The question of enlarging NATO has occasioned the most important
foreign policy debate in the United States since the end of the Cold
War, and rightly so. The issue is integral to determining America's
future role in Europe, still a very important place in world politics.

But it has been a curious and unsatisfying debate in several ways:
Unsatisfying because it often seems as though there has been no
debate at all, only contrary assertions passing each other without
making useful contact; curious because of the various and
contradictory trajectories of shifting opinions. Several policy
analysts who started out favoring NATO enlargement have subsequently
become opponents of it, while the Clinton administration has moved in
the opposite direction, from skepticism and efforts at deflection to
avid embrace and the declaration, last summer, that debate over
essentials was closed.

Not only have the intellectual and policy processes been out of sync,
but the debate has also divided both rock-hearted realists and
passionate idealists in unusual ways. That Henry Kissinger and VÃ clav
Havel find themselves together on one side of the issue, Paul Nitze
and Richard Barnett together on the other, suggests that this is a
trickier problem than most. And it is tricky, not least because the
question at the center of the debate--to enlarge NATO or not?--turns
out to be the wrong question (but of this more below).

Realist Enlargers

Realists define foreign policy as being first and foremost about
national security in the literal sense: protecting the country and
its citizens from physical or economic harm. How does the prospect of
NATO enlargement look from this perspective, in which geopolitics
trumps all? As indicated above, it looks equivocal, for, although
operating from the same premises, various realists reach different
conclusions. To give one striking example: a Council on Foreign
Relations working group co-chaired by Henry Kissinger and Harold
Brown could not agree on their Final Report in 1995. That
report--Should NATO Expand?--lists only Brown as chairman, a note
within stating that Kissinger and Samuel Huntington, though members
of the group, declined to sign it.

The central argument made by realists who favor enlargement is that,
in the nature of things, given its size and historical ambitions, a
resurgent Russia is likely again in due course to threaten Central
and Eastern Europe (hereafter, for the sake of parsimony, simply
Central Europe). It is therefore best to seize the moment of
opportunity and to move the line of confrontation east while Russia
is weak. We should consolidate the historic outcome of 1989-91 while
we can, permanently erasing the unnatural division of Europe
represented by the Cold War.

It is on the basis of this logic that such advocates refer
unrepentantly, and often unselfconsciously, to Central Europe, the
Baltic republics, and Ukraine as a No Man's Land or a cast of nervous
neutrals--as though the Washington-Moscow conflict were a historical
constant rather than a politically contingent condition. Peter Rodman
expresses clearly the essential logic of the pro-enlargement realist
case--its assumption of the incorrigible nature of Moscow's
ambition--in these terms: "The only potential great-power security
problem in Central Europe is the lengthening shadow of Russian
strength, and NATO still has the job of counter-balancing it. Russia
is a force of nature; all this is inevitable."

Further, not to expand NATO would be taken by the Russians as tacit
U.S. acceptance of Moscow's right to define Central Europe as its
security glacis. And to allow Moscow this interpretation would amount
to acquiescence in the rebirth of the Warsaw Pact, or something like
it--a folly, some say, destined to rival Yalta as a symbol of infamy.

Some prestigious early commentary also argued for NATO enlargement in
institutional as well as substantive terms. We need NATO against an
uncertain future, said Dr. Kissinger in 1994, but "NATO cannot long
survive if the borders it protects are not threatened while it
refuses to protect the borders of adjoining countries that do feel
threatened." Senator Richard Lugar's view that NATO had to go
out-of-area or risk being out-of-business was similarly motivated:
preserve the alliance by expanding its functions as well as its
members, for while we do not need a military shield now, we may find
it impossible to reconstitute one should we need it later.

Other realists favor expanding NATO less out of fear of a future
Russian military threat, and more as a means of achieving long-term
political stabilization in Europe. This argument comes in three
related variations.

First, expanding NATO is said to be necessary to protect Central
Europe's new democracies and their liberal economic reforms from
being swallowed up by political opportunists feeding on the
dislocations of the post-communist era. The West, it is maintained,
needs to give these countries a roof for their reconstruction more
than a wall against an external threat. This is particularly the case
in such an ethnically heterogeneous region, it is argued, because
liberal free-market democracies provide better protection against
explosions of ethnic hatred than regimes commandeered by nationalist
oligarches.

