Clinton Makes Case for Expanded NATO

Just back from a trip that highlighted the enduring U.S. ties across the Atlantic, President Clinton on Saturday pressed forward with a campaign to persuade his own country that an expanded NATO “is in our national interests,” despite the risks and cost.

“The bottom line to me is clear,” the president said in a commencement speech at the United States Military Academy, outlining America’s long-term security strategy before a group of men and women whose own lives could be deeply affected by expanded U.S. commitments abroad.

“Expanding NATO will enhance our security. It is the right thing to do,” Clinton said. “. . . Europe’s fate and America’s future are joined.”

Even more broadly, Clinton cast enlargement of the 16-member alliance in the context of a security vision that would increase the nation’s reliance on international coalitions to tackle problems that disregard national boundaries, such as terrorism, drug trafficking, crime and pollution.

Clinton’s visit to West Point came just four days after he and other world leaders met in Paris to create a new NATO-Russia council designed to bolster cooperation between the onetime adversaries. Although Russia opposes NATO expansion, the North Atlantic alliance plans to accept at least three former Soviet satellites as members in July.

U.S. approval of an expanded NATO ultimately would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, where skeptics may attack it as potentially committing the military to costly and dangerous engagements in places where America’s interests are less obvious than in Western Europe.

In his 25-minute speech, the president acknowledged the importance of such concerns and invited a national debate on the issue.

“I firmly believe NATO enlargement is in our national interests,” he said. “But because it is not without cost and risk, it is appropriate to have an open, full, national discussion before proceeding.”

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Clinton relied on four key points to make his case for a costlier U.S. commitment to a larger, more far-reaching NATO:

* A bigger alliance would be stronger.

* It would help preserve the spread of democracy into Eastern Europe.

* It would encourage prospective members to settle age-old conflicts peacefully.

* It would “erase the artificial line” between East and West.

The goal, he said, is to build “a Europe that will avoid repeating the darkest moments of the 20th century and fulfill the brilliant possibilities of the 21st.”

Clinton, who avoided service in the Vietnam War and never has been warmly embraced by the military, seemed acutely aware that his arguments could have a profound effect on the audience inside West Point’s Michie Stadium.

“In the years ahead, it means that you could be asked to put your lives on the line for a new NATO member, just as today, you can be called upon to defend the freedom of our allies in Western Europe,” he told 896 graduating cadets on a warm, misty day.

” . . . As the sentinels of our security in the years ahead, your work will be much easier and safer if we do the right thing--and riskier and much more difficult if we do not,” he said.

While administration officials have not announced it, the United States is believed to support the admission of three new members--Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic--during the NATO parley set for July in Madrid.

Clinton stuck to more overarching themes as he sought to outline a security vision for the United States as the new century emerges.

“With all of our power and wealth, we are living in a world in which increasingly our influence depends upon recognizing that our future is interdependent with other nations, and we must work with them all across the globe,” Clinton said, because “the threats we face tomorrow will cross national boundaries.”