Book Review: How NATO was enlarged

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- The book at a glance: Opening NATO's Door by Ronald Asmus. Columbia University Press, $30.00, 372 pages.

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The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and it took another 10 years before the first three countries from the old Soviet Empire -- Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic -- joined NATO. About halfway through that long, slow decade, in January, 1994, former President Bill Clinton declared that enlarging NATO was "not a question of if, but of when."

This extraordinary and insightful book gives the ultimate insider's view of that process, what took NATO so long, and the long bureaucratic battles with allies and within the American bureaucracy.

Ron Asmus, a smart young academic and analyst with the RAND Corp., was hired by the Clinton team to ride shotgun on the process as a deputy assistant secretary of state.

To write this book, he was given rare permission to use and reprint State Department documents -- and to use the documents from other sources, like the National Security Council and other official bodies that sent copies to the State Department.

As a result, this is about as well-sourced and well-documented as any work of scholarly contemporary history can be. This is a view from the inside of the way the American foreign policy machine works -- and it works pretty well. It may be slow, but there were serious questions to be asked about NATO enlargement, and not just the prospect of ruining relations with Russia, where NATO remains a dirty word.

Moreover, the NATO alliance is not a club. NATO members pledge under Article V to come to one another's aid if attacked, and for U.S. legislators and policy-makers, that means giving little-known countries like Hungary an American nuclear guarantee. Small wonder that the process took some time.

Moreover, NATO's very seriousness meant that the prospective new members had to shape up. Their obligations were clear -- and not to be achieved overnight.

They had to reform their Soviet-style military hierarchies, ensure full civilian control over the soldiers, and establish a clearly irreversible process to free market democracy and full human rights. They also had to resolve any outstanding border problems.

To their credit, they met the goals -- even though there was some gulping when their entry into NATO, which they had seen as a security guarantee against war -- immediately required them to show solidarity with NATO's first war, the attack on Serbia over Kosovo.

If this book has any heroes, they are Czech President Vaclav Havel, whose moral authority and persistence never let the issue drop, and Czech-born Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State in Clinton's second term, who drove it through the allies, the bureaucracy and the Senate.

Clinton himself is given considerable credit, for his skill at convincing Russia's Boris Yeltsin that NATO enlargement could be good for Russia -- a proposition that Yeltsin swallowed only because of his personal trust in Clinton.

As a reporter who followed the issue closely and covered it throughout the 1990s in Washington and Europe, Asmus's account comes as a revelation to this reviewer.

Most of us outside the bureaucracy tend to assume hat when a U.S. president, secretary of state and defense secretary all agree on something, it will happen. Not so. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, and that all-purpose diplomatic task force, Richard Holbrooke, were both required to help push NATO enlargement through.

Asmus recounts two remarkable meetings that reveal the inimitable Holbrooke style. At the first, he summoned the senior State Department staff who had questioned enlargement in the past and informed them that NATO enlargement was now policy and they either got on board or looked for another job.

Then, he convened a very high-level inter-agency meeting and did the same thing, going around the table to ask the assistant defense secretaries and other Potomac heavyweights if they understood the president's will.

When Gen. Wesley Clark, who was about to become NATO's Supreme Commander, questioned Holbrooke's mandate, Holbrooke replied brutally that if Clark disagreed with his commander-in-chief, that would be insubordination.

"The participants sat in stunned silence. This was clearly not your average interagency meeting," writes Asmus.

Asmus is equally good on the tough confrontations with the established NATO allies, and France's unhelpful role in pushing the cause of Romania (then palpably unready for NATO membership), largely because Paris through that the Romanians were Latins who would be susceptible to French influence.

The French suspected that most Eastern European countries would be instinctively pro-American voices in NATO, with little time for grandiose French hopes of a separate Europe-based security system, led from Paris. The fear was that if the French got their way, that could have been NATO's first and last enlargement -- leaving out the thoroughly deserving causes of the Baltic States.

Asmus tells a complex tale well, and he and his old boss Strobe Talbott with his own memoir "The Russian Hand," have set the bar for Clinton administration memoirs very, very high.

It remains to be seen whether Clinton is equally frank and equally useful -- at least on matter of policy -- in his own $10 million memoirs. At least in Asmus he will find an indispensable source to one of the unquestioned triumphs of his presidency.