International Herald Tribune
BY Joseph Fitchett
A transformation of NATO is emerging as it prepares parallel moves to bring in up to seven new East European members while simultaneously upgrading relations with Moscow, the alliance's longtime principal adversary, diplomats said Monday.
The package, set to receive tentative approval this week in Brussels, could receive final clearance at a NATO summit meeting in Prague in November. It would provide for a so-called "big bang" enlargement extending NATO membership to countries along Russia's western frontier, including the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
The proposals also would give Russia a formal voice within the alliance on selected matters such as peacekeeping operations and other areas of presumed common interest, including cooperation against nuclear proliferation. But it would fall far short of granting full membership or even a Russian veto on alliance military decisions.
There is no explicit linkage between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's expansion eastward and upgraded ties with Russia, but the negotiations on both issues have proceeded simultaneously. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has not yet agreed to the NATO overture, which was reported Monday by the Financial Times.
"It will really be up to the Russians to show whether and how far they can learn to play the cooperation game by the alliance's rules of real candor and genuine give-and-take," a NATO ambassador said.
Significantly, NATO's plan could turn the group from a defensive military alliance into a more political organization that underpins security throughout the European Continent. A change along those lines would deepen the current doubts about NATO's future military importance, and even its survival in its old Cold War role as a crucible for forging collective trans-Atlantic security policy between the United States and its European allies.
With the inclusion of East European nations and a greater role for Moscow, NATO seems likely to become less crucial as a forum for Western decision-making in major military conflicts. The 1999 Kosovo conflict, the alliance's first combat operation, already demonstrated the complications of wartime consultations among allied capitals. And late last year, the United States effectively ignored NATO as a source of significant military assistance in Afghanistan.
Even so, NATO can remain militarily valuable as "a toolbox" of allied forces, an official said, explaining that the alliance amounted to a pool of armed forces with similar operational doctrines that could fit into alliances of the willing led by the United States - or perhaps by the European Union in regional crises.
The dual opening to Moscow and to the most sensitive former Soviet satellites such as the Baltic states has been a topic of debate within the alliance for months. Now the NATO offer to Moscow, for joint meetings on some matters "at 20," meaning including the current 19-nation alliance and Russia, is set for formal approval Wednesday at the regular weekly meeting of NATO ambassadors known as the North Atlantic Council.
Once the alliance offer is forwarded to Moscow, an initial Russian response is expected ahead of a NATO ministerial meeting in Iceland in May.
Putin is known to be seeking more Western recognition for Russia, but he is facing resistance from hard-liners in Moscow, including much of his own military hierarchy. They opposed his moves to back the U.S.-led war on terrorism and endorse the establishment of U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan and other former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
The impending changes in NATO reflect radical U.S. rethinking about the alliance as an instrument for consolidating the new status quo throughout Europe, Western diplomats said. Seven new members are being considered in the plans for enlargement: Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the three Baltic states. Even if not all are accepted this year, Europe in its geographical entirety could soon be included in NATO with the exception of a few small neutral nations, Albania and the new countries that used to be Yugoslavia.
Bush administration officials have said publicly that alliance membership should be open eventually to Russia, a shift in U.S. attitudes that reflects the trend for NATO to become an organization in which military matters take second place to the political goal of democratic stability in Europe.
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