The Dawn of Peace in Europe (review)

It may be slightly unfair to review The Dawn of Peace in Europe right after the Helsinki Summit, at which Russian President Boris Yeltsin bowed to Bill Clinton’s insistence that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) take in at least three new members, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. This book is devoted to marshaling many arguments why NATO expansion is bad. Professor Mandelbaum believes it may cause an enraged Russia to defect from a set of recent arms control arrangements, principally in Europe, which he regards as constituting a “common security” system. But Yeltsin, while he was still protesting at Helsinki about NATO enlargement, conceded that it had become inevitable and at the same time promised to take new steps to reinforce, not defect from, the security order.

The Dawn of Peace is broad in scope with something for everyone: for wannabe policymaker, the NATO expansion issue; for International Relations theorists, an exegesis of what Mandelbaum calls a new “common security order;” for Kremlinologists, two chapters on post-Soviet Russia; and for students of American foreign policy, a convincing rationale for US engagement in Europe. This review will concentrate on NATO expansion, an issue which has been much debated for the past six months and a policy which constitutes a top foreign agenda item for the Clinton administration.

Mandelbaum’s book represents a provocative contribution to the public discussion on NATO expansion. It is a debate that has rallied an impressive pro-expansion alliance of administration big thinkers such as the Russian specialist Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of State, and heavyweight strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. They have been opposed by an equally distinguished coalition of analysts and former diplomats, headed by the venerable George Kennan, a grouping of opponents in which Mandelbaum has earned a worthy place.

Taut and clear, the book is an easy read, refreshingly light on strategists’ argot and acronyms. Mandelbaum illuminates Europe’s postwar problems by citing parallels with other places and times. He comes up with novelly apt comparisons here and there, such as “Russia is no longer great, Germany is not military, and the United States, which is both, is not European.” Mandelbaum contends that arrangements concluded in recent years to control nuclear and conventional arms in Europe and worldwide constitute a “common security order.” This new order, he asserts, provides a “third way” to organize relations among states—between utopian world government on the one hand and realistic but costly balance-of- power politics on the other. His chief service with this book is to call attention to this “historic innovation,” so far little appreciated by students of international relations.

Yet the system is “fragile” and “vulnerable,” and Mandelbaum is careful not to claim too much for it. While it has reduced the possibility of great-power conflict, it could yet collapse. What might cause that?

Mandelbaum goes right to his principal argument in the first part of the book, which may fairly be described as a polemic against efforts to give NATO new things to do, such as so-called out-of-area missions and expansion into the East. The former he calls desirable but not feasible, the latter feasible but not desirable. A good case could be made that NATO’s mission in Bosnia, its first “out-of-area,” is not turning out as badly as Mandelbaum predicts. Yet, even leaving aside evidence to the contrary provided by Yeltsin at Helsinki, Mandelbaum’s attack on expansion hinges on assumptions about Russia’s future conduct that are wishful and therefore imprudent.

The author is candid about the real case for NATO expansion. As the alliance originated in the late 1940s, as a hedge against the plausible threat of a resurgent Germany, so it is to be expanded in the late 1990s, as a hedge against an eventually resurgent Russia. This may seem like a sensible policy move vis-à-vis a country which, Mandelbaum readily admits, has an...