Senate Floor Speech
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
May 17, 2002 -- Page: S4514

MRS. HUTCHISON. I thank the Chair, and I thank the Senator from Virginia.

It is very important for the United States and Europe to have the kind of alliance that NATO has been. It has been the greatest defensive alliance in the history of the world, but I feel as if I am experiencing deja vu all over again.

The Senate is once again considering a measure to endorse the expansion of NATO without having satisfactorily addressed any of the same questions that loomed over the alliance 4 years ago when we made the first recent expansion.

In April of 1998, this body voted to expand NATO without articulating a rationale for NATO in the post-cold-war era, without calculating a reliable estimate of the cost of the expansion, without establishing an interalliance dispute resolution process, without evaluating the militaries of the respective candidates to see what they offered and where their problems were, and without determining how the alliance can effectively coordinate military action amongst an even larger and more unwieldy membership.

Here we are in 2002 with the same questions unanswered, and yet we are on the cusp of enlarging again. I have never thought that any of my concerns about the structure and purpose of NATO should be directed at any one country. I do intend to vote for this resolution because I think we should expand the Partnership for Peace, we should get countries ready, we should try to bring their militaries up to speed, and the President wants this ability before he goes to Europe. I understand that, and I support the concept of an alliance with Europe.

What is the alliance's purpose? This is a defensive alliance to protect the democracies of Western Europe from the Communist threat of the East. That threat has evaporated. Our President is going to make an agreement with Russia in the next week that will have a mutual disarmament pact that will bring down our stash of nuclear weapons and their stash of nuclear weapons. We are friends with the Russians.

Today the threat for which NATO was first put in place is gone. We should have a strategic military alliance, but we need to talk about what functions it will have. If we are going to go offensive, as we did in Kosovo, how are we going to do it? Everyone knows the problems we had in trying to get unanimity when we were bombing Serbia. Everybody knows that was an almost impossible task. Yet here we are talking about adding new members without talking about what kinds of offensive alliances we are going to have.

In fact, as we are looking now at the hotspots around the world, some of the NATO allies agree with what we are doing in certain places; some have been less helpful. We need to have a purpose for NATO, or are we going to set our alliances according to the operations and interests of different parties involved so that we should stretch our dollars in a way that allows us the flexibility to determine which alliances we will have for any particular operation?

The cost of NATO is a big one for the United States. One-half of our permanent foreign forces are in Europe. We have a commitment to provide 25 percent of the NATO budget. We spend $170 million to $180 million in military construction for NATO, and we have a $500 million commitment for U.S. military construction in NATO countries. So we are talking about almost $1 billion, about three-quarters of a billion dollars in construction costs in European countries and/or NATO. That is a big part of our budget when we also have major commitments in the Middle East, major commitments in Korea in the DMZ, and major commitments, of course, ongoing in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and places regarding the war on terrorism.

We need to assess the costs before we go forward with this kind of process.