The Headless Enlargement: How Grand Strategy Became Structure in NATO, 1990–1998

NATO's first post-Cold War enlargement is usually explained as the product of a strategy. In the realist version, Washington used a window of Russian weakness to move the alliance east before Moscow recovered; in the liberal version, it extended a zone of democracy and markets that Russia would in time accept. This paper argues that the declassified record of the Clinton administration supports neither. On our reading, one strategic decision set the frame in 1990, when the Bush administration preserved NATO's primacy and left its later course open. Afterwards, enlargement was selected by configuration. Using the vocabulary of the headless series, the paper traces the case from 1990 to 1998 through released cables, memoranda and telephone records. In 1993 Clinton and Kohl ranked Russian reform above enlargement and acted on that ranking within hours. We call this a dyadic, residual ranking: held by a relationship rather than an institution, and begun without the means to entrench it. It could be made while enlargement was still weakly coupled to American domestic sectors. During 1994 the dyad dissolved without either member deciding to end it. The President's ranking was rebuilt by his staff from his own public statements, Kohl's veto lapsed when Russian troops left Germany, and Holbrooke, as assistant secretary of state, enforced a decision that had not been formally taken. By 1995 Washington ranked the sequence, NATO before the European Union, and declined to rank the ends. Formulas of "parallel" and "complementary" enlargement, in Washington and in Bonn, left the order open; Washington set it. NATO moved first because European vetoes on the cost of enlarging the Union had left the track held by the external guarantor as the one that could move. The Senate's two-thirds rule then turned the timetable into a campaign, and the campaign created the private network that later claimed it. The paper identifies an advocate fallacy shared by critics and supporters of enlargement: locating the choice in the most visible voice, whether a designer, a public advocate or a self-described prime mover. Each claim is marked as documented or inferred, and the paper states the conditions under which its thesis fails, including the closest counter-evidence, a hedge against Russian recovery kept in the background of the 1994 memoranda. To our knowledge, the paper is the first to read these records across the security and economic tracks and as evidence for the order of the two enlargements. The outcome was structured, not inevitable. The choices that mattered were vetoes, lapses and deferrals, made inside a frame that one earlier decision had set.