Striving for Military Stability in Europe

Jane M. O. Sharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134325818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

First Published in 2004. This new book traces the changing relationship between Russia and NATO through the prism of conventional arms control, and focuses on the negotiation, implementation and adaptation of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. It shows that arms control agreements reflect rather than affect rela tions between parties. The CFE Treaty codified parity between NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) in November 1990, reflecting the status quo at the end of the cold war. The benefits were short lived for Russia, however. Although still widely viewed in the West as the cornerstone of security and stability in post-cold war Europe, from the Russian perspective the treaty was soon overtaken by events. With the collapse of the WTO and the Soviet Union in 1991, it became impossible to talk of a military balance between east and west in Europe, especially as all the former WTO states opted for membership in NATO. This study details how the other state parties worked hard to adjust and adapt the treaty to meet Russian concerns about its new weakness relative to NATO, and the issues that complicated Russian acceptance of CFE limits. This book will be of great interest to all students of Russia, NATO, European politics, international relations and strategic studies in general.

Part I
BACKGROUND TO THE FORMAL CFE NEGOTIATION

1
ARMS CONTROL AS A BAROMETER OF EUROPEAN POLITICS

I Introduction

‘The Fat Lady Sings in Vienna’ was the message that US Ambassador James Woolsey cabled back to Washington at 19.00 hours on 15 November 1990. The cable confirmed final approval of all 22 negotiating states to the text of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (the CFE Treaty). A spurt of US–Soviet bargaining in Moscow in the first week of November settled last-minute delays caused by Turkey’s anxieties about Soviet paramilitary troops on its borders. France, Germany and the UK all made minor changes the following week, and all the other states gave their approval on 15 November. The agreement culminated two of the most productive years in the history of East–West arms control since World War II. Under the enlightened leadership of President Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union negotiated cooperatively in Vienna, making many concessions to Western positions.¹

The rapid pace of negotiations in 1989 matched the euphoria of Europe’s velvet revolutions, in which energetic and democratic reformers replaced stagnant communist regimes. The pace slackened in 1990, however, as Soviet anxiety about German unification and the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) increased, and Western countries began to worry about the stability of the Soviet Union and the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe. By the time the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) gathered for the Paris summit meeting on 19 November 1990 the mood was sombre.² In the weeks leading up to treaty signature it became clear that the Soviet General Staff had evaded the requirement to destroy excess weapons in Europe by transferring almost 80,000 pieces of equipment out of the zone of application. While not a breach of the letter of the agreement, these transfers eroded much of the trust and confidence that had been built up over the previous two years and suggested that Soviet dissatisfaction with the limits imposed by the treaty could still jeopardize ratification. The Soviet Foreign Ministry apparently ignored one of the most fundamental lessons of post-1945 arms control for the Western powers, namely, that the domestic negotiations between different national interests are at least as important to the successful conclusion of an arms control treaty as the negotiations with other states.

Soviet discomfort in early 1991 stemmed not only from the terms of the CFE Treaty, but also from the enormous change in Soviet status that coincided with the CFE negotiating process. 1990 was as symbolic a year of change in the international system as 1815, 1898 and 1945 had been. The end of the Napoleonic threat to Europe was marked by 1815, 1898 marked the emergence of the USA as a major actor on the world scene after its war with Spain (even if the USA remained an isolationist power sheltering under a Pax Britannica until World War I), and 1945 marked the end of German and Japanese militarism and the emergence of the Soviet Union and the USA as the two superpowers in a new bipolar system. Not only did 1990 mark the end of the cold war, with the collapse of the WTO and the end of the Soviet threat to Europe, but it also marked the emergence of a multipolar world with several economic giants but only one military superpower, the USA.³

