NATO Growth Is Key to Security, Senate Told

Amid conditions far more favorable than she could have hoped for barely six months ago, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Tuesday began the job of selling the Senate on the Clinton administration’s premier, and controversial, foreign affairs initiative: North Atlantic Treaty Organization enlargement.

In the first formal hearings on the issue, Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that expanding the United States’ security commitments--including its nuclear guarantees--eastward is vital to preserving the peace in Europe, despite the absence of any current visible threat there.

“A larger NATO will prevent conflict, strengthen NATO and protect the gains of stability and freedom in Central and Eastern Europe,” she said. “That is the strategic rationale.”

Albright called the costs of enlargement--currently estimated by the Pentagon at $27 billion to $35 billion over the next decade--as “real but affordable,” and labeled Russian opposition to the move as “a product of old misperceptions.”

“Instead of changing our policies to accommodate Russia’s outdated fears, we need to encourage Russia’s more modern aspirations,” she told the lawmakers.

Tuesday’s hearing was the first of several that the Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled this month.

Last July in Madrid, President Clinton and leaders of the alliance’s 15 other member countries invited Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO immediately and held out the prospect that other nations might be invited to join within the next few years.

The negotiated terms of accession for all three countries are expected to be signed in December, and the Senate’s vote on ratification is expected next year.

The expansion policy has been controversial from the start, generating the opposition of such highly respected figures as former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and George Kennan, one of the century’s most influential U.S. diplomats.

But Senate ratification, once considered an uphill fight, now looks increasingly probable. Among the reasons:

* The decibel level of Moscow’s protests has diminished sharply. Russia remains fundamentally opposed to expansion, which would bring the world’s most powerful military alliance closer to its own frontiers. But its rhetoric fell off sharply after a NATO-Russia summit in Paris last May gave Moscow a formal, albeit largely consultative, voice in alliance affairs.

* Public opinion in the United States appears to have settled broadly in favor of enlargement. A poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press in Washington found that the public favors expansion by a wide margin of 63% to 18%, with only 19% undecided.

* The alliance’s image has brightened with modest, yet significant, progress in the NATO-led effort to stabilize Bosnia-Herzegovina. Monday’s surrender of 10 Bosnian Croats suspected of war crimes and the open split in the Bosnian Serb leadership are only two examples of recent gains.

* Albright’s personal chemistry with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) appears to be intact despite Helms’ summer clash with the White House over the nomination of former Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld as ambassador to Mexico. Helms has expressed doubts about the administration’s tactics on enlargement, but Tuesday he praised Albright’s testimony as a “very eloquent, important statement.”