| 摘要 | Delivered at the Congress of Phoenix.
Those of us who live in Europe are often told that the economic success of the Sunbelt states is bringing about a fundamental change in America’s political outlook and priorities. We are advised that in the future we must take account of an America that is shifting its gaze from the Atlantic to the Pacific—an America in which new elites are emerging to challenge the assumptions of those from the Eastern seaboard who shaped the Atlanticist outlook of the post–Second World War generation.
As a consequence of these changing demographic and economic realities, the United States will grow weary of its Atlantic partner, giving higher priorities to the more enticing relationships that it is forging in Asia and the Pacific Rim, or so the argument runs. European states must therefore revise their security and trade arrangements. If this then has the effect of encouraging the very trends that Europe is said to fear, this is merely the price of responding to changing realities, so it is said.
But let me make it clear: I believe these arguments to be deeply and dangerously flawed, the product of imprudent extrapolation, weak reasoning, and predetermined conclusions. Moreover, I regard the fact that this congress is being held in Phoenix, with magnificent local support, as tangible evidence that my reservations are well grounded. For it provides a clear indication not only of America’s enduring commitment to the Atlantic Alliance but also of the contribution that the processes of American economic change can make in underpinning that commitment.
America’s Demographic Shift
Indeed, it seems to me that the significance of America’s changing demographic profile has been misunderstood. The remarkable shift in resources to Arizona and the other states of the American Southwest is an indication of America’s capacity to renew itself, not a demonstration that it is undergoing a profound change of identity. The character of a nation does not change because some of its most enterprising citizens occasionally change their address: pity the nation in which such mobility does not occur. America’s commitment to the European democracies, old and new, is a reflection of its character and its values.
The purpose of this congress is to entrench, extend, and renew our Western inheritance of liberty. More specifically, it is charged with finding ways to deepen the institutions of the Western Alliance. “Congress of Phoenix” may have an unexpected ring to it because we tend to assume that congresses are events that take place only in the venerable seats of governments.
But where better to pursue our tasks than in a city that symbolizes America’s freedom of enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit that freedom nurtures? Where better to find an atmosphere conducive to the achievement of our task than in a state that has reaped the rewards of high-risk, high-tech endeavors while remaining faithful to America’s best traditions of international engagement?
I may be impressed by the fact that Arizona’s increasing economic and political significance is serving to strengthen its ties with its traditional allies in Europe, rather than the reverse, but I am scarcely surprised by it. After all, I worked quite well with the favorite son of another Sunbelt state during the climactic final years of the cold war. The Californian ascendancy of the 1980s may have presaged a change in White House dress code, but not a cooling in the Atlantic relationship; far from it. The immensity of Europe’s debt to Ronald Reagan in accelerating the decline of Soviet communism and in healing a divided continent has not been acknowledged. Europeans can best repair this omission by playing a more constructive role in helping to redefine the alliance whose preservation was one of his greatest achievements. This means resisting the allure of certain courses of political action that are incompatible with that aim, a subject to which I shall return.
Atlantic Community Values
Happily, the robust and cogent address of Senator Jon L. Kyl to the Congress of Prague in 1996 dispelled any fear I may have had that on this side of the Atlantic a new generation of Republican leaders would dissipate Ronald Reagan’s legacy: Kyl’s analysis of the problems faced by the alliance and his proposals for overcoming them were compelling.
Those who believe that the alliance has had its day are apt to lay stress on economic factors. But the Atlantic community is not primarily about economics; it is a matter of common values and of shared historical experience. It is the failure to understand this that encourages the doubters to suppose that in the absence of a single common enemy the alliance has outlived its usefulness. But, even in the matter of economics, the doubters have got it wrong. Economic ties between the United States and European states remain of fundamental importance to all parties, and they are expanding. This is true even of those American states that are alleged to be obsessed with the importance of Asia and the Pacific Rim. In 1993 (the last year for which I have been able to find figures), investment in Arizona by European states amounted to 41 percent of total investments, compared with 40 percent by all of Asia.
