NATO, go East; as NATO spreads to the East, Russia may decide to look eastward as well.

As NATO spreads to the East, Russia may decide to look eastward as well.

Mr. Straus, U.S. Coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, can be reached at 703-521-5759.

As NATO expansion moves ahead after the Madrid Sum-mit, the issue of how to deal with Russia will not vanish. Whether or not the expansion into Central Europe succeeds -- but especially if it does -- it is vital to develop a relationship with Russia for the long run.

Russia is bitterly opposed to the expansion of a NATO from which Russia is permanently excluded. Why? Boris Berezovsky, Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council and the most uninhibited of the new Westernizers, explains that such exclusion would "separate Russia from Europe and in effect put it in geopolitical opposition to the family of Western democracies." This in turn would shape Russia's identity in an anti-Western way -- perhaps for generations.

Russians face a geopolitical nightmare when they look at Western maps that color in the NATO countries as full members, shade in the small Eastern European countries as candidates, and leave Russia blank as an outsider. And geopolitical nightmares move people to react. When a power is spreading on the map, others do not accept its assurances blindly. They start looking for allies to balance it. And Russia has been doing just that.

Even before last December's decision to expand NATO, Russian liberals warned that it would lead to a realignment of Russia with China -- the one and only development that could threaten the West's global leadership. But the West dismissed this; indeed, when Russia later agreed to negotiate a charter with NATO, Westerners argued that Russia was now accommodating to the reality of NATO expansion. Then in April, the Russia - China alignment was duly proclaimed.

Western commentators consoled themselves by saying that this alignment would not go as deep as the one in the 1950s. They missed the point. If theirs is merely a negative alignment against Western leadership, Russia and China do not need deep ideological sympathy. They need only to join hands in making trouble, selling arms, supporting each other against Western pressures -- and supporting other troublemaking countries.

Unsurprisingly, Communists and Zhirinovsky supporters in the Duma denounced NATO expansion in unqualified terms. The government and centrist parties -- Viktor Chernomyrdin's NDR and Grigory Yavlinsky's Yabloko -- denounced it no less bitterly; for them it was a betrayal. Their denunciation, however, was highly qualified: they objected to expansion as long as it excluded Russia while moving NATO military structures eastward. Their preferred alternative was to include Russia in NATO.

Yeltsin himself had come out for joining NATO back in 1991. With no response from the West, this became a liability for him. Still, in 1996, Ivan Rybkin -- Lebed's replacement as secretary of the Security Council -- revived the idea, stating that Russia should join NATO as a political member. Rybkin was supported by Yuri Baturin, secretary of the Defense Council, and in 1997 by Viktor Chernomyrdin, the prime minister, who said Russia was prepared to sign the necessary agreements for joining the North Atlantic Council. With that, practically the entire Russian leadership had come out for joining NATO -- except for Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who told Rybkin to shut up. The West proceeded to negotiate with Primakov over his proposal for an external Russia -NATO link that would constrict NATO. This validated Primakov and hung the Westernizers out to dry.

One problem with the NATO - Russia Founding Act is that it provides an external consultative link but not a home for a new Russian identity. At best it is a first step that could be eventually replaced with the kind of link that could really anchor Russia to the West. If, however, NATO were to minimize the effects of the Founding Act while expanding to the East, the actual effect would be to expel Russia from the discussion in Europe.

Ironically, much of the criticism of the Founding Act in the West is that it gives Russia too much say. We can agree that it is cumbersome, and that it sometimes places Russia on a par with all of NATO. But these were the predictable consequences of negotiating an external arm's-length relationship (insisted on by those who feared Russia). It would be nice to think that, when it proves unwieldy in practice, NATO might take the practical step of inviting Russia to come as an observer to actual NATO meetings and skip the separate ones.

The choices are so stark because NATO is a military alliance. A Euro-pean great power is either in it or out. Russia in NATO could add to NATO's power; Russia outside NATO must try to constrain it.

What is especially significant, however, is the mixed reaction of the non-European world to the new tensions between Russia and the West. Japan, which is largely integrated with the West, does not hope for a renewal of conflict among the white powers -- even though that might give Japan more room to maneuver. The Tokyo Shimbun last December lamented the problems between Russia and NATO as a danger to international security, and concluded that "the final and only resolution may be the inclusion of Russia in NATO."

In the Southern tier, commentary has been more caustic. Criticisms of the impending new cold war have been coupled with strategies for exploiting it. The Chinese line has paralleled the Primakov line: against unipolarism, against U.S. global leadership via NATO, and in favor of reversion to a multipolar balance of power. Primakov and the Chinese leadership have for some time been encouraging one another in developing this dangerous doctrine.

But it is a doctrine that fits Chinese nationalist interests far better than Russian ones. Many Russians have been nervous about serving the Chinese interest in fragmenting the world order. But Primakov had a trump card: the pressure of NATO expansion minus Russia. He duly got his rapprochement with China, with a declaration in favor of a "new world order" of "multipolarism."

Differences between Russia and the West are undermining Western influence not only on Russia itself but also on China, just as pre-1945 differences between Germany and the West used to undermine Western influence on Russia. As seen from China, Russia is a Western country, and its division from other Western powers only serves to weaken and discredit the West. It makes clear that there is no reliable leading group in the world. This encourages China to follow a separate path.

Indeed, multipolarism breeds as well as reflects a multiplication of power centers with separate spiritual/strategic orientations. From China, the effects go on to India. In the Pioneer this January, a strategic-affairs analyst, Brahma Chellaney, saw the renewal of conflict between Russia and the West as providing moral cover for other countries to stake out their own power positions. He gloated over the opportunity for India to become a nuclear power outright:

The nation can no longer put off critical decision-making on its security options. One cold war ended between 1989 - 91, another is set to begin in 1997 as the U.S.-led NATO expands to the doorsteps of Russia. . . . India should exploit the NATO-expansion summit to unveil its own nuclear security plans. . . . India should ready its prototype warheads and delivery vehicles. . . . By the end of 1997, India's nuclear ambivalence should have dissipated.

Here, again, we see the effect of a Russia - West split in undermining Northern leadership of the world, spurring nuclear proliferation as well as a proliferation of moral orientations. This is where multipolarism leads. There is no reason to think it stops at India. What has been articulated in India must also be in the minds of proliferation-minded strategists in many another country.

Multipolarism is a contagious disease. When the multipolar new world order was proclaimed by Russia and China this April, it was welcomed not only in India and Iran, but also in Pakistan, Egypt, and Singapore. In each of these countries, leading newspapers bemoaned the unipolar domination of the world since 1991 by the West. They all approved the Russia-China alignment as something that could give more weight to their own nations and curb American arrogance.

Interestingly, they all took unipolarism seriously -- as a fact, and as a problem for themselves. They took it for granted that America, as the core of the Western "unipole," if I may so call it, was serious about unipolarism. It was quite inconceivable to them that America could proceed without any plans for unipolarity, or be unaware of its unipolar position -- or that America's thinkers would be wasting their time talking about multipolarism or "American decline" as if it were the present reality. For them, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns was being disingenuous when he claimed to be happy with the Russo - Chinese rapprochement.

While holding that Western policy was deliberately unipolarist, The Times of India still argued this April that a "multipolar world is inevitable," thanks to the spread of nuclear weapons, the growth of regional powers, and the willingness of Russia and China to "proclaim a strategic partnership and counter the doctrine of unipolarity with multipolarity."

The Hindustan Times welcomed "Moscow's proposal to build a quadrangular axis with China, India, and Iran." Pakistan's Dawn welcomed China and Russia's "working together in the