NATO Source: U.S. Pushes Alliance's Expansion After Attack

U.S. President George W. Bush is more committed than ever to the NATO expansion following the September 11 attacks on the United States, a senior NATO official said Friday.

The official was briefing on talks that NATO Secretary-General George Robertson had in Washington with Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and U.S. senators.

"Enlargement came up and the administration said 'make no mistake, we are all supportive. We haven't changed our mind.' ... More than ever this enlargement makes sense because it enhances our common security," the official told reporters.

It was the clearest indication so far that the new spirit of cooperation between Russia and the West in the fight against terrorism would not prompt Bush to defer or scale down the next wave of NATO expansion, due to be launched next year.

The official said Robertson and Bush did not discuss which specific east European countries should be invited to join when the 19-nation alliance holds its next summit in Prague in November 2002.

But Bush had said that his June speech in Warsaw, which envisaged a NATO from the Baltic to the Black Sea, remained valid.

NATO diplomats said it looked increasingly probable that all three former Soviet Baltic republics -- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia -- would be invited to join, along with Slovakia, Slovenia and probably Bulgaria and Romania. The official made clear candidates must first meet goals for military reform and civilian control over the armed forces set out in NATO's 1999 Membership Action Plan.

Russia has in the past fiercely opposed expanding NATO to include former Soviet territory but Russian President Vladimir Putin softened that stance on a visit to Brussels last week. Putin said he might reconsider his opposition to NATO expansion if the alliance became more of a political than a military body, and Russia felt more involved in the process.






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