO's decision to extend invitations to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and finally, the U.S. Senate's ratification of enlargement.

Asmus documents how the Clinton Administration sought to develop a rationale for a new NATO that would bind the U.S. and Europe together as closely in the post-Cold War era as they had been during the fight against communism. For the Clinton Administration, NATO enlargement became the centerpiece of a broader agenda to modernize the U.S.-European strategic partnership for the future. That strategy reflected an American commitment to the spread of democracy and Western values, the importance attached to modernizing Washington's key alliances for an increasingly globalized world, and the fact that the Clinton Administration looked to Europe as America's natural partner in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century.

As the Alliance weighs its the future following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and prepares for a second round of enlargement, this book is required reading about the first post-Cold War effort to modernize NATO for a new era.

NOTES

BOOK I. THE ORIGINS

1. See A. W. DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers: the Enduring Balance (New Haven: Yale University, 1979), p. vii.

2. See John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

3. On German unification see Philip Zelikow and Condoleeza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

4. Philip Zelikow, “NATO Expansion Wasn’t Ruled Out,” International Herald Tribune, August 10, 1995.

5. See “Memcon from 2/9/90 meeting w/USSR Pres. Gorbachev & FM Shevardnadze, Moscow, USSR.” This exchange is also described in Zelikow and Rice, pp. 182–83.

6. See Valentin Falin, Politische Erinnerungen (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1993); and Julij A. Kwizinskij, Vor dem Sturm (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1993).

7. The argument that Baker and Gorbachev were talking in their capacity as representatives of the Quadripartite powers with residual responsibility for Germany resulting from World War II was underscored by Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, John Kornblum. See the memorandum from Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs John Kornblum and acting S/NIS Director John Herbst entitled “NATO Enlargement: Russian Assertions Regarding the Two-plus-Four Agreement on German Unification. The memo was sent to our U.S. Embassies in Europe as the official U.S. position in February 1996.

8. Krzysztof Skubiszewski, “Polska I Sojusz Atlantycki w latach 1989–1991,” Sprawy Miedzynarodowe, no. 1 (1999), p. 18.

9. See Adam Michnik’s 1976 essay entitled “The New Evolutionism” reprinted in Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 135–148.

10. See Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984.

11. See “Letter from Gdansk Prison” in Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, pp. 96–97.

12. See Gyorgy Konrad, Antipolitics: An Essay (New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, Publishers, 1984), pp. 1–10.

13. See Vaclav Havel’s essay on Central and East European attitudes toward the peace movement in his essay “The Anatomy of a Reticence” in Vaclav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 291–322.

14. The Prague Appeal was issued on March 11, 1985 as a message to the International Conference on Nuclear Disarmament scheduled to take place in Amsterdam that summer. It was signed by the then Charter 77 spokespersons Jiri Dienstbier, Eva Kanturkova, and Petuska Sustrova. It is reprinted in the East European Reporter (London) 1, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 27–28.

15. For an eyewitness account of the 1989 revolution, see Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

16. For further details on the Polish-Soviet troop negotiations and how these shaped overall Polish thinking at the time on broader security issue, see Grzegorz Kostrewa-Zorbas, “The Russian Troop Withdrawal from Poland” in Allan Goodman, ed., The Diplomatic Record 1992–1993 (Bolder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 113–138.

17. For press coverage of the Budapest conference, see Blaine Harden, “Warsaw Pact Disbands Military Union,” The Washington Post, February 26, 1991. See also Celestine Bohlen, “Warsaw Pact Agrees to Dissolve its Military Alliance by March 31,” The New York Times, February 26, 1991.

18. With the exception of Romania, the former members of the Warsaw Pact refused to agree to this language bringing negotiations to a deadlock that was not broken until after the failed Soviet coup attempt in the fall of 1991. For further details see F. Stephen Larrabee, East European Security After the Cold War (Santa Monica, CA.: RAND, 1993), pp. 154–156.

19. See “Warsaw Pact Now Part of History,” The Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1991.

20. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was renamed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) at the Budapest Summit, December 5–6, 1994. The official title took effect January 1, 1995. The European Community (EC) member states and their territories agreed on November 1, 1993 to be subsequently be known as the European Union (EU). For the purposes of this book, the OSCE and EU will be used throughout.

21. See “Memorandum on the European Security Commission” by the government of Czechoslovakia, Prague, April 6, 1990.

22. According to Havel. “It seems that NATO, as a more meaningful, more democratic and more effective structure, could become the seed of a new European security system with less trouble than the Warsaw Pact. But NATO, too, must change. Above all, it should—in the face of today’s reality transform its military doctrine. And it should soon—in view of its changing role—change its name as well. The present name is so linked to the era of the Cold War that it would be a sign of a lack of understanding present-day developments if Europe were to unite under the NATO flag.” For the Vaclav Havel speech at The Council of Europe, Strasbourg, May 10, 1990, see “Responsibility, Safety, Stability: Vaclav Havel Concerning NATO,” Selected Speeches, Articles and Interviews 1990–1999, pp. 6–14. Authors signed private copy.

23. See Jiri Dienstbier, “Central Europe’s Security,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1991, p. 121.

24. For a firsthand account of U.S. policy toward Europe during the period 1989–1992 see Robert L. Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider’s Account of U.S. Policy in Europe, 1989–1992 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

25. See “Charter of Paris for a New Europe,” Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1990 Summit, Paris, November 19–21, <http://www.osce.org/docs/english/1990–1999/summits/paris90e.htm>. The Paris summit agreed to create a standing Council with accredited Ambassadors, which would meet once a year in Ministerial session; a Committee of Senior Officials that could be convened in the interim; and a secretariat. It also created special offices to monitor elections as well as a new conflict prevention center.

26. For further details see James B. Steinberg, An Ever Closer Union (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1993).

27. See “Dans un entretien à Radio-France internationale Les pays d’Europe centrale n’adhéreront pas à la CEE avant ‘des dizaines d’années déclare M. Mitterrand,’” [Mitterrand declares in a Radio-France international interview that the countries of Central Europe will not become...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Sources
• Introduction
• Book I. The Origins
• Book II. The Debate Begins
• Book III. Across the Rubicon
• Book IV. Establishing the Dual Track
• Book V. Toward a New NATO
• Illustrations
• Book VI. The NATO-Russia Endgame
• Book VII. Head-to-Head at Madrid
• Book VIII. The Political Battle
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index