Just one month ago everyone in the West was confident that NATO was the "pillar" of security in Europe. Then came the crisis over the Bosnian Serb attack on Bihac, which caused deep rifts in the transatlantic relationship. Then, the American initiative to speed up the process of admitting the former Warsaw Pact countries of Central Europe into NATO, which was supposed to bring the alliance together, led to the most serious rift between NATO and Moscow since the end of the Cold War. The whole future of NATO came into question and, instead of projecting stability into the Eurasian region, NATO has become a source of instability.


Of course, NATO has survived many crises in its 45 year history, including the withdrawal of France and the transfer of NATO headquarters from Paris to Brussels and the controversy over the deployment of American Pershing-2 missiles in Europe in the 1980s. However, as one highly placed bureaucrat in the NATO secretariat told me last week in Brussels, "All we used to have to do was put a cardboard bear in a fur hat with a red star on it up on the shelf and all 16 countries would come together: Now we don't know what to do."


A number of influential bureaucrats in Brussels think that the current crisis is largely the fault of the late NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner. For the last two years of his tenure, he did practically no work and had to be brought from his hospital to NATO headquarters for occasional press conferences on Bosnia. As a result, there was no one to lead the perestroika of NATO and valuable time was lost.


Unlike the European Union, NATO has never had the organizational structures necessary to conduct an independent foreign policy, and it does not have permanent representatives in other countries. Moreover, there was a clear policy forbidding all employees of NATO from meeting or conversing with citizens of Warsaw Pact countries.


The alliance was strictly limited to coordinating the defense policies of the 16 member states. The rest of the Eurasian continent was viewed simply as a possible theater of war. NATO never had its own intelligence-gathering organization, except for a small institution that supervised the exchange of intelligence information among NATO members.


NATO has already entered into a "partnership" with the countries of Central Europe and with the former Soviet republics. But it did so without any understanding of the internal situations of these countries or of what these countries were looking for in such a "partnership." At the same time, according to many bureaucrats in Brussels, the Central European countries that have been so ardently trying to become members have a very poor understanding of the purpose and essence of the alliance.


NATO officials do not hide their irritation about having to accommodate endless delegations from Eastern Europe bringing to Brussels the same plea: "Let us in!" They also know that the Russian army's capabilities are low and decreasing daily and that it is totally incapable of carrying out a conventional thrust into Eastern Europe, even if Vladimir Zhirinovsky came to power in Moscow.


Now, in the wake of the Republican victory in last month's Congressional elections in the United States, the Clinton administration has decided to sharply accelerate the process of expanding NATO, primarily so that Bill Clinton will be in a better position for the up-coming presidential election rather than in response to the real political needs of either NATO or the countries of Central Europe. However, the bureaucrats in Brussels will do all they can to slow down the expansion process as long as possible, since they believe that it may lead to the final collapse of the alliance.


Practically everyone that I talked to in Brussels last week agreed privately that expanding NATO is a bad idea. The ideas contained in the report to the German Foreign Ministry by the German ambassador to NATO Hermann von Richthofen which was leaked to the press spelled out the general opinion: "The United States is pushing for NATO expansion without proper consideration of its consequences for the alliance."


Several old friends in Brussels even asked me: "Why doesn't Russia publicly protest the expansion plans? It might help if Moscow would lay out its position clearly." It would seem that some people in the West were pleased by Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev's performance in Brussels and President Boris Yeltsin's speech in Budapest on Monday.


Pavel Felgenhauer is the defense and national security editor for Segodnya.