Second, keeping Central Europe at peace with itself, both within and
between its countries, helps prevent a broader danger, that of this
region's again becoming a theater for the intrigues of Russia and
Germany, a fate that has been its historic lot. Some worry more about
Russia, some more about Germany, but all worry about a collision (or
collusion) between them. The gist of the pro-enlargement view based
on this concern is that just as NATO managed in time to solve the
problem that had given shape to the First World War--the
long-standing Franco-German rivalry--so it should expand to solve the
problem that helped shape the Second World War--the equally
long-standing Russo-German rivalry. Few who reason this way claim
that this will be easy. What they do argue is that this should be a
pre-eminent task of a geopolitically-minded statecraft for the next
several decades, and that only the wise application of American power
can achieve it.

Third, there is fear of German resurgence itself. After forty years
of tense competition between the United States and Russia, few are
inhibited from speaking of Russia as a future problem. Not so with
Germany, a democracy and an ally; but the fear exists and the
inhibitions do sometimes break down. Tony Judt describes the basic
physiognomy of this fear in the context of EU deepening; now that the
Germans

". . . lead Europe, where should they take it? And of what Europe are
they the natural leaders--the West-leaning Europe forged by the
French, or the traditional Europe of German interests, where Germany
sits not on the eastern edge but squarely in the middle? . . . [T]he
image of a Germany resolutely turning away from troubling Eastern
memories, clinging fervently to its postwar Western allies, as though
they alone stood between the nation and its demons, is not very
convincing."

Anthony Hartley, too, in an essay entitled "Thomas Mann and Germany's
Demons", argues that "Germany still retains the indetermination that
Mann saw in it. Behind it looms the ambivalence of German culture. No
one", he added, "can have much certainty as to the direction in which
a newly reunited Germany will jump." Robert W. Tucker and Thomas C.
Hendrickson have argued that Germany as "the most powerful state in
Europe will entertain pretensions to a role and status commensurate
with its power. In doing so, it is bound to stimulate the suspicions
and unease of a continent that has not forgotten the past."

Adding to the anxiety is knowledge that the Germans as a people still
cannot decide what the rightful borders of their country should be;
that stridently nationalist rhetoric has been heard with greater
frequency since reunification; and that German government ministers
even speak of wanting apologies from the Czech Republic for the
postwar expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.

Clearly, the possibility that German interests will pull it away from
its Atlantic moorings, destroying NATO in the process, and lead to a
Germany with nuclear weapons haunts many minds. Translated into the
terms of the NATO debate, this becomes an argument that, if Germany
continues to sit on the eastern frontier of NATO, its inevitably
large diplomatic (and economic) agenda in the lands between it and
Russia will become divorced from U.S. power and political influence.
But if Central Europe is brought into the alliance, it is argued,
America can play a leavening role, reducing the prospect of conflict
over expanding German power.

These various arguments for enlarging NATO--one emphasizing the need
to deter the Russians militarily, others the need to secure Europe
politically--are sometimes characterized as complementary, as well
they may be in some respects. But in one sense they are mutually
exclusive: The former cannot hide its anti-Russian premise, while the
latter believe that expanding NATO need not be anti-Russian and that,
once they get a grip on their reduced circumstances, the Russians can
be so persuaded. And they should acquiesce, the reasoning goes,
because unless Moscow contemplates future aggression in Central
Europe, Russians should be grateful for any institutional arrangement
that promises to save them from yet another historic confrontation
with the Germans. However, with one school marking them as villains
and the other marking them as benefactors, many in Moscow cannot help
wondering which argument is sincere and which is pretext. Plans that
include both enlarging NATO and creating other arrangements to
assuage Russian concerns, while not illogical in themselves, seem to
particularly frustrate Russian observers.

Realist Doubters

Other realists, with no less impressive credentials as masters of
realpolitik, reject all these justifications for enlargement. As for
the Russia-oriented argument, they point out that there is simply no
Russian military threat in sight, and that there will be plenty of
time to respond if one begins to emerge. And what other sort of
occasion to advance Russian ambitions is there likely to be? Central
Europe fell into Soviet domination because the Red Army moved into a
virtual political vacuum with the defeat of Nazi Germany, and Moscow
solidified control partly through the use of communist
"internationalism." Today there is no such vacuum and no such
"internationalism", and neither is likely to reappear in the
foreseeable future.

As for the argument that NATO can be kept alive by enlarging its
membership and functions, opponents of enlargement see in this a vast
underestimation of NATO's considerable and well-appreciated "as is"
value as a guarantor against Russian imperial recidivism. That view
is also criticized for reversing means and ends, letting the survival
of NATO drive security policy rather than serve it.

