Unlike many libertarians, I love presidential election season, because that’s when generally ignored foreign policy issues are discussed beyond the small circle of Washington wonks. And that’s why I’m having such fun with Donald Trump – much to the annoyance of some of my readers, both libertarians and liberals alike: because he’s provoking a much-needed discussion about who benefits (and loses) from “American leadership” on the world stage. Most useful is his recent assertion that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is “obsolete.”
So it is. When the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union dissolved, the rationale for NATO disintegrated along with it. However, as libertarians know all too well, government programs (especially those that benefit the corporate sector) never die, nor do they fade away: they just keep growing to the degree that their constituency wields political clout. In NATO’s case, this clout is considerable.
When the citizens of Berlin did what Ronald Reagan urged Gorbachev to do – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” – the Soviet leader tried to negotiate with the West. And, to his mind, he succeeded: an understanding was reached with Washington that the Russians would allow German reunification on the condition that the NATO alliance would not expand eastward.
That promise was not kept. Instead, the lobbyists, both foreign and domestic, went into overdrive in a campaign to extend NATO to the very gates of Moscow. It was a lucrative business for the Washington set, as the Wall Street Journal documented: cushy fees for lobbyists, influence-buying by US corporations, as well as political tradeoffs for the administration of George W. Bush, which garnered support for the Iraq war from Eastern Europe’s former Warsaw Pact states in exchange for favorable treatment of their NATO applications.
The Committee to Expand NATO, later re-dubbed the US Committee on NATO, had at its core many of the founding members of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century (PNAC) which played such an instrumental role in agitating for the invasion of Iraq. Yet it was too lucrative to exclude “progressives” of the Clintonian variety, bringing together neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Stephen Hadley, and Richard Perle, with liberal internationalists such as Will Marshall, of the Progressive Policy Institute, and Sally Painter, a former Commerce Department official under Bill Clinton –turned-lobbyist, who raked in hundreds of thousands in contracts from aspiring NATO countries and their corporate clients in the US.
Founder and president of the NATO Committee were Bruce Jackson, at the time finance director of Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, and vice-president in charge of planning and strategy for Lockheed – today Lockheed-Martin – the biggest military contractor in the country.
The NATO expansion project fit neatly in with Jackson’s day job: all NATO applicants must upgrade their military forces in order to meet uniform standards, and this meant a windfall for the military-industrial complex – with Lockheed first in line. The Lockheed connection was reinforced by Randy Scheunemann, a member of the Committee’s board, and president of Orion Strategies, a public relations firm whose clients include Lockheed.
The Clinton administration fully supported NATO expansion, and the Committee’s activities brought together the White House, members of Congress from both parties, and the Washington lobbyists and their foreign clients for a spate of conferences, dinners, and private meetings. Reams of propaganda were aimed at the mass media, and the political class, including a very visible presence at the national conventions of both political parties.
In short, NATO expansion was – and is – a crony capitalist’s dream, albeit not the sort that gets the same amount of attention from “libertarian” critics of such boondoggles as the Ex-Im Bank, who regularly remind us that Boeing is the Bank’s biggest customer. Forgotten (or evaded) is the fact that Boeing (or Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, etc.) gets billions whenever a new applicant is added to NATO’s ranks and has to modernizes its forces.
The NATO expansionists won their battle: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined in 1999: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia were added in 2004. Albania and Croatia came on board in 2006. The latest applicants are tiny Montenegro, a splinter shaved off of the former Yugoslavia, which will probably be admitted this summer, and Georgia, which is not even in Europe, and is still fighting to join the club: its inclusion is controversial in part because it would be seen as throwing down the gauntlet to Russia, with whom it fought a brief war in 2008 over the breakaway Republic of Ossetia.
