Expanded NATO looks for new role

NATO leaders launched a radical overhaul of the Western alliance at a summit in Prague Thursday, welcoming seven new members from the former communist bloc and creating a rapid-reaction force ready to fight anywhere in the world.

The heads of state, meeting for the first time behind the old Iron Curtain, also promised to "take effective action" to help the United Nations make Iraq comply with disarmament resolutions. Though their statement did not specifically endorse military action against Baghdad, a senior US official called it "very helpful."

NATO's summit is designed to find a new role for the alliance in a world where the US can - and does - fight wars without it.

Soon after the two-day meeting opened, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson announced that Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia had been formally invited to join the alliance, taking NATO deep into former Soviet territory.

The invitees are expected to join by 2004, in a move that President Bush said would "refresh the spirit of this great democratic alliance."

The 19 NATO leaders also agreed to set up a 20,000-man strike force to be used "wherever needed," as the alliance retools to cope with threats far from its traditional area of operations in Europe. They said the force, first suggested by Washington, should be operational within two years.

That decision, and a pledge to gear NATO's military capabilities to new threats that have emerged since Sept. 11, illustrated how much the prize of a "Europe whole and free" - long the alliance's dream - has lost its glitter.

The seven Eastern European applicant nations invited to join the alliance today may be seeking protection from their traditional nemesis, the Russian bear, but Washington and other Western capitals are more fearful of a very different enemy, and are frantically remaking NATO to face it.

The new danger comes from "unstable failed states and terrorist organizations far from Europe's borders," and especially "the toxic mix of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism," US ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns warned in a speech last month.

Unless this week's summit, "originally billed as the 'enlargement summit,' is truly turned into a 'transformation summit,' NATO will have outlived its utility and will fade away," wrote Gen. Klaus Naumann, former chairman of NATO's military committee, in the NATO Review recently.

NATO's hardest challenge is to make itself useful to the United States.

Even though NATO leaders immediately invoked Article V of the alliance's charter on Sept. 12, 2001, calling the attack on New York and Washington an attack on them all, Washington did not call on NATO to help fight the war in Afghanistan.

And US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that he has no intention of involving NATO in any war on Iraq.

That is largely because NATO does not have the capability to fight in Iraq, far from its traditional area of operations in Western Europe. The US plan for a 20,000-man "response force" that could deploy anywhere in the world within days and maintain itself for a month is designed to rectify that.

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