The closest parallel to efforts to develop a new pan-European security system in 1990 was the pattern of events in 1815, when the European powers were developing a new conference system to incorporate and contain France after the Napoleonic wars. Coral Bell, for example, drew on the 1815 analogy to make the case for inviting ‘Russia and the other major members of the now defunct Warsaw Pact’ to join NATO in a new ‘Concert of Europe’.⁴ In 1816 Tsar Alexander I of Russia proposed a system of negotiated force reductions throughout Europe to consolidate the peace. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, was suspicious, however, as the Russian Army was the only one on the continent that had not yet begun to demobilize. Castlereagh’s reply to the Tsar’s proposal invoked many familiar impediments to arms control agreements, for example:

the settlement of a scale of force for so many Powers, under such different circumstances as to their relative means, frontier positions and faculties for rearming, presents a very complicated question for negotiation; that the means of preserving a system, if once created, are not without their difficulties liable as States are to partial necessities for an increase of force; … and further, as on so many subjects of a jealous character, in attempting to do too much, difficulties are rather brought into view than made to disappear.⁵

Castlereagh suggested instead that each state reduce its forces unilaterally to the minimum necessary, then explain ‘… to Allied and neighbour ing States the extent and nature of its arrangements as a means of dispelling alarm and of rendering moderate establishments mutually convenient’.⁶

In the four decades after World War II, Castlereagh’s injunction that negotiated force reductions were more fraught with difficulties than flexible unilateral force planning was borne out by experience. Demobilizations after 1945 took effect unilaterally rather than by agreement, and where negotiations were initiated they served only to preserve the status quo or to raise force levels. Fifteen years of inter-alliance negotiations on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR), for example, served only to preserve existing NATO and WTO force levels.

For the weaker powers in the international community, one of the most powerful motivations against concluding formal arms control agreements was the fear of committing one’s country to a position of inferiority. The USSR would not even enter into bilateral negotiations with the USA until it had achieved an intercontinental delivery system for its nuclear weapons, and would almost certainly not have entered into CFE negotiations had it known the WTO would collapse so quickly. Balanced agreements were difficult to achieve, even in the bipolar world, because different geographical conditions and historical experiences, as well as incompatible political and economic systems, shaped highly asymmetrical force postures that were difficult to compare quantitatively. Agreements will be even more difficult to conclude in the new multipolar system, in which alliances will be more fluid and today’s friend may be tomorrow’s adversary. The international system may yet be forced back to a combination of status quo agreements and unregulated unilateral measures.

II Cold war asymmetries

Geographical asymmetries

As an alliance of maritime nations heavily dependent on sea links, NATO always sought to avoid limits on its naval capability. By contrast, with a vast land mass to defend, Russian leaders traditionally relied on large standing armies and were unwilling to accept deep cuts in their ground forces. Although the Western group of states persuaded the USSR to agree to a mandate for the CFE talks that excluded naval forces, this issue haunted almost every stage of the negotiations as the Soviet military was unwilling to accept limits only on those categories of force in which it was ahead and leave naval forces, in which NATO enjoyed superiority, unlimited.

Geography permitted the Soviet Union to introduce reinforcements into Eastern Europe over land, while the United States could only reinforce Western Europe by air and sea lift. This suggested a strategic advantage to Moscow, but permanently deployed US forces in Western Europe gave the United States an option to invade Soviet territory, while the USSR had no similar option vis-à-vis the United States.⁷ As long as the NATO and WTO countries considered each other adversaries this asymmetry posed problems for dealing with any troops and equipment to be withdrawn. At the inter-alliance MBFR talks, for example, WTO states wanted treaty provisions that required arms and equipment to be withdrawn with manpower, whereas NATO states wanted US ammunition and equipment stocks to remain in Europe.

As long as the WTO was intact, geography gave the Soviet Union the luxury of a protective buffer zone in Eastern Europe, whereas NATO could never hope to defend in depth. This asymmetry also generated intraNATO differences since West German leaders were unwilling to relax NATO’s doctrine of forward defence at the inter-German border, while most military experts in the rest of NATO would have traded space for time to enhance the defence of NATO territory overall. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) did not want to erect physical barriers on its territory, because these would have emphasized the division of Germany, whereas other West Europeans preferred to keep Germany divided and believed barriers would be a relatively non-provocative and cost-effective means to slow any WTO advance. Geography also made the FRG sensitive to the problem of singularity, particularly to proposals for weapon-free corridors between the blocs, since these would have distinguished it from the rest of NATO in terms of inspection regimes. The other allies grew impatient with the FRG on this issue in the late 1980s, however.⁸

