NATO Hits a Crossroads as New Europe Takes Shape : Security: With Soviet threat gone, some think the alliance is obsolete. Washington pushes for expansion.

“Institutions founder on their victories.”

-- Baron Montesquieu

It was over in 19 minutes, and from the time it began--with a blip on an allied plane’s radar at 6:31 a.m.--to the destruction of the last of four intruding aircraft at 6:50 a.m., it was a perfect mission.

But it was also much more.

The incident, which unfolded early last year over northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, marked the first offensive action taken by the Atlantic Alliance in its near-half-century history.

The attacking planes were two American F-16 fighters, although they could well have been Dutch, British, Spanish, Turkish or French aircraft, which operate under the same command. The radar craft was American-made but flown by a mixed U.S. and European crew. The prey--Serbian light attack aircraft brazen enough to challenge the “no-fly” zone over Bosnia--never stood a chance.

The attack stands as a rare example of the collective military muscle the alliance can muster. It also stands as one of the few bright moments in NATO’s otherwise star-crossed venture in the Balkans.

“For the future, we have to do better,” NATO Secretary General Willy Claes confided to a gathering of defense experts in Munich, Germany, earlier this year.

In many ways, the Bosnia experience reflects both the potential and the dangers of a post-Cold War world for the most powerful, most enduring, most successful military alliance the United States has ever been a part of--the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Since its formation in 1949, the alliance has grown far beyond its primary mission of shielding the democracies of Western Europe from Soviet aggression. It has evolved into a model of military cooperation among its 16 member states and today stands as the backbone of America’s relationship with the Old World.

It has also become a valuable platform where like-minded countries can discuss complex security issues ranging from terrorism to nuclear proliferation.

“NATO is the only forum we have for things like that,” said Francois Heisbourg, a French defense industry executive and a respected European voice on security issues.

Still, the enormous political change that has swept through Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall has placed the very future of the alliance in question.

With the Communist threat gone, the Soviet empire a fast-fading memory, and NATO’s largest member, the United States, increasingly distracted elsewhere, the alliance quite simply has become a victim of its own success. Today, it is an organization that has worked itself out of a job and embarked on a search for new meaning and a new role in a different world.

Some argue that NATO shouldn’t even try. They believe it should quietly fade away and free its member governments from the costly, essentially futile exercise of cooking up new tasks for an institution already living on bureaucratic inertia.

“NATO’s future is behind it,” declared retired U.S. Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll Jr., deputy director of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. He described the alliance as “an inhibiting element” in the quest for new, more appropriate ways of addressing the post-Cold War environment.

“Right now, it is glue for papering over a mismatch in priorities,” Carroll said.

Others aren’t so sure.

They look out over a Europe that is less stable, less predictable and more prone to armed conflict than at any time since the 1930s. They see an uncertain Russia staggering between reform and repression and insist it would be folly to abandon America’s only collective security alliance, one whose members’ years of work together has produced an irreplaceable level of cooperation and teamwork among Western democracies.

They want to harness that experience, reshape it and redirect it to solve new problems.

They envision an even larger NATO that would expand to include Poland, the Czech Republic and other former Communist states in Central and Eastern Europe, a NATO in which America’s European partners would shoulder a greater share of the burden in a grand joint venture to preserve the peace and promote democracy both within the borders of member countries and beyond.

According to Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), “The new NATO task is to project stability across the European continent for non-members as well as members.”

Said British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind: “NATO remains crucial to the defense and security needs of the nations on both sides of the Atlantic.”

But if NATO’s new mission is that of a supra-regional peace-enforcement agency, its first attempt at fulfilling that mission--in the former Yugoslav federation--has produced some worrisome results.

To be sure, parts of the operation, such as last year’s successful attack against the Serbian jets over northern Bosnia, have been impressive. Technically and organizationally, the meshing of nearly 4,500 personnel from NATO member countries to keep the Serbian air force on the ground, provide close air support for U.N. peacekeepers and conduct punitive air strikes has also worked well.

Politically and militarily, however, Bosnia has been a debacle for NATO.

Within months of its involvement, NATO had squandered valuable credibility and found itself either at odds with itself internally or paralyzed by the United Nations, whose peacekeeping operation it was supposed to be supporting.

If the air attack was NATO’s high point in Bosnia, the ordeal of a British Harrier pilot near the town of Gorazde a few months later is a candidate for its nadir.

With NATO working by rules that required allied aircraft to attack only the exact Serbian weapon that had fired into a U.N.-declared “safe area,” the Harrier was shot down on its 19th pass through hostile fire as the pilot passed up several similar potential targets in his search for the offending tank.

Differences both within NATO and with the United Nations over the use of allied air strikes have gradually neutralized the impact of air power in Bosnia. Nearly six months have passed since the last air strike there.

