NATO and Immigrants
The Israel lobby — and the Jewish American community that backs it in a big way — gets a lot of heat in certain tiny circles for influencing America’s foreign policy. Yeah, there’s been always a big focus on the Jews. Meanwhile, most other nationalistically oriented immigrant communities involved in pushing the politics of “their own” foreign countries almost always fly below the radar. No one notices them.
Take, for example, the issue of NATO.
I’ve been digging into the history of how the Clinton Administration decided to expand the alliance in my last few letters (see here and here) — despite the expansionist position not being very popular early on. While looking into it I got to thinking: I bet Eastern European communities in America — people from places like Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia — got involved in pushing for NATO expansion domestically. I also bet that the Clinton Administration would have been receptive to those demands in the hopes of getting those sweet ethnic bloc votes.
So I started looking around and I found out that, yep, that was indeed the case.
In fact, as a 2009 article in Foreign Affairs pointed out, it was widely assumed in political circles at the time that Bill Clinton was pushing for NATO enlargement at least in part as an election year issue: “the Clinton administration saw enlargement as a means of gaining support of ethnic eastern European voters in the run-up to the 1996 presidential election.”
Here’s how it played it out:
Democracy at work! Foreign Affairs, 2009.
As far as I can tell there haven’t been any studies on the influence of Eastern European immigrant communities inside America on the NATO question (email me if you know of any.) But there are bits and pieces of published historical material that hint at them playing a big role.
For instance, there’s a detailed article from 1995 — written by Donald E. Piekos and published in the Polish Review — that looks at how the Polish community, through the Polish American Congress, led the effort to get Clinton on board with a much more aggressive NATO expansionist concept and timeline, and helped organize smaller Eastern European communities in America to join the effort.
I’ll quote a few snippets: