Major Garrett: Bush meeting with NATO leadership

Major Garrett

Major Garrett is a White House correspondent for CNN. He is reporting from Brussels, Belgium, on President Bush's trip to Europe.

Q: President Bush met with NATO leaders today. What discussions did they have about NATO expansion?

Garrett: The president has concluded all his meetings, both formal and informal, and he endorsed completely NATO's announcement today that it would expand its numbers. There are 19 member nations now, and it would expand by an unknown number of nations in the year 2002. The next NATO summit is scheduled for November, 2002 in Prague, Czech Republic, and NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson announced here today that NATO would expand. There had been some talk that NATO would delay expansion in 2002, but he made it emphatically clear there would be new nations added to NATO, and the president of the United States thoroughly endorsed that position. As to who might join NATO, no-one knows quite yet. NATO has a process for selecting new members, and nations named as potential new members are Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.

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Q: Were there any developments on the European Strategic Defense Plan, which would allow Europeans to defend Europeans without U.S. involvement?

Garrett: The developments on that front were that the president of the United States told NATO leaders that he is supportive of the development of a European defense force that could act rapidly to deal with situations, and do so in ways that NATO -- because it is a consensus organization -- might not. The Europeans have to spend a good deal more money on defense if they are going to deploy this defense force than they are currently spending. President Bush said that was a precursor: inevitably, Europe has to spend more on defense if it has any ideas of creating and deploying this force. European nations have expressed an interest in doing so, but have yet to locate the resources within their own budgets to pay for this defense force, so that's an on-going issue.

Q: How is the U.S. relationship with NATO changing?

Garrett: As president Bush pointed out in his remarks after lunch, some of the member nations, in talking about his ideas on missile defense, said NATO has always adapted to different realities. NATO is a defense alliance. Article 5 of the NATO Treaty says that an attack on any one NATO nation is an attack on them all. So it is first and foremost a consensus-driven defensive alliance, and as every member of NATO points out, it is the most successful defensive alliance of the 20th century. The evolution that's going on, is on how to deal with threats that are outside the Cold War structure familiar to most European nations.

The president said those threats are the firing, or the threat of firing, of a ballistic missile tipped either with a nuclear device, or a biological or chemical weapon. The president said the threat is just as real if that device is created but not fired, as if it were to be fired, because the threat of firing of that type of weapon could blackmail a member of NATO, the United States, or Russia. So the president says NATO has got to evolve to deal with this threat.

There is general agreement among NATO nations that these threats do exist. There isn't quite yet universal agreement on how to deal with them. The president says the best way to deal with them is to develop, test and deploy a missile defense system as soon as possible that could protect the United States, Europe, and quite possibly, if the Russians were interested, Russia as well. The president said that if such as system were created, NATO and Russia for the first time would come into common alliance on defensive matters against rogue nations, and if that happened, he would consider it a significant breakthrough in the way Russia and NATO deal with each other.

Q: And how did NATO leaders react?

Garrett: It was not universally supportive, but certain NATO nations were supportive. White House officials tell us that Hungary, Italy, Britain, Poland and Spain were particularly enthusiastic about this idea of missile defense. The French, however, are quite worried that missile defense could provoke, in other parts of the world, a new arms race. They are uneasy about doing the one thing that must be done if the United States is going to test and deploy a missile system, which is to get rid of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, or amend it so it is almost unrecognizable. The Germans, we are told, are not emphatic one way or the other. They are impressed and supportive of the consultations Mr. Bush has undertaken, they have neither publicly embraced nor rejected his ideas on missile defense, and since NATO is a consensus-driven organization, there has to be consensus throughout the alliance before a full position is taken. That hasn't been achieved, but the president said that at this meeting, his very first face-to-face with all NATO allies, there was what he called a "new receptivity" to the idea of missile defense.

Q: What kind of public reception has Bush received in Brussels? Were there any protests?

Garrett: Protests here were civil, somewhat scattered and the crowds were not enormous. They did not appear to be particularly passionate. I don't mean to say they aren't committed, but they were nowhere near the scale of the protests that President Reagan encountered in the 1980's in the very teeth of the Cold War when the United States was trying to create forward deployment for troops and medium range nuclear armaments. In those days, the European protests were incredibly strong, vociferous, passionate and numerous, both in number and the size of the crowds that would assemble. But the protests are here and they are real, the sense of unease among the European citizenry is profound on two issues: missile defense which some Europeans are not accustomed to yet, and global warming, where they believe the United States is backing away from the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 which they believe would significantly address the issue of global warming. The president has made clear on this trip he is going to look for new ways to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, and he is going to do so outside the Kyoto treaty in a way that doesn't harm the U.S. economy.