One last note: the Polish vote, Bill Clinton, and NATO
"We have to resist those who believe that now that the Cold War is over the United States can completely return to focusing on problems within our borders."
Yesterday, I wrote about the overlooked importance of the immigrant/ethnic vote in helping convince Bill Clinton to pursue NATO expansion. Today, Michael Pollack — a reader and friend — sent me a note about it. Looks like I totally missed it, but the great Andrew Cockburn wrote about the issue of NATO and the Polish vote in Harper’s back in 2014.
As Michael wrote me, “In re your last newsletter on Nato expansion and the Polish-American ethnic community — Chap 6 (Game On) of Andrew Cockburn’s book The Spoils of War is all about NATO expansion and it’s excellent. It's a reprint of an article he wrote in 2015. He blames it almost entirely the drive to increase defense spending. But he has a quote in passing you might be able to use:”
“It was widely understood in the White House that [influential foreign policy adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski told Clinton he would lose the Polish vote in the ‘96 election if he didn’t let Poland into NATO,” a former Clinton White House official, who requested anonymity, assured me. To an ear as finely tuned to electoral minutiae as the forty-second president’s, such a warning would have been incentive enough, since Polish Americans constituted a significant voting bloc in the Midwest. It was no coincidence then that Clinton chose Detroit for his announcement, two weeks before the 1996 election, that NATO would admit the first of its new members by 1999 (meaning Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary). He also made it clear that NATO would not stop there. “It must reach out to all the new democracies in Central Europe,” he continued, “the Baltics and the new independent states of the former Soviet Union.”
I’ve been meaning to read Andrew’s The Spoils of War. Guess now I have no excuse to to keep procrastinating.
—Yasha Levine
PS: I was listening to Clinton’s speech about NATO enlargement, which he gave in Detroit in 1996, and he had a great bit that I think sums things up about America’s NATO expansion, domestic neoliberalism, and its belligerent and permanent post-Cold War war posture:
“And in a world that is increasingly interconnected, we have to just sort of take down that artificial wall in our mind that this is completely a foreign policy issue and this is completely a domestic issue, because increasingly they impact one on the other. That is why I think, among other things, we have to resist those who believe that now that the Cold War is over the United States can completely return to focusing on problems within our borders and basically ignore those beyond our borders.
That escapism is not available to us because at the end of the Cold War, America truly is the world's indispensable nation.”
Indeed.
Clinton announcing NATO expansion. Detroit, 1996.
Want to know more? Read:“George Kennan, NATO, covert guerrilla warfare.”