The Foreign Service Journal, June 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2021 37 Burdened with its own immigration issues, the United States has done virtually nothing to help, and that contin- ues true under Biden. Yet it is a key factor in one of the most important challenges facing the Western community as a whole: the falling away from democratic practice by some European countries, notably Poland and Hungary—ironically, two of the first three new NATO allies when the alliance began enlarging in 1999. A suggestion made at the time that NATO create a mecha- nism for counseling laggards in democracy was rejected by the Clinton administration. And it is not possible to threaten these countries and their democratic leaders with expulsion from NATO; there is no provision for doing so. NATO and the European Union The European Union has major roles to play in European security in the broadest sense, including economic and political development in Central Europe and climate change. Yet relations between NATO and the E.U. remain woefully inadequate, despite evidence that “security” has to be seen holistically and that institutional North American–European ties must have a strong economic dimension (beyond the deep integration of much of the private sector on both sides of the Atlantic). Moreover, America’s links to the European Union, to which it does not belong, can’t compete with its NATO membership. NATO obviously needs a robust relationship with the The matter of how security burdens and responsibilities are to be shared is significant.