I do not point to these facts in order to doubt the huge importance of Asian economic success. Indeed, a very great deal depends upon our ability to accommodate the Asian states within a liberal trading regime. I point to these facts to show that there are dangers that can result from rash assessments of its significance.
My main aim today is to offer some thoughts about how Atlantic institutions can be strengthened to meet new security needs before the NATO summit of July 1997. Certainly, the security environment has undergone some profound changes. Unless the reform of those institutions with responsibility for security is based on a clear understanding of their significance, this will heighten instability, rather than the reverse.
As we have moved from a relatively stable, bipolar world to a multipolar one, new sources of instability and conflict have emerged. This was inevitable, since—quite suddenly—a major constraint on the spread of conflict was suddenly removed—the fear that a minor conflict might lead to a nuclear conflagration.
Post–Cold War Dangers
In short, the world remains a dangerous and unpredictable place, menaced by more unstable and complex threats than it was a decade ago. One measure of this instability can be found in the fact that more Europeans have been killed in war during the past five years than in the preceding fifty. Another measure can be found in the alarming proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, a subject on which I shall say more. But because the risk of nuclear annihilation has gone, we in the West have lapsed into a dangerous complacency and relaxed our guard. In almost every Western country, defense spending has fallen and is set to fall still further; during the British general election, campaign defense scarcely rated a mention. Yet defense, as Adam Smith famously wrote, is more important than opulence.
To comfort ourselves that we are doing the right thing, we have increasingly placed our trust in international cooperation to safeguard our future. But international bodies have not generally performed well. Indeed, we have learned what perhaps should have been self-evident: that they cannot perform well unless we refrain from utopian aims, give them practical tasks, and provide them with the means and backing to carry them out.
During the years following the Second World War, NATO amply fulfilled its purpose. The consequence was victory in the cold war. No alliance in history has created a comparable organization or imbued it with a sense of permanence. It is the body through which the Western Alliance finds its best expression, one that has indisputably conferred more benefits upon the citizens of its members than any other international organization. But since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, some Western statesmen have been undecided about NATO’s purpose, its membership, its methods, and its priorities.
How confident can we be that these uncertainties will be dispelled at the Madrid summit, which, according to its secretary general, Senor Javier Solana, “will mark the moment when the processes of transformation and change converge and the new Alliance emerges”? I find the title for that occasion—”Summit for Euro-Atlantic Security and Cooperation”—less than promising. It partly reflects the current attempt to transfer responsibility from European nation-states to a unitary European state and the associated bid to create a separate European defense identity—separate, that is, from the country that brings the greatest military assets to the alliance, but that curiously is absent from the title.
The ambition to create such an identity is driven entirely by politics, and it rests on two illusions. The first is that the European nations will be prepared to cede responsibility to a federal European state in times of acute crises; they will not. The second illusion is that a strong second pillar to the alliance would ensure greater cohesion and military effectiveness. Quite the opposite is the case: were such an entity to be created, it would inevitably produce antagonism and competition. As I argued in Prague in 1996, for America such a step would transform an ally into a rival—or, at the very least, would permanently threaten to do so. We must not allow NATO to be used as a building block in the creation of a federal Europe. The simple question to be asked of all and any reform is, Will it strengthen our common defenses? If that question becomes the test of relevance, then NATO will maintain the clarity of purpose on which success has been built.
These words are intended as a warning, not as a criticism of the changes that are likely to be determined at Madrid. One such change is both profoundly welcome and overdue: NATO enlargement. The Madrid meeting is expected to start accession negotiations with the aim of admitting the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary in 1999. The case for including these three states is overwhelming—they should have been included long before now. Continued tardiness would not only be shortsighted, but morally offensive. It would leave a security vacuum in a part of the world that, it has been noted, has a tendency to produce more history than can be consumed locally.
The accession to NATO of these three states will answer two fundamental needs; it will provide an institutional framework to underpin stability, and it will provide NATO with a common, cohesive purpose, without which it may atrophy.
The Russian Response
I know those who will be meeting in Madrid recognize the force of such arguments. I hope that they will also recognize the dangers of seeking to assuage alleged Russian fears about the purposes of enlargement by seeking in some way to qualify or limit the status of the new members—for example, through a commitment not to base foreign troops on their territory. That step would effectively create a two-tier membership. If NATO credibility is not to be seriously eroded, however, there must be only one category of membership: one conferring equal rights and benefits. Above all, an attack on one must continue to be regarded clearly and unambiguously as an attack upon all.
Diplomats, I know, are not given to taking clear, effective decisions. That’s what strong-minded politicians are for. Our strategic intentions with respect to the new members must be as clearly signaled as those with respect to the existing membership. A partial or equivocal security guarantee can sometimes look like a green light to a potential aggressor, and with catastrophic consequences. All of this must be borne in mind when the public case for enlargement is made prior to its ratification by the parliaments of NATO member states. Those in Peoria—or Phoenix or London, for that matter—must understand the binding nature of the guarantees being extended to the new members and the risks and obligations that flow from them. Such understanding cannot wait upon the outbreak of conflict.
Of course, we should seek to engage the Russians in a candid, constructive dialogue about all matters of mutual interest, but there is no plausible reason for bowing to the pressures they have recently been exerting. We should select our words carefully when describing the changes we propose—for fear that extreme Russian nationalists misinterpret them for their own cynical ends. But the Russian people have been provided with irrefutable evidence of NATO’s purely defensive character for more than fifty years, and during a period when their leaders threatened to bury us. And to an even greater extent than ourselves, Russia has a powerful interest in the stability of Central Europe—to which NATO enlargement will make a powerful contribution.
My conclusion is that no institutional arrangement linking NATO with its former adversary should be entertained if it obscures its purpose or diminishes its central task. There are many other vital matters to be discussed at Madrid—not least the question and the modalities of operating out of area, and the extremely important matter of reaching an understanding on security issues with Ukraine.
But I have two concerns that do not figure on the Madrid agenda: one general, the other specific, urgent, and compelling. The first and general concern relates to the tendency to stress what is sometimes described as NATO’s “political dimension.” In a flurry of articles and seminar papers, learned experts refer to the need to “de-emphasize” NATO’s defensive aspects and to widen its concerns. I disagree. NATO has always been political, in the sense that the mutual security commitments at its core have reflected political agreement. But the vague terminology to which I take exception points to the risk that NATO’s defense capability will be diluted or diminished, and its essential character undermined. The danger is that it will become either another talking shop and photo opportunity—despite impressive competition from other international organizations to fill those roles—or, worse still, a subcontractor to the United Nations. Any attempt to make NATO “politically correct” would not merely be absurd; it would destroy that clarity of mission on which its past success has crucially depended.
The use of language by some of those who write about NATO is particularly revealing. I note that the term defense is used less and less; having given way to security, a somewhat vaguer term that nevertheless has its uses. But according to an article in a recent issue of NATO Review, what is meant by security will have to be stretched still further. What is required, according to the author, is a “multidimensional strategy encompassing such issues as the impact of socioeconomic change; the phenomenon of the global financial system; and transboundary environmental issues.”
Having failed to demolish Western defenses by other means, it seems that our enemies are trying to achieve their objective by obscuring the issues, and by boring us into submission. My more pressing concern arises from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic missiles to deliver them—and the seeming determination of Western governments to preserve our vulnerability to future missile attack.
According to the Defense Studies Centre at Lancaster University in Great Britain, thirty-five non-NATO countries have ballistic missiles. As it rightly points out, the greatest potential menace is the five “rogue states,” some of which have helped one another’s missile programs: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea.
According to U.S. sources, all of Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, much of the Pacific, and most of Russia could be threatened by the latest North Korean missiles. Once they are available in the Middle East, all the capitals of Europe will be in target range. According to present trends, a direct threat to American shores is likely to mature early in the next century.