Economic asymmetries

Western economic superiority always gave NATO a technological edge over the Soviet Union that the USSR compensated for with numerical superiority in many force categories. Before reliable data were produced in connection with the CFE negotiation, assessments of the NATO–WTO balance varied as to the number of combat forces available on short notice, but all agreed that the wartime production and manpower potential of the NATO countries was much higher than that of the Eastern bloc. This was particularly relevant for mobilization rates. A net assessment prepared by the Staff of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in late 1987 noted that the quality and readiness of NATO reserves were far superior to those of the WTO.⁹ Some analysts even suggested that the US National Guard could be in the FRG before Soviet reinforcements could reach the German Democratic Republic (GDR).¹⁰ This made some European states confident that they could meet any likely challenge from the Soviet Union, but others worried that the Soviet Union must prepare for a short-warning attack because they could not afford to allow NATO time to gear up to a war footing.

Greater economic potential gave the NATO countries an edge in most of the technologies relevant to weaponry.¹¹ In the past, the USSR tried to curb Western innovation through arms control, and to compensate for technological inferiority with quantitative superiority, but Soviet planners always worried that new Western systems could make Soviet forces inoperable.

Political asymmetries

In both halves of Europe, allied governments were always more enthusiastic about retaining stationed superpower forces than were general publics. Nevertheless, Soviet troops were in Eastern Europe as occupying forces propping up client governments, whereas in most NATO countries US troops were accepted as welcome symbols of the US security guarantee to NATO.¹² During the 1980s, US bases were least popular in Greece and Spain because they were often identified with former military dictatorships in those countries. In the early 1990s, however, most West European countries wanted US troops to remain, even as Soviet troops left Eastern Europe.¹³

During the cold war, with communist governments in power throughout Eastern and Central Europe, the WTO often looked more cohesive than NATO. In an East–West conflict, however, East European troops were thought unlikely to be reliable fighting under Soviet orders. Serious analysts in the West thus usually discounted, or even subtracted, East European forces when calculating the NATO–WTO military balance.¹⁴ One of the factors that made the CFE Treaty difficult for the Soviet Union to accept was the parallel collapse of the WTO and the continuation of NATO – indeed the open acceptance by the non-Soviet WTO (NSWTO) countries that NATO was an essential element in the stability of the new Europe.

Political asymmetries also affected intelligence gathering during the cold war years, since the Western states were more open than those in the WTO. This made NATO more conservative in its estimates of WTO capabilities and more demanding in terms of on-site inspections than might have been the case if WTO data had been openly available. Prior to Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, Soviet unwillingness to provide military data and to open up WTO territory for inspection were serious stumbling blocks to negotiated arms control. Under Gorbachev’s leadership the Soviet Union accepted intrusive inspections – but not without some grumbling by the military.

III Background to the CFE negotiation

The Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe stemmed from two sets of cold war forums designed to preserve the status quo in Europe: the inter-alliance MBFR talks and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The CSCE was a WTO initiative that sought to cement the political and territorial status quo in Europe, with a view to eventually moving beyond the bloc structure to a pan-European security system. The MBFR talks were a NATO initiative designed to arrest the trickle of unilateral cuts in US and European forces in the NATO area in the mid-1960s. Initially the NATO powers resisted the WTO proposals for a CSCE and the WTO resisted the NATO invitation to join the MBFR talks, but both forums were eventually established in the early 1970s – the CSCE in 1972 and the MBF...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ACRONYMS
• Part I BACKGROUND TO THE FORMAL CFE NEGOTIATION
• Part II NEGOTIATING THE TREATY AND ASSESSING ITS IMPACT
• Part III RATIFICATION PROBLEMS
• Part IV IMPLEMENTATION
• Part V THE NEED FOR TREATY REVISIONS
• Appendix I PARITY REGAINED
• Appendix II PARITY LOST
• NOTES
• INDEX