As for the more political arguments for enlargement, realist skeptics
are impressed with both the social and moral transformation of
Germany and the weakness of Russia. They therefore argue that
Russo-German competition will not unsettle Central Europe as it once
did. NATO enlargers are said to be busily engaged in solving
yesterday's problems, with those who fear the Russians still fighting
the Cold War, and those who fear the Germans still fighting the two
wars before that.

Most such observers find it highly improbable that Germany would
write off decades of integration into Atlantic and European
institutions, and the German government, if anything, shows more of
an inclination to deepen that integration. Moreover, it is plain that
an awakening German pride no longer finds expression in military
ambitions and metaphors, and that its demographic profile shows a
rapidly aging and slightly shrinking population, leaving the country
without means for protracted military assertion. Current demographic
and economic trends suggest further that the relative size of the
German economy will decline as well, to the point that within fifty
years the German and French economies will be roughly the same size,
both of them in turn of a similar order of magnitude to that of Great
Britain.

As for Russia, those inclined against enlargement see neither the
Russian people nor the Russian elite as imperialist. Rather, as
Charles Fairbanks has put it, "Russian national reassertion is not a
mass taste or instinct, but a posture or gesture." Russian concern
for the "near abroad", it is claimed, is no more (or less) imperial
than the historic U.S. concern for the Caribbean and Central America.

Some argue further that there is already a security structure in
place in Central Europe, composed of a floor-to-ceiling array of arms
control agreements (CFE +INF+START) and networks of economic and
institutional engagements, all buttressed by what amounts to a moral
commitment to European peace. Both the United States and Russia are
parties to these agreements, so Central Europe is already included
"in effect" in the security structure that bridges Europe. But given
the fragile condition of both the Russian state and psyche after the
Soviet era, advancing NATO toward the Russian steppes might well lead
to the collapse of these existing military-strategic understandings.
Enlargement is thus characterized as being less likely to solve a
problem than, as Sam Nunn put it, "to help create the very threat we
are trying to guard against."

More specifically, it is argued that if NATO pushes itself part but
not all the way eastward, it will create a compressed and volatile
tinder out of the Baltic states and Ukraine. It would, in short, not
eliminate an unstable zone between Russia and Germany but bring a
more combustible one into being. This would be the case not only in a
political but also in a military sense. Pushing NATO's military
muscle eastward would invert the nuclear first-use imperative of Cold
War days: instead of NATO employing that posture to deal with its
conventional military inferiority to the Warsaw Pact countries,
Russia would do so in response to the new NATO conventional
superiority. It would be awkward, to say the least, to refute Russian
logic on this point, since it is a logic that NATO itself invented.

To drive home the point that NATO enlargement would represent
geopolitical overreach of a dangerous kind, some of those opposed to
enlargement put the matter in these terms: If it had been proposed to
you in 1989 that the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union both would come
peaceably to an end, that Germany would be reunited in NATO, and that
all Russian military forces would withdraw behind their own
frontier--and that all that was asked in return was that NATO not
take advantage of this retreat by moving eastward--would you have
accepted? Extraordinary as it would have sounded then, had it been
put so succinctly and all in one breath, this is more or less what
was in fact proposed in the "two-plus-four" agreement for the
reunification of Germany, and later accepted as the Warsaw Pact
collapsed. The United States affirmed and helped guide this
progression of events from the pinnacle of its leadership, and most
Russian observers today see U.S. support for NATO expansion as being
inconsistent with this undertaking. Thus Sergei Karaganov, one of
Russia's friendliest critics of NATO enlargement:

"In 1990 we were told quite clearly by the West that dissolution of
the Warsaw Pact and German unification would not lead to NATO
expansion. We did not demand written guarantees because in the
euphoric atmosphere of that time it would have seemed almost
indecent, like two girlfriends giving written promises not to seduce
each other's husbands."

In short, then, it is argued that expanding NATO represents both the
breaking of at least an implicit promise, and an expression of
geopolitical greed toward a humiliated former superpower adversary
that still possesses enormous nuclear clout, and whose cooperation is
still needed on a range of critical international problems. It is to
ignore Churchill's famous advice--"In victory: magnanimity"--in the
most pig-headed way.