When I warned of these dangers in March 1996, some commentators suggested that I may have exaggerated: the Korean missile program would surely slow as a result of that country’s crippling economic difficulties. But on April 14 came the striking evidence to the contrary: the Japanese foreign minister referred to reports that North Korea had now deployed the Rodong 1 missile, which has a range of 625 miles and is therefore capable of striking any target in Japan. This is an ominous development that threatens regional stability and puts at risk U.S. forces in South Korea as well as those based in Japan. Meanwhile, North Korea continues to develop more advanced, longer-range missiles, with a range of 2,500–4,000 miles, capable of striking the West Coast of America. Since I warned of the risk that tens of thousands of people might be killed by an attack that wise preparation might have prevented, three factors have further convinced me that my concerns were not misplaced:
We have growing evidence of cooperation between the proliferating states: the Rodong missile that North Korea may now have deployed is believed to be financed by Libya and Iran.
There are reports that Iran has tested components of a missile capable of striking Israel.
Western attempts to prevent the sale of advanced Russian military technologies and of nuclear reactors to Iran have quite evidently failed; Russia’s Arms Catalog, produced by the Russian Defense Ministry, is still required reading in Tehran, as it is in many other third world capitals, and the mail order business in high-tech weaponry flourishes.
In these circumstances, an effective global defense against missile attack must be regarded as a matter of the greatest urgency, not something to be researched at leisure in case the international situation becomes ugly. It is not only the dreadful consequences that would flow from the use of missiles armed with nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads, but the implications of their threatened use, that should disturb us. For the threat undermines the ability of the West to project power in defense of its allies and its interests. Would President George Bush have been able to construct the international coalition that removed Iraqi forces from Kuwait if those who joined up had immediately been at risk from Saddam Hussein’s missiles? At the very least, the possession of ballistic missiles by an aggressor introduces new factors into the calculations faced by the political leadership when deciding how to respond.
European-American Synergy
The problem is at least as serious for those European states such as Britain and France that have the ability to project power as well as a long tradition of doing so. For obvious geographical reasons, the problem is likely to mature more quickly than for America. How can Europe’s lack of interest in so obvious a threat be explained?
Is it because the emerging dangers of which I have spoken serve as an unwelcome reminder of just how dependent Europe still is upon America for its security—at a time when European federalists are trying to create a purely European defense? It would be the height of irresponsibility to allow such factors to take priority over the first and most important task of all governments—to protect the lives and property of their citizens.
How can we explain America’s slow progress in exploiting its technological strengths through the deployment of a global system of ballistic missile defense? Is this in part attributable to outdated regard for the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty, a relic of the cold war, which effectively makes U.S. vulnerability to a missile attack a legal obligation? Is the lack of enthusiasm shown by its allies a contributory factor? One of the signatories to the treaty no longer exists; and the world has changed in several other respects. But President Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the treaty at the recent Helsinki summit.
The purpose of the treaty was to prevent the buildup of Soviet strategic offensive systems. It failed dismally in this respect, as Henry Kissinger, one of its principal architects, later acknowledged. But one can understand America’s original reasons for wanting it. If, however, one of the principal features of the post–cold war period is missile proliferation—and no one actually denies this—why preserve a treaty that perpetuates the vulnerability of both parties to third-party attacks? Those in favor of keeping the treaty are apt to describe it as “the cornerstone of our stability.” I think of it in the opposite light: as a major contributor to growing instabilities.
To conclude: a wider role for NATO and expansion to the east provides the best means for renewing—and deepening—Atlantic institutions and of giving new significance to a continued U.S. presence in Europe. Attempts to “politicize” NATO or to load it with responsibilities that would dilute its mutual defense capabilities or obscure its basic purpose must be resisted. Nor should we permit such factors to discourage us from asking inconvenient questions about the source of present dangers and the means by which these should be countered. This will require a collective response under American leadership to the urgent problem of missile proliferation, with NATO providing the practical means by which others may make a contribution. This in turn will necessitate some institutional adjustments, and in the European case, some revision of ambitions that, unless qualified, can only endanger the lives of European citizens. Above all, what is required is Western unity.
My optimism about the ultimate achievement of this goal rests upon faith in the values and resources of the civilization that we meet to defend.
Margaret Thatcher is the former British prime minister. |
