NEWS ANALYSIS : Dispute Over Expansion Lays Bare Core Differences Within NATO

It was a perfect diplomatic ambush.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev had said his country was ready to agree to a long-awaited working arrangement with NATO, and he wanted a high-profile ceremony--a brief formal exchange of documents in front of the cameras, lots of cameras.

And so Thursday evening, with NATO’s smiling, unsuspecting leadership right where he wanted it in front of the cameras, Kozyrev unleashed his trap: Instead of handshakes and backslaps, he declared that he could not agree to the working plan. NATO’s decision to begin immediate preparations for eastward expansion, he said, had raised new problems.

While the blindside attack won Kozyrev points among hard-line conservatives in Moscow wary of alliance intentions, it was also an effective Russian strike at an alliance weak point--deep divisions over the wisdom of rapid expansion.

What Kozyrev saw and zeroed in on was just one of a growing number of internal differences that have begun to strike at the heart of the 44-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which remains the key institution linking the United States and Europe.

A two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers that ended here late Friday may have managed a facade of unity, but it did little to resolve differences on fundamental issues, some of which could haunt the alliance for years to come.

Certainly, dispute is no stranger to NATO, an alliance of 16 free-thinking democracies.

The Jimmy Carter Administration’s proposal of the late 1970s to develop a neutron bomb that would destroy life but not property briefly drove a wedge through the alliance, while German resistance in the late 1980s to American pressure to develop a new short-range nuclear missile also cooled transatlantic ties briefly.

But today NATO is especially vulnerable to internal tension. For the first time, the alliance has no visible external threat to keep it together. For the first time, it is unsure of its own role.

The crucial job of secretary general, whose role is to find and build consensus among the 16, is held by a capable diplomat, but one inexperienced in military affairs.

On Bosnia, alliance harmony got a hefty assist from a last-minute shift in Washington that brought the Clinton Administration into line with the Europeans’ plan to offer Bosnian Serbs important concessions in return for agreeing to a preliminary peace formula.

“The crisis in Bosnia is about Bosnia, not about NATO,” was a refrain recited on cue by alliance Secretary General Willy Claes and members of nearly every delegation present.

However, the underlying divisions on how to deal with the conflict itself still remain.

Comments earlier this week by Sen. Bob Dole (R.-Kan.) denigrating the French and British for faintheartedness in Bosnia, and his pledge to push the new Congress for greater use of NATO air power and a lifting of the internationally imposed arms embargo against the Bosnian government, have also not been forgotten.

“If British and French forces die in the next couple of weeks, there will be a tendency in Britain and France to blame the United States for this,” said Patrick Glynn, an expert on the Balkans at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

Other analysts believe that NATO’s decision on eastward expansion carries more serious long-term implications for alliance unity.

While all 16 members officially welcomed the first concrete step toward enlargement, doubts pervade Western Europe.

“The alliance is overextending itself” with expansion, warned Heinrich Vogel, director of the Institute of International and East European Studies in Cologne, Germany. “It’s nice wording on expansion, but there’s little thought given to it. They are releasing an additional Pandora’s box.”

Some Europeans worry that the Clinton Administration, thinking that it may be a one-term phenomenon, has set a target of completing the initial expansion by 1996, a pace the Europeans see as dangerously fast.

They want to delay any NATO expansion beyond late 1996, when a review of the European Union’s treaty on political and economic union is scheduled.

“It takes more time to think through the implications, the assumptions for this kind of a step,” Vogel added. “The assumptions on NATO expansion depend on the potential development of Russia, and there’s no agreement on that. Some see it as a basket case, others as a neo-imperialist power.”

There is also concern in Europe that rapid NATO expansion could provoke Russia, which, as Kozyrev’s performance underscored, remains deeply suspicious of its old enemy.

Kozyrev’s hard-line stance in Brussels met with approval in Moscow, where lawmakers and opinion leaders have warned that expanding NATO membership to the former Warsaw Pact nations would have disastrous consequences for Russia’s relations with the West.

NATO in the last year has embraced 23 nations, mostly former Soviet-bloc countries, in an adjunct organization called the Partnership for Peace.

“The train of European history has started off in the wrong direction, and a crash is unavoidable,” said defense analyst Alexander A. Konovalov of Moscow’s U.S.A. and Canada Institute.

Despite NATO efforts to reassure Russia that any expansion of the alliance east poses no threat, Moscow will view any enlargement of NATO as an unfriendly act that would polarize Europe and isolate Russia behind “a new Berlin Wall,” Konovalov said.

Moreover, Konovalov said, “nobody can explain seriously why NATO should enlarge if Russia is not the enemy.”

As the alliance begins its preliminary work on expansion, some Western experts are asking the same question.