The concern of other realists is focused on the prospect that
expanding NATO will vitiate its core mission: that of a military
alliance which, while not urgently needed at present, might be so
needed in the future. It is especially risky to push on with
enlargement before we have answers to some important questions:

* How will expanding the alliance influence NATO's military strategy?
If NATO troops and nuclear weapons are deployed forward in Central
Europe, how many and whose will they be? Will the CFE and INF
treaties have to be re-negotiated--assuming the Russians do not
renounce them outright?

* If military forces are not moved forward, what would the resultant
multi-tiered membership structure do to NATO's political coherence?
To the functioning of its unanimity rule? To the already difficult
problem of reaching a consensus on the alliance's role in out-of-area
domains?

* What steps are to be taken to ensure that new members will meet
existing standards of military capability and performance? Or will
standards be lowered for new members, and if so at what risk to
military effectiveness?

* How much will the various versions of enlargement really cost the
United States, particularly at a time when our allies' military
expenditures are falling even faster than our own? Since when does a
military alliance, in the absence of a threat, take on expansive and
expensive new responsibilities at a time when the defense budget of
every member of that alliance is falling?

* How does the seemingly bipartisan concern to curb the power of the
U.S. federal government play against the assumption of substantially
more responsibilities abroad? Having once secured sixty-seven Senate
votes in favor of enlarging the alliance, will it be possible to get
even simple majority votes, year after year, on the appropriations
bills required to fulfill the commitments undertaken?

These are hardly minor issues. Without at least tentative answers to
such questions it is difficult to see how a sensible conclusion about
enlargement can be reached at all.

Finally in this regard, some observers who oppose the expansion of
NATO but take seriously the anxieties of the Central Europeans,
suggest more modest steps, such as expanding the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union to
meet the needs of the supplicant states. The general point in such
suggestions is that we have choices other than extending formal
security guarantees or doing nothing. "The Cold War framework has
distorted our perceptions", writes Robert Jervis. "We have become
accustomed to thinking that important interests require firm
commitments and that little else will be effective. We have neglected
much of the range of classical diplomacy."

The NATO Debate as Culture War

Most of what we hear about NATO enlargement falls into the realist
domain--but not all of it. There is, in addition, an undertone of
argument that takes an idealist or, better, a cultural form. This
undertone has to do largely with divergent interpretations of what
constitutes politically binding "kinship." It is, in essence, the
replaying in a new context of the debate over the "West", and there
is a close symmetry between the two. Partisans of enlargement
generally affirm the reality of the "West" along both historical and
ideological lines, while those opposed most often do not.

As for the historical rationale, those favoring NATO enlargement
argue that Slavs and Hungarians, as well as Slovenians and Balts,
share the heritage of the Renaissance and the Reformation, being both
culturally "modern" and within the domain of Western Christianity. As
for the ideological, Central European countries are deemed fit for
inclusion to the extent that they are democratic and free-market
oriented.

Those persuaded by the historical rationale are represented
prominently by Samuel Huntington, who favors NATO expansion as a
means of politically unifying the cultural West around U.S.
leadership to face Orthodox, Islamic, and other civilizations. Those
more focused on ideology would expand NATO in order to expand the
"West", conceived as a metaphysical zone of free political choice
(democracy), free markets (capitalism), and free minds (liberty).
Many credit Havel's argument that the West has a moral commitment to
protect Central Europe. But the practical side of the argument
usually takes pride of place: Societies marked by such qualities do
not war on one another, so the clear American interest is to expand
the domain of Western civilization by bringing Europe's fledgling
free to shelter under NATO's wing.

Contrarily, those inclined against enlargement generally argue that
there is no West in a meaningful politico-military sense, now that
there is no communist East against which to define it. Some go
further, claiming that there never was any such thing as a political
West. What seemed to be the "West" arose from Cold War melodrama, a
notion summoned from the vasty deep but now banished back to its
vaporous etherae. Why ethereal? Because claims for the "West" as a
traditional repository of positive political values do not stand up
to scrutiny. Germany was undoubtedly Western over the past century,
yet it often respected neither human rights, nor the rule of law, nor
representative democracy, not to speak of having started two world
wars in which over sixty million people were killed. And three
centuries before that, divisions between Catholics and Protestants
were often murderous. Since the so-called West has neither venerable
pedigree, nor a clear set of political values, nor any experience of
continuous political unity within the last thousand years, the extent
to which Central Europeans are culturally Western is simply
irrelevant to a debate about contemporary security issues.

