(...) European Union planners have been irked by opening statements from Washington that disparaged the proposed European defense force and suggested U.S. troop reductions in the Balkans. But for NATO members Poland and Hungary, the transatlantic discussion over structure and resources invokes the disastrous but not far-fetched scenario of American troops pulling out of nearby Bosnia and Kosovo to make way for a European Union command that excludes them.
Politicians in Washington and Paris may see the centrifugal forces tugging at the transatlantic relationship as endurable, and maybe inevitable. But for Europe's former Soviet bloc side, they could soon become the elements of a geopolitical crisis. Russian President Vladimir Putin is working aggresively to re-establish Moscow's political dominion over countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, and its ability to sway decisions in capitals as far away as Vienna. Meanwhile, the transatlantic tensions that the Bush administration has inherited, and at least initially heightened, suggest an alliance too focused on debates over weapons in space to consider the corners of Europe; or even worse, split into American and European Union camps that exclude the Central and East European.
Will half of Europe be left to choose between an uncertain partnership with the West and a slide back toward Moscow? That may well depend on how Bush administration handles the third major issue on its security agenda with Europe, the one it hasn't been talking much about: NATO expansion. Nine Central and Eastern European countries, including three former Soviet republics, three former Warsaw Pact states and three Balkan countries, are hoping for invitation to join NATO at a summit next year in Prague.
Letting the NATO candidates in would decisively expand the Western alliance - and the U.S. leadership that comes with it - across Europe, while consolidating the free politics and free markets under construction in countries from Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in the north to Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria in the center and south, and Macedonia, Slovenia and Albania in the Balkans. Keeping them out would effectively invite a resurgence of Russian influence in the region, along with the authoritarian politics and anti-American foreign policy currently ascendant in Moscow.
Putin's Russia will surely resist another NATO expansion more aggressively than Boris Yeltsin oposed the 1997 admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. But unlike missile defense, which Putin is also trying to block, NATO expansion has one big advantage: The Bush administration and Europe broadly seem to agree about it. "This is one of the few major constructive things on the Atlantic alliance agenda" that is likely to be unifying and not divisive, says former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński, a leading advocate of expansion.
Though they may be uneasy about U.S. domination of NATO, European governments like NATO expansion because it is a way of growing the continent's democratic zone of stability without expanding the European Union, a far more cumbersome process that requires much greater sacrifices from both existing and new members.
(...) Still the administration has repeatedly said that strengthening the Atlantic alliance is one of its top priorities - and the other policies it is pushing, even if successful in the long run, are unlikely to do that soon. "The fact that President Bush will have to present a positive agenda for NATO sometime in the first half of this year," says Polish Ambassador Przemysław Grudziński, whose government is pushing hard for new members. "There are not too many tools available for strengthening the alliance." Expansion is certainly one of them.       u