JULES EVANS, LONDON
UKRAINE SHOULD NOT JOIN NATO
I was at the first US-Ukrainian conference in Boston last week. The first speaker, a former US National Security Council wonk named John Tedstrom, was particularly excited about Ukraine’s move to join NATO, which at the moment looks more realizable than its other ambition to join the EU. NATO accession, said Tedstrom, would help anchor Ukraine in a trans-Atlantic-focused foreign policy.
But is NATO accession in Ukraine’s national interests? It is certainly in the interests of the Washington military-industrial complex. If Ukraine joined NATO, it would, like the Central and Eastern European new members before it, have to upgrade its military to achieve ‘interoperability’ with other NATO forces. That means spending billions of dollars buying, yes, US military equipment, particularly from Boeing and Lockheed-Martin.
Ukraine’s neighbour Poland, for example, joined NATO in 1999, together with Hungary and the Czech Republic. In March 2003, Poland raised a $5.5 billion loan to buy 48 F-16 jets from Lockheed-Martin. The deal was partly financed by subsidies from the US government. Hungary and the Czech Republic have shelled out smaller but still sizeable amounts for mainly US equipment, again in deals heavily subsidized by the US tax-payer, under a programme called the Defence Export Loan Guarantee programme, passed in 1996 by that great progressive, Bill Clinton.
No one lobbied harder for NATO’s expansion east than Lockheed and Boeing. US ambassadors in the region tell me the single person who had most influence in persuading Congress to ratify NATO expansion was Bruce Jackson, head of the NGO, the US Committee on NATO.
Persuading Congress was hard work, Jackson told me in an interview in 2003. "When we started [lobbying] in 1995, around 70% of editorial boards and 80% of think-tanks were on the record as being opposed to NATO expansion…We organized well over 1,000 meetings with senators and Congress. By 1999, we won 89% of the vote."
While lobbying Congress for NATO expansion in the late 1990s, Jackson was also vice-president at Lockheed-Martin. In addition, defence companies spent around $41 million lobbying Congress the year they decided on the first wave of NATO expansion.
Jackson says his employment at Lockheed didn’t motivate him in his work to expand NATO. What seems primarily to have motivated him is a deep Cold War suspicion of Russia and its security services – perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that his father was deputy director of the CIA, and that his family sheltered Jewish refugees from the USSR when he was growing up.
In Senate and Congress briefings, Jackson has been one of the most strident critics of the Putin regime. He said the nationalization of Yukos was the biggest illegal appropriation of Jewish property since the Holocaust, and has accused the FSB [perhaps fairly] of building a national security state in Russia.
NATO expansion east has thus been sold to Congress and the Senate as giving Eastern European countries some protection against invasion by nasty, imperialist and anti-Semitic Russia.
It is debatable whether NATO is a necessary protection against Russian imperialism. Firstly, it is very unlikely Russia would invade Ukraine, with or without NATO. It has neither the strength nor the desire nor the audacity for such a move. It is likewise very unlikely the West would tolerate such an invasion, whether Ukraine was or wasn't a member of NATO.
In practical terms, however, NATO accession for new and prospective members has had less to do with European security, and more to do with supporting the US’ Middle-Eastern adventures.
It is notable that the same month that the US government agreed to subsidize Poland’s $5.5 billion acquisition of Lockheed jets, Poland agreed to send 3,000 troops to Iraq. I interviewed a banker from Deutsche Bank who worked on the deal. He told me: “We understood what the deal was. The US government finances the deal at good rates. In return, Poland supports the US in Iraq.”
The connection between NATO expansion and neo-con manoeuvres in the Middle East again goes directly through Bruce Jackson. He’s a member of the arch neo-con think-tank, the Project for the New American Century, which was already lobbying for the deposition of Saddam under the Clinton administration. And he headed up the Washington NGO, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
When France, Germany and Russia opposed the Iraq war in 2003, Jackson was instrumental in getting 10 Eastern European countries to write the so-called ‘Vilnius letter’, which praised the “compelling evidence” of Saddam’s possession of WMD presented by Colin Powell at the UN.
This seems to me a brilliant scam – Eastern European countries shell out billions of dollars to buy US military equipment, for the right to fight the US’ own military adventures in distant lands. We sell you expensive weapons, and you fight our wars for us. Now that’s what I call outsourcing.
There is also the issue of how Russia will see Ukraine’s accession. Many people, during the first round of NATO expansion in 1999, made the argument that expanding NATO east could dangerously aggravate Russia. That turned out to be exaggerated – Russia may not have liked it, but it had to grin and bear it.
But Ukraine is in a more delicate position than Poland or the Baltics. For one thing, as the events of this year have shown, it remains highly dependent on Russia for energy. That is likely to remain the case, while Russia’s dependence on Ukraine for energy transit looks set to lessen in the years to come. An aggravated Russia is thus in a position to deal a blow to Ukraine’s economic growth.
Natalie Jaresko, president of Ukrainian private equity fund Horizon Capitol, suggested to me at the Ukraine conference that NATO membership is a guarantee of stability, which would help encourage foreign direct investment.
With respect to Jaresko, she is a former State Department official whose fund is entirely made up of US government money, so she is not making decisions on a purely private sector basis.
Other State officials have been more sceptical than her. Former secretary of state Madeline Albright told the Senate in the late 1990s that “there is no historical evidence that NATO membership provides economic benefits”. It could, however, very possibly worsen relations with Russia, which could certainly damage Ukraine’s economy.
Finally, there is the argument that joining NATO helps make Ukraine more ‘civilized’, because in order to join, countries must improve their judiciary, their human rights record etc etc. Thus, NATO membership could be an important first step to joining the EU.
This is perhaps the greatest scam ever. What is the connection between buying an F-16 jet and improving your human rights? It’s like a global version of the National Rifle Association’s libertarian double-speak – the more US guns we buy, the freer we will all be.
Surely we can develop better yardsticks for measuring a country’s progress in democratic reforms than how much money they give Boeing and Lockheed-Martin.
Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.
November 7, 2005
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