So much for the historical case; what about the ideological one?
First of all, many observers question the true extent and likely
longevity of genuine political and economic reform throughout Central
Europe. Others wonder as well if contemporary Western Europe is still
"Western" in the philosophical sense. The contemporary idea of
"Europe", it is said, which champions corporatism in place of
democracy, socialism within and protectionism without in place of the
free market, and a continental-scale bureaucracy in place of the
prerogatives of liberty, does not square with Western political
values as they are traditionally understood. Many of those who
espouse this view see West European societies much enfeebled by the
demobilizing comforts of the welfare state, and their governments
easily cowed by any halfway ruthless challenger.

The implication for NATO enlargement is obvious: If the Europeans
have lost their own political verve to the point that they do not
seriously contemplate ever again having to defend their own vital
interests, what makes anyone think that Frenchmen, Germans, or
Dutchmen will fight for the sake of Poles or Hungarians? On occasion,
too, West Europeans seem far more intent on keeping Central Europe as
a plantation, exploiting its cheaper skilled labor and resources but
keeping out its lower priced goods and bumptious immigrants. Some
West Europeans may therefore favor NATO expansion to deflect
pressures for the expansion of the EU. Others may do so because they
fear a "deeper" Europe that would exclude America and Central Europe.
But very few support it because they feel a strong historical or
ideological kinship with Central Europeans. That being the case, it
is argued, NATO enlargement must be decided solely on strategic
grounds, stripped of any larger purported cultural significance.

Getting Serious

Whether the NATO debate is about the definition and scope of European
civilization, the structure of European security, or some of both, it
is a serious matter--more serious than the debate over enlargement
has often been. Some proponents of enlargement sing the praises of
marching eastward as if prepared to lug the caissons themselves,
ready to die for Bratislava without being able to find it on a map.
Others urging Czech, Polish, and Hungarian membership in the first
round seem to be unaware of the fact that without Slovakia, and sans
Slovenian or Austrian entry into NATO, Hungary has no border with any
NATO country. There are also those who seem to miss the exhilaration
of Cold War competition, and who actually relish irritating the
Russians.

On the other hand, some arguing against enlargement hold
simultaneously that since Russia is so weak, there is no need to
expand, and that since Russia may one day again be strong, it is too
dangerous to expand. Relatedly, others argue that since Russia is
weak expansion is not needed, and, simultaneously, that expansion
would be too expensive given falling budgets and other needs--but
enlargement at the political level can proceed without large
additional military expenses as long as Russian behavior makes such
expenses unnecessary.

A greater barrier to serious intellectual engagement than any amount
of wayward punditry, however, has been the Clinton administration's
weaving and wobbling its way to a conclusion on NATO enlargement. The
sitting administration's actual policy record inevitably shapes
thinking about major foreign policy issues; in this case, the Clinton
team's dissociated approach to European security has had the general
effect of disorganizing the existing stock of geopolitical knowledge.

The administration's embrace of the pro-enlargement view proceeded in
an ungainly two-step process. First, by late 1993 expectations of
quick economic and political reform in Russia had acquired a thick
patina of doubt, inspiring the new elites in Central Europe to
remember their histories. Their subsequent ministrations to
Washington were not entirely welcome to Clinton administration
principals, who had until then ignored NATO (and other traditional
U.S. alliances, too) in favor of assertive multilateralism,
democratic enlargement, and other catchy-sounding substitutes for
geopolitical thinking. These ministrations led, however, to the
deliberately off-putting episode of the Partnership for Peace, a
halfway-house of both commitment and understanding that ended up
assuming more substance than its authors probably intended, for fast
on the heels of the Partnership came the growing American policy
debacle in Bosnia. The administration's subsequent embrace of NATO
enlargement seems to have come partly from concern to repair the
damage done by its mistakes there. This repair job was undertaken
despite the fact that it contradicted U.S. policy of pragmatic
partnership with Russia.

In other words, U.S. policy toward Bosnia formed reactively, in
isolation from any sense of a general U.S. policy toward Europe,
eventually endangering NATO; and then U.S. policy toward NATO formed
reactively, in isolation from its implications for U.S. policy toward
Russia, eventually endangering partnership. This was a perfectly
backwards way of thinking about European security, but we have been
backing into that subject for so long now that it has become for many
an unconscious habit. We need to turn around and face front: The real
issue is not how large NATO needs to be, but how large the American
role in Europe needs to be to assure European security after the Cold
War. It really is important to start with the right question.

