NATO expands eastward, but pivots away from confrontation with Russia

WASHINGTON (AFP) Mar 28, 2004

NATO's expansion eastward this week marks the latest step in a decade-long pivot by the Atlantic alliance away from confrontation with Russia toward new dangers in the Middle East .

Despite some threats and grumbling from Moscow , the admission of seven new members -- all former Soviet republics or East bloc states -- has been carried off with little of the impassioned debate that accompanied the first round of NATO enlargement in 1999.

"I think it's symbolically quite significant in that it represents the next step to the enlargement that brought Poland , Hungary and the Czech Republic in a few years ago and it further consolidates the eastward spread of stability and democracy in Europe ," said Charles Kupchan , an expert on European security at the Council on Foreign Relations here.

"It's strategic significance is relatively muted in that the main show in town is now about terrorism, and it's in the Middle East; it's not in Europe anymore," he said.

The new members are Latvia , Lithuania , Estonia , Romania , Bulgaria , Slovenia and Slovakia .

The Baltic states are the first former Soviet republics to join the alliance, a bitter pill for Moscow , which has protested NATO plans to fly air defense patrols from Lithuania and warned it might respond with a nuclear buildup.

But softening Russian antagonism is an epochal transformation now underway within NATO that is replacing Cold War defenses aimed at Moscow with light, rapidly deployable forces designed to respond to crises outside Europe , notably in the Middle East and Central Asia .

NATO "is in the process of one of its most fundamental changes in its history," General Jim Jones, the supreme allied commander, told defense reporters Friday.

"It will be a different organization. It will have a different membership. The Eastern European influence will change the voting demographics. It will bring different views," he said.

"It is an organization that as a result of the Prague Summit is going global instead of regional," he said.

The centerpiece is a new NATO Response Force designed for rapid deployments. It fuses air, land, sea and special forces components into a ready unit capable of moving in

The alliance also has taken command of an international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan , a reflection of the dramatic recasting of the alliance's roles and mission from a simple territorial defense of Europe .

Looking to its allies to ease the burden on its own overstretched forces, the United States has said it would like NATO to assume command of a division in Iraq . "It's very much a topic but there is no mission," Jones said.

Beyond NATO, the United States is devising plans to dismantle many of the huge bases from which its forces defended Europe for more than 50 years against a Soviet invasion.

In their place, it is planning a network of a network of smaller bases flung across the globe, many of them lightly manned and used only for training or in the event of a crisis.

Accelerating the changes were the September 11 attacks on the United States and the new threats of Islamic extremism.

"The United States has committed itself to recognizing that the greater Middle East for the forseable future is going to be of primary interest," said Jones.

The September 11 attacks also brought the United States and Russia closer in ways that has helped ease the sting of NATO's expansion.

"It now makes sense to talk about a strategic partnership, particularly because the US has arrived in Russia 's backyard, and the Russians have generally been cooperating with the US on the anti-terror front.

"After September 11, the notion of partnership of strategic partnership became concrete and meaningful because the US needed access to air bases in Russia 's southern rim so that it could get to Afghanistan ," said Kupchan .

Kupchan also believes NATO enlargement will open more opportunities for engagement with Russia because the former Soviet bloc countries will feel more relaxed in their dealing with Moscow once they are under NATO's wing.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France- Presse . Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France- Presse . As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France- Presse .