ABSTRACT
On 4 April 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson signed the North Atlantic Treaty, the first peacetime military alliance concluded by the United States since the adoption of the US Constitution.l After two world wars, a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, and post-war Soviet expansion into eastern Europe, the United States determined that its own best national interests lay in providing western Europe with economic assistance via the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, cemented by a bona fide military security guarantee. A strong American economic and military presence in Europe would prove necessary for European economic recovery and the 'long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies'.2 Western Europeans, too, saw American economic aid serving their best national interests as they struggled to rebuild their war-torn economies. Moreover, as they looked warily over their shoulder at the installation of communist governments in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin, and the first Soviet atomic test, western Europeans understood that a military alliance with America would be key to preventing another war. 3
On 4 April 1999, NATO marked its 50th anniversary under far different circumstances by admitting the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to its ranks.4 With the Warsaw Pact defunct and the Soviet Union dissolved, NATO accepted new member states even though the principal threat against which it originally organized no longer exists. Why? Because, under these new circumstances, national interests once again drove policy - this time US, western European and eastern European in origin. Just as these interests converged to enable the first wave of postCold War NATO enlargement,5 so, too, will such a coalition of national wills be needed for any second-wave member states to join. As the fledgling Russian federation watches its former allies board the NATO train, Russians struggle to determine their own proper national interests, not yet shedding their Cold War distrust of the West on security matters. Most Russian attitudes regarding NATO remain visceral and negative, suggesting that since Russia is the successor to the Soviet Union, then NATO must still somehow be aligned against Russian interests.6 This Russian fear of a runaway NATO train, this anti-NATO psychological baggage will have to be handled most carefully, proved wrong, and overcome if NATO enlargement is ultimately to achieve its objectives.7
