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Hungary, Poland, and the Czech republic, come on down! You're the next contestants on "Expansion's Right (and Just, and Essential for Freedom, yadda, yadda yadda)". Bill Clinton is your host, and you have the chance to exchange those backwards Warsaw pact ways for NATO membership, a package of equipment and training estimated at over 35 billion dollars.
Contestants on this show won't worry too much over that price tag, however, because their new friends, the member nations of NATO are going to help pick up the tab. They really know how to throw a party. So enthused to get on with Cold War victory by absorbing former foes, the lone voice of dissent, France, opposed this plan of expansion as too small. France argued that Slovenia and Romania be admitted to the all night disco and military exercise, as well.
Ostensibly, the world, and in particular Europe, is still a dangerous place for democracy; good, freedom-loving countries need to work together against these threats. Like the Internet. Germany and the United States are going to put a stop to this dangerous means of free speech.
In order to protect young democracies, NATO extends a hand to them by offering membership. Protection from what exactly? Russia would be an ideal boogeyman, but their military, or more accurately their armaments , are more a threat to the continental U.S. than to former east block nations. Just this year, the DEA uncovered a scheme in which Miami drug dealers planned to purchase a Russian submarine to smuggle merchandise into Florida. Then this month, U.S. Customs officials arrested two men who said they could deliver missiles from the former Soviet Union. Maybe the FBI should ask for NATO membership.
For that matter, the biggest threat to the U.S. seems to be from inside. Militias, individual terrorists, and The Republic of Texas are a lot closer to home than the republic of Turkmenistan. Probably better armed, too.
Which probably implies that countries like Hungary want NATO membership for protection, not from Russia, but from the United States. I know I would. We're fucking crazy.
My girlfriend, Nina Markovic, came up with that one. She's from Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia. It gives her a different perspective on a lot of things: like crazy Americans, for example. That still doesn't explain why current NATO members want expansion. They have one word that helps them explain it. Instability. That has all of the fear needed for political expediency built right into it. Sounds a lot like FUD to me. That acronym stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt", a common enough way to scare people into taking a known, familiar, and presumably safe course.
Frankly, I think there is nothing safe in undertaking a course of foreign policy that may aggrevate the very instability it is meant to counter. People like Belarus's Lukashenko are slobbering over this as a means to raise nationalistic fervor and their own personal political power. Having been in Croatia, Nina knows all about that, too.
Maybe the best thing to do to help these young countries, including the potentially unstable former Soviet republics, is to let them be. Encourage foreign investment in new industries, invite them to take place in world bodies like the G7, but allow them their growing pains.
There is another gameshow appropriate to mention, one that uses its own style of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt: Monty Hall's "Let's Make a Deal". The central gimmick of that show has come to be called "The Monty Hall Problem" by mathematicians, among others. We can look at the problem in detail, but the bottom line is, you beat Monty Hall when you take a chance and swap what you have for the unknown.
I suggest the NATO nations do the same. Or we might all be kissing our Bob Barker goodbye.
Last Updated: 9 July 1997
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