Despite these problems, alliance insiders insist that they have learned from their mistakes in the Balkans, such as agreeing to a joint command system with the United Nations.

The alliance has just completed detailed contingency planning to rescue the 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers from the former Yugoslav federation if the Security Council should decide to order a withdrawal. This time, NATO officials claim, they have insisted upon and been granted full command of the operation by the United Nations.

At present, however, the debate over “out of area” operations has been pushed into the background by two equally controversial and closely connected issues pivotal to the alliance’s future: enlargement, and its relations with Russia.

Leaders of the NATO nations, reacting to pressure from countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, first committed themselves to eventual enlargement at a January, 1994, summit. But the issue came to a head only late last year, when it became both a major Clinton Administration priority and the only foreign policy priority in the Republican “contract with America.”

The intensity of the American push immediately unsettled European allies and angered Moscow, which remains deeply suspicious of its Cold War adversary. It also turned a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in December into what one alliance staffer referred to as a train wreck--a collision between the U.S.-led push for enlargement and carefully nurtured plans to forge a new working relationship with Russia.

The collision took place in full public glare as Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev--miffed over the expansion plans--refused to sign a detailed cooperation agreement and instead denounced enlargement to the cameras in front of him.

In the months since, squaring NATO’s expansion plans with its need to engage Russia constructively has proven impossible.

“The expansion of the alliance is contrary to Russia’s vital interests,” declared Yuri Baturin, a national security aide to President Boris N. Yeltsin, recently. “Sooner or later, it can lead to the emergence of a sense of military and political isolation in Russia.”

U.S. officials predict that Moscow’s resistance could ease when Clinton and Yeltsin meet in Moscow on Tuesday and Wednesday, although the last time the two were together, at an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe meeting in Budapest in December, Yeltsin warned of a “cold peace.”

Advocates of enlargement claim that NATO’s security guarantees will help build new confidence into the struggling post-Communist nations, speed their integration into the West and bring their armed forces under democratic control more quickly. They also argue it would be impossible in an undivided Europe to deny these states equal security over the long term.

“Admission of the new democracies to NATO will make these countries feel safer and more secure and enhance their awareness of their European affiliation,” Czech President Vaclav Havel told a gathering of senior officers at the alliance military headquarters last Thursday.

While few dispute either Havel’s remarks or the need for equal security, many Europeans would prefer a more measured alliance expansion, in tandem with European Union enlargement.

The EU, they say, would provide an economic stability that in the post-Cold War era is probably more important to these struggling new democracies than military security, at least over the medium term. They also point out that the EU is not seen as a threat in Moscow.

“The resistance of Russia to NATO is a resistance to the Americans,” said Karl Lamers, the leading foreign specialist for the ruling Christian Democrats in the German Parliament.

Ironically, the enlargement issue is probably nowhere less understood than in the United States--the country lobbying hardest for it.

Few Americans realize, for example, that an expansion of NATO would effectively extend America’s nuclear umbrella and commit the United States and other members to defending new entrants in case of attack.

“I don’t think the public has been prepared for what that actually means,” said Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.), a key member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

An internal study under way at NATO headquarters here is attempting to assess the potential impact of enlargement, but even those involved acknowledge it’s very much a subjective exercise.

The task of a group charged with studying such things as the potential added difficulties of building the consensus needed for action within an 18-, 20- or 25-member alliance, compared with the present 16, has been dismissed by some.

“It’s about as meaningful as a committee on how to make love,” stated Frederick Bonnart, editor of NATO’s Sixteen Nations, an independent military journal published in Brussels. The confusion surrounding NATO’s future has been enhanced by the reduced effectiveness of the alliance’s secretary general, Willy Claes.

A former Belgian foreign minister, Claes is considered good at weaving together diverse strands of opinion, but he is said to lack the conceptual vision and the persuasive rhetoric of his immediate predecessors, Manfred Woerner and Peter Carrington.

Questions about his possible involvement in a Belgian political scandal involving defense contract kickbacks have also diminished Claes’ ability to lobby for his ideas in the corridors of power and have sharply reduced his public profile.

During a trip to the United States in March, he canceled a National Press Club appearance and granted only one interview, which dwelt heavily on the scandal. Claes declined to be interviewed for this article.

Despite NATO’s present lack of clearly defined purpose or direction and its weakened leadership, its supporters believe the alliance’s proven strength eventually will prevail.

“This is a time to understand that we’re going through a process, a process where we have to focus on the fundamentals--which are extremely strong,” declared John Kornblum, U.S. principal deputy secretary of state for European and European Community affairs. “We must not be led astray by the need for some sort of all-encompassing vision, but rather we must live with the debate.”

Pine reported from Washington, Marshall from Brussels. Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Moscow and researcher Isabelle Maelcamp of The Times’ Brussels Bureau also contributed to this report.