If it is to be successful, security policy must respond realistically
to the level of threat. In the case of security guarantees offered to
distant allies, that sense of realism turns on two factors: how
serious the threat is, and the extent to which one's allies can meet
it on their own. Clearly, then, what Europeans themselves do now that
the Cold War's constraints are gone will have a major impact on the
problem at hand. Whether the new democracies of Central Europe become
going concerns, and what becomes of efforts to create European
political union are clearly the two key factors involved.

To the extent that Europe coheres politically and inclusively, it
should dampen internal conflict, embed Germany safely in a
multinational diplomatic cushion, and provide both an economic and
social basis for Europe to manage more of its own security problems.
If Europe does not cohere, or if the core EU countries "deepen" their
association at the expense of Central Europe, then a less benign
result may be expected. This is not the place to examine all possible
European security environments that may arise over the next few
decades; the point is simply that planning the U.S.-led facet of the
European security equation--NATO--cannot proceed in isolation from
consideration of other integrally European facets.

The future of European integration and the future of NATO are each a
function of the other, in the sense that the ideal extent of the
American security role in Europe is that required portion that is
left after what the Europeans themselves provide. The Europeans could
do much more for themselves than they do at present if a more
autonomous NATO-European pillar within the alliance were to develop
in tandem with a wider inter-governmental European Union. If it does,
the United States could, and should, still contain both Germany and
fears of Germany, and offset Russian strategic forces. But Europe
could, and should, assume more of the political and conventional
military burden for balancing Russia, and for keeping its own house
in order. This defines the difference between Copernican and
Ptolemaic conceptions of the U.S. orb in Europe--the former includes
America as a part of that world, but not as its center, as the latter
would have it.

This is probably the best of possible futures, but at present Europe
appears instead to be set on course either for "deep"-and-small-EU,
or for retrograde motion toward newly competitive security policies
should European Union "beyond Maastricht" fail. It will probably
fail. Nor have the major West European states shown much talent for
handling security issues at their periphery, as the Bosnia experience
shows. But whatever happens, the evolution of European politics, well
entangled as they already are with American political influence and
military power, will be more important to European security than
whether NATO is enlarged in the near term or not.

Walk, Don't Run

Unfortunately, the enlargement dilemma deflects attention from all this - but that dilemma sits in our laps and something must be done about it. What is that something? It is, I suggest, to slow the policy process down to give ourselves a chance to sort out these larger issues. The polarizing tendencies of polemic aside, we face a common problem over NATO enlargement: that of wanting something, but not wanting to pay the price for it. It is possible simultaneously to credit most prudential arguments against enlarging NATO and still respect some arguments in principle favoring it. The trick, as always, is to judge wisely with both sets of arguments in mind.

The best argument for enlargement is that which sees a larger NATO as protection against a Europe returned to re-nationalized, competitive security policies. The optimists may be right about both Germany and Russia, and correct that even a revival of their rivalry would be expressed only in relatively harmless economic terms. But that is by no means clear. The German political personality floats today in a historical space defined by the memory of moral enormities and dual national defeat on the one side, impressive economic success and recent reunification on the other. It is, indeed, too soon to draw confident conclusions about its future.

As for Russia, few would claim that its journey is set and its destination known. So far, so pretty good, but until Russia has built a social infrastructure for political pluralism and the rule of law - both unknown in six hundred years of its modern history, and still little more than noble intentions - no one could be blamed for expecting another autocratic, imperial emergence from another Russian Time of Troubles. And, certainly, Central Europe has a capacity for homegrown mischief whose exploitation by troubled powers on the flanks could once again prove irresistible.

That said, concern about future European troubles is at present very speculative. There is plenty of time to see whether such worries are justified, so there is no need to rush into major commitments without really having thought them. through. That we are on the verge of such decisions anyway owes much more to the fallout from the Clinton administration's accident-prone experience in Europe over the past four years than to careful analysis.

Temporizing is not always a good idea, but neither is impetuousness, and it is nothing other than impetuous to end the NATO enlargement debate prematurely, to decide such an important issue before its time. In one sense, though, debate cannot end, for events will re-open it - several times, no doubt - in the years ahead. As they do, we shall be reminded that there are some things in life that, if they cannot be done properly, ought not be done at all.

Time, therefore, is of the essence in the special sense that we should use the uncharacteristically ample supply at our disposal to apply the diplomatic arts and to examine carefully all the options in Europe, not only those directly pertaining to NATO enlargement. If the Clinton administration is not so disposed, then the Senate, before and during ratification hearings, should insist on it. That is, in this case, the national interest.