Silence in the Congress

The United States insists that the expansion of NATO that will be voted on next month by the 16 alliance members has to be limited to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, meaning that Romania and Slovenia, candidates also favored by many of its European allies, will have to wait for another day. But even with enlargement held to three countries, the bill for a bigger NATO promises to be high, with the U.S. share likely to far surpass the Clinton administration’s projection.

Bringing new states into the alliance requires re-equipping and retraining their armed forces so they can integrate with the rest of NATO. That process could stretch out over a dozen years if no major threats arise in Europe. In more dangerous circumstances it could be accelerated. The Congressional Budget Office puts the total expansion cost to the NATO countries at $60 billion in the first instance and $125 billion in the second, a far cry from the administration’s estimate of between $27 billion and $35 billion.

Under the CBO’s low-threat scenario, Washington could expect to pay $4.8 billion. In a more perilous world the cost could swell to $19 billion. In either case, annual U.S. costs would be much more than the $150 million to $200 million the administration calculates. At the same time there’s no certainty other alliance members will meet U.S. cost-sharing expectations. With economies that are less robust than ours and with resistance to cuts in social welfare programs growing, the Europeans might plead an inability to contribute as much to expansion costs as the administration hopes.

Congress has taken a remarkably detached stance as NATO’s expansion has moved forward. It seems to accept as a given that a bigger NATO is a good thing, with barely any consideration given to what it will cost or to the extended security commitments that must be undertaken. Here is another case of a policy being announced and allowed to gain momentum with hardly a voice being raised in Congress to ask whether it’s good for American interests. The current Congress is sometimes seen as being isolationist in foreign policy. It might be more accurate to describe it as being astonishingly passive, at least on one of the major foreign policy matters of our time.