Time to check out the serious action in Brussels. Down at Nato headquarters, the brass hats are proving that there's life after the end of the cold war. Ask their most famous recruit, a sheepish Russian general by the name of Shevtsov.
For almost 12 months, Leontiy Shevtsov has been strolling round top secret installations, like the planning HQ in Mons and the golf course at Zaventem. Nato is happy. Shevtsov is happy. Everybody is too polite to ask the obvious question: if this is an exchange, when do we get to send one of our boys to Moscow?
Having Shevtsov stick around for a few more months may not be a bad idea because Nato is heading for trouble with the Russians. A minor matter known as enlargement. By the middle of next year, the alliance will announce its plans to admit at least three new members: most likely, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Enlargement means pushing the west's defensive parameter up to Russia's borders. A new line is being drawn across Europe.
The Russians have blown hot and cold on enlargement. One day, they dispatch Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov. He is a sinister former KGB man who knows how to bully Javier Solana, the former Spanish foreign minister who is a little too nice to be a Nato secretary general. But the next day, would-be Russian president Aleksander Lebed turns up in Brussels and charms everybody by appearing to accept the principle that Nato is a club which has the right to choose its own members. But even Lebed is vague about the terms which Moscow will accept.
What's going on? The best guess is that the Russians will give way on enlargement, just like they did on German reunification. There will be a price, but it should be manageable. That will upset the teenage scribblers on The Times editorial pages and all the other defeatists who have been writing Nato's obituary. Meanwhile, Nato's new lease of life should at least shame the EU into remembering that it has made its own promises to open the doors to the central and eastern Europeans.
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the latest news on the EU's enlargement dossier is no news. The grandly named commission task force headed by the mercurial Frenchman Fran?ois Lamoureux dispatched detailed questionnaires earlier this year to each of the ten candidate countries. So detailed were the requests for statistics that one Hungarian diplomat wondered aloud whether Brussels was aware that the central Europeans abandoned central planning ten years ago.
The man who is supposed to be giving a lead on EU enlargement is Dutch commissioner Hans van den Broek. But he is still fussing about Bosnia. Van den Broek wants Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic up before the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. But Hans commands fewer divisions than the Pope. And the only people capable of organising a snatch are sitting in Nato headquarters.
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yugoslavia was a humiliation for the EU, but it proved a life saver for Nato, thanks largely to Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat who brokered the Bosnian peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio. Holbrooke is a bull-headed, self-promoting media junky. As one of his aides admitted, Holbrooke's capacity for double-dealing and obnoxiousness was exceeded only by the other participants around the negotiating table. But the American grasped that Nato had to act out of its traditional theatre in western Europe or go out of business.
Holbrooke's other achievement was to push Bill Clinton into backing early enlargement of Nato. The story is that he told Clinton in late 1994 that Nato expansion could be a vote winner, especially in ethnic, blue-collar areas in Illinois and Michigan, where most voters have a distant cousin in Warsaw or a great aunt in Gdansk. Clinton, facing obliteration in the congressional mid-term elections, fell for the pitch, not realising that Holbrooke's real reason was to do a favour for his pals in the German defence ministry. They see Nato expansion as a buffer zone against Russia.
If all goes to plan, the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians should be attending the 50th anniversary celebrations of the alliance in mid-1999. Okay, so they will not have the latest F-16s or M1A1 tanks. But they will have the right to stand next to US generals and buy US hardware.
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which brings us to Sir Leon Brittan, still viewed as the east Europeans' best friend in the European commission. Sir Leon is having personnel problems. Catherine Day, his towering Irish deputy chief of staff, is moving over to the Bosnia desk. Alison Hook, monetary adviser, is heading for the number two slot at the European commission office in London. Philip Rycroft is also job hunting. And Sir Leon still has no idea who to appoint as his new director general. Any more delays, and he will have to look east. General Shevtsov, are you still available?
