New Size, Scope, Mission in Store for NATO

NATO leaders will declare at a summit here this week a new focus on the global fight against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, edging the Western alliance further away from its roots as an anti-Soviet defense group.

The shift grows out of the global response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a warming of the West’s relations with Moscow, as the former enemies seek to cooperate against a shared threat.

Additionally -- and of particular importance for those who still fear Russia or believe it may emerge as a danger in the future -- making anti-terrorism a core mission conveniently gives the North Atlantic Treaty Organization an official new reason to exist. That makes it easier to keep the alliance in place to ensure military cooperation among members without needing to provoke Moscow by declaring it still a potential enemy.

Leaders who will gather here in the Czech capital Thursday and Friday also will debate what role members should play in any U.S.-led war against Iraq.

The emphasis on anti-terrorism efforts should take some of the sting for Russia out of plans to issue membership invitations at the summit to as many as seven formerly communist states, including three Baltic countries that for decades were part of the Soviet Union.

Membership for former Soviet bloc states has become “a symbol that the given country belongs to democratic Europe,” so NATO enlargement helps “expand the frontiers of European values,” said Lubos Dobrovsky, a Czech dissident who after the fall of communism became defense minister and ambassador to Russia.

Moscow is happy to be a partner in anti-terrorism efforts but quietly seethes over the alliance’s planned expansion. Its response has been muted for a variety of reasons, ranging from acceptance of the inevitable to calculations that Russia’s long-term interests lie after all in closer integration with the West.

“We hope ... that none of the steps to be taken will undermine stability and security in the common European space and will not damage or prejudice the national security interests of Russia,” Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said last week in Brussels after meeting with NATO Secretary-General George Robertson to discuss the summit. “I hope mutual military restraint and confidence will serve as a basis for NATO-Russia relations.”

Robertson, standing alongside Putin, said steps taken in the Czech capital would not be “in any way contrary to any of Russia’s security interests.”

Putin and Robertson said they were satisfied with the work of the NATO-Russia Council, a body set up in May that brings Moscow into full consultation with the allies on issues such as peacekeeping and terrorism.

Critics fear that NATO and Russia are trying to paper over their differences. The council “created the false illusion that Russia can be regarded as a credible partner of the democratic world,” Dobrovsky said. But Moscow, he insisted, “retains many of the old Soviet characteristics” even as Putin seeks “modernization at any price.”

Speaking Friday in Istanbul, Turkey, Robertson declared that “Prague is about NATO’s comprehensive transformation.”

“After Sept. 11, we had to realize that terrorism has become an international security challenge and that we had no real recipe to deal with it,” he said. “That was not the only shock we were dealt. The fact that Al Qaeda operated from Afghanistan demonstrated the connection between terrorism and failed states. The fact that some of these terrorists were trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction raised yet another danger: the specter of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in the hands of people too irrational to be deterred by the logic of orthodox deterrence.”

The result was to turn “combating terrorism into a new mission for this alliance,” Robertson said, and to end NATO’s unwillingness to act “out of area” -- outside the borders of its member states.

“The idea of imposing geographical limitations on NATO’s reach is, in effect, dead,” he declared. “When the World Trade Center collapsed, the notion of in and out of area collapsed with it. We can no longer look at threats only geographically.”

In the context of the alliance gearing up for a long and fierce anti-terrorism struggle, fear of Russia has become the elephant in the closet, unlikely to be discussed frankly at the summit.

The alliance will portray enlargement primarily as a way of welcoming new members into the community of Western democracies, rather than defending them against Moscow.

Even so, letting in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia inevitably carries overtones of protecting them from their powerful neighbor to the east. Many in those states fear a reimposition of Moscow’s control, and some Russian nationalists would like just that.

Planned invitations to Romania and Bulgaria are widely seen as extending NATO’s reach and improving its defense against terrorist or other threats arising in the Middle East and Central Asia. Welcoming Slovenia and Slovakia is little more than filling in territorial gaps of membership in Central Europe.

Accession for the invitees is likely to be targeted for 2004. Three other applicants -- Albania, Macedonia and Croatia -- are not expected to win invitations at this gathering.

NATO intends to respond to the new terrorist threats by shifting its focus toward more flexible and high-tech forces, Robertson said in a speech this month in Brussels.

Alliance members will promise to build strength in areas such as “long-range airlift, air tankers, better surveillance, precision-guided weapons to prevail with the minimum casualties on all sides, modern secure communications ... and protection against weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

The summit will also approve a U.S. proposal to create a NATO rapid-response force capable of quick deployment outside alliance territory, he said.

About 12,000 police and soldiers are expected to be on duty at the summit to protect more than 40 heads of state or government. Up to 250 American troops and 15 U.S. aircraft, including four to six fighters in the air at any time, will assist.

President Bush will attend, as will many leaders from the 18 other NATO member states, the 10 countries seeking membership and other nations formally associated with the alliance.

Bush embarks on his 11th trip abroad as president with his domestic clout at its zenith and his nation in a showdown with Iraq. Midterm elections Nov. 5 left the Democrats in disarray and will deliver early next year a Republican-dominated Congress ready to do his bidding. Armed with a U.N. Security Council resolution against Iraq, the president could not be riding higher as he takes his campaign against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to a new level.

Robertson told reporters last week in Brussels that the summit will debate what members should do if Iraq rebuffs U.N. weapons inspections, which would set the stage for a U.S.-led war to overthrow Hussein. “NATO nations may well assist the United States

Decisions made here could set precedents and define better command structures for future such actions far from NATO territory, which are likely to be carried out by so-called coalitions of the willing rather than the alliance as a whole.

Instead of viewing NATO as a unified military alliance, the Bush administration increasingly sees it as a “toolbox” that can provide niche capabilities, such as Czech expertise in defense against chemical and biological weapons, said Philip H. Gordon, who was director for European affairs at the National Security Council in the Clinton White House.

Putin will not attend the summit, but he is scheduled to meet with Bush in St. Petersburg afterward. Bush’s trip, which will also take him to Lithuania and Romania, amounts in many ways to a postelection “victory lap,” Gordon said.

Alexei G. Arbatov, deputy chairman of the defense committee in the lower house of Russia’s parliament, said in an interview that Moscow hasn’t spoken out more forcefully against enlargement “because the more Russia speaks against it, the more certain NATO expansion will be. Experience already shows this.”

Cooperating with the U.S. and integrating into Europe is essential if Russia is to be “a civilized 21st century power,” Arbatov said.

But one of the key reasons Putin decided to go along with many Western policies after the Sept. 11 attacks was to head off criticism abroad of his authoritarian measures at home, Arbatov added. These include tighter controls on the mass media, a tough military policy toward separatists in the republic of Chechnya and the promotion of many people from the armed forces and secret services to positions of influence.

“I would prefer for President Putin to do just the opposite, to go forward with improvement and expansion of democratic freedoms, division of powers, rule of law in our country and finding a political solution to the war in Chechnya, while being much more tough on the issues of international security where the West, in particular the United States, has very unfair or counterproductive or just very negative positions,” Arbatov said, citing as examples NATO expansion and the U.S. withdrawal in June from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

*

Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Washington and special correspondent Iva Drapalova in Prague contributed to this report.