NATO Plan Is Inviting Loud Debate

On the face of it, NATO’s imminent invitation to three of its former enemies to join the alliance stands out as President Clinton’s premier achievement in foreign policy, a plan he sponsored, promoted and sold to wary allies.

But as the 16-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization prepares this week to adopt Clinton’s plan to open its doors to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, his initiative is becoming a topic of fierce debate among experts, some of whom fear it is an epic mistake that ultimately will lead to American blood being spilled in far-off lands for obscure reasons.

On Saturday, as Clinton toured a medieval fortress on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, the White House was anticipating a triumphant week that will feature Tuesday’s much-ballyhooed NATO summit in Madrid, followed by presidential visits to Poland and Romania.

At home, meanwhile, the debate over Clinton’s signature initiative in foreign policy is growing, a clash of views that is certain to become noisier and more heated in the coming weeks.

“They’ve made a policy decision, but they do not have a strategy,” said Jack Mendelsohn, deputy director of the Arms Control Assn., a Washington-based think tank. “They do not know where this is going to lead.

“People will ask: ‘Should we be defending the Romanian-Ukraine border? Is that something the United States needs to get involved in?’ ”

Michael W. Doyle, director of Princeton University’s Center of International Studies, offered a question of his own: “What is the purpose of this new NATO?”

Supporters inside and outside the White House offer various answers. They view it as a bold step for long-term stability in Europe, and a way to nurture fledgling democracies that once revolved around the Soviet Union by wedding them to Western military, political and economic institutions.

Moreover, proponents applaud Clinton’s strategy as a way to preserve American influence in a part of the world often associated with war and instability.

“It’s a way of expanding American influence into Eastern and Central Europe,” said Kim R. Holmes, chief foreign policy spokesman at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington and a general supporter of Clinton’s approach.

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More than any other foreign policy move by Clinton, analysts generally agree, NATO expansion represents a forward-looking plan with potentially enormous ripple effects.

“We’re making history next Tuesday,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry declared last week before Clinton left for Spain.

But some caution that Americans should not be lulled by the recent NATO-Russia charter signed in Paris in which Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin seemed comfortable with Western promises that the alliance will work more closely with his nation. Rather, they warn, an expanded NATO could be a dangerous provocation to hard-liners in Moscow, who resent the expansion of an alliance still widely perceived as an anti-Russia coalition.

Said one senior Russian official: “What is happening now is a big mistake, a mistake that will be resolved by the dissolution of the alliance.

“Yes, we signed the documents [that bond the Cold War adversaries], but we still don’t understand enlargement and the eagerness to bring a military organization closer to Russia. All of us in Russia ask: Why are they doing this?”

Under NATO rules, nations must respond to an attack on any members as an attack against the whole alliance, a provision that raises scenarios of U.S. troops becoming entangled in European feuds.

“Is the American public willing to risk the lives of U.S. troops should the security or stability of Eastern Europe be threatened?” more than 20 Republican and Democratic members of the Senate asked in a June letter to Clinton. “The question is complicated by the fact that the U.S. commitment to NATO includes the use of its nuclear forces.”

Doubters also maintain that U.S. and NATO officials have failed to make clear precisely what they are looking for in new members--why, for example, Hungary makes the grade but Slovenia does not. Then there is the matter of cost, with upbeat American officials predicting that taxpayers will shoulder no more than $250 million a year and pessimists arguing that the price tag could be much higher.

This week the policy will be praised by world leaders in Madrid. But soon after, a major domestic battle is expected to flare up.

“This is not over yet,” said Holmes of the Heritage Foundation.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall in Washington contributed to this report.