The question of enlarging NATO has occasioned the most important
foreign policy debate in the United States since the end of the Cold
War, and rightly so. The issue is integral to determining America's
future role in Europe, still a very important place in world politics.
But it has been a curious and unsatisfying debate in several ways:
Unsatisfying because it often seems as though there has been no
debate at all, only contrary assertions passing each other without
making useful contact; curious because of the various and
contradictory trajectories of shifting opinions. Several policy
analysts who started out favoring NATO enlargement have subsequently
become opponents of it, while the Clinton administration has moved in
the opposite direction, from skepticism and efforts at deflection to
avid embrace and the declaration, last summer, that debate over
essentials was closed.
Not only have the intellectual and policy processes been out of sync,
but the debate has also divided both rock-hearted realists and
passionate idealists in unusual ways. That Henry Kissinger and VÃ clav
Havel find themselves together on one side of the issue, Paul Nitze
and Richard Barnett together on the other, suggests that this is a
trickier problem than most. And it is tricky, not least because the
question at the center of the debate--to enlarge NATO or not?--turns
out to be the wrong question (but of this more below).
Realist Enlargers
