Col. Stanislav Lunev
Monday, April 8, 2002

As President Bush said in his message read at a summit of nine candidate nations in Bucharest, Romania, "in Prague, our nations will take a historic step forward removing the remaining divisions of Europe."

NATO, which last expanded in 1999 by taking in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, would say nothing officially about which nations were likely to get the invitation at the summit in Prague. Currently, nine Eastern European nations are awaiting membership in NATO, almost all of them from the former communist bloc and even from the former Soviet Union itself.

The leaders of nine formal candidates – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania – gathered last month in Bucharest and expressed their desire to join NATO, giving support to the war on international terrorism.

All nine nations are scrambling to complete detailed military reform programs, while at the same time trying to ensure NATO they have the political and economical stability to be useful allies.

After joining NATO, new members of the alliance will receive all the political and military benefits, which can improve their defenses. The major point uniting all these nations in their desire to join NATO, however, is their fear of an unpredictable Russia, which continues its military preparations, a real threat to its nearest neighbors.

Russia's government strongly opposes the idea of NATO enlargement, but fortunately this process doesn't depend on Moscow's wishes. In a time of historic changes in the international strategic landscape, we must not only keep this in mind but also advance our interests and provide security to those nations that could become our newest reliable friends.

According to press reports, current expansion options range from a minimal expansion that might include Slovenia, Slovakia and the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) to a much more ambitious enlargement embracing all three Baltic states and Romania and Bulgaria as well.

Many at NATO headquarters expect that the first to be taken into full membership will not necessarily be Eastern European aspirant states such as Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, but the Baltic states, which were officially part of the Soviet Union from World War II to the end of the former USSR in 1991.

The Baltic states have already fulfilled the NATO requirements for entry into the alliance. They have established free-market economies and relatively good human rights records after 46 years of totalitarian communist regimes, taken an active part in peacekeeping missions, deployed their military according to the alliance's regulations and even combined their armies into a Baltic battalion.

Actually, these countries are already acting as de facto allies and strongly support NATO and the U.S. missions in the Balkans and Afghanistan.

Today the West has a historic opportunity to expand the alliance, and NATO officials are excited by these new developments, which would be formalized at a NATO summit this spring in Reykjavik, Iceland.

A new NATO enlargement will not automatically improve the quality of the alliance, but it will create conditions for its future role in our turbulent world, when we must not only face traditional threats from totalitarian states but also stand against the new threats posed by terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Col. Stanislav Lunev is the highest-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer ever to defect from Russia. Read his gripping story, Through the Eyes of the Enemy.

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