Future of a Delusion.

• Position: NATO

When the NATO ministers packed their bags and left the Washington summit in late April, they had no reason to rejoice over the job they had just completed. They had committed the Alliance to continue to wage its ill-conceived and illegal war against Yugoslavia. And they had revised the "strategic concept" of NATO in such a way as to make further such wars more likely.

NATO is now entering the future of a delusion. The delusion of the past was that NATO kept the peace in Europe. But as Gore Vidal and historian Carolyn Eisenberg have pointed out, the Alliance came into being only because the United States and Britain decided to renege on the Yalta and Potsdam agreements they made with the Soviet Union. The breaking of those pacts helped lead to the perilous years of the Cold War and the four decades of nuclear terror that gripped the world.

Basic to NATO doctrine was a first-strike nuclear option. If the Soviet Union put a toe into West Germany, NATO would drop the bomb on Moscow. Nuclear war didn't erupt. But it came close, more than a dozen times. To say the Alliance successfully preserved the peace is like a drunk driver bragging that he went 100 miles an hour down the highway without crashing his car.

Now, eight years after the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has no reason for being, and yet it has been fighting a war in Yugoslavia to save the credibility of this organization's afterlife.

To justify that war and to invent a new purpose, NATO ministers came to Washington. They had to work quickly to modify NATO's strategic concept because the war against Yugoslavia violated the one that was in force up until April. The old strategic concept, which was approved in London in July 1990, stated: "The Alliance is purely defensive in purpose: None of its weapons will ever be used except in self-defense." In the new strategic concept, adopted on April 23 and April 24, NATO quietly dropped this clear and encumbering language.

In its place, the ministers agreed to language that basically will allow NATO to intervene anywhere in the world at any time. In classic bureaucratese, the new strategic concept speaks of "crisis management through non-Article 5 crisis response operations." Article 5 is part of NATO's charter, adopted on April 4, 1949, and it states: "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all." So a military action that is "non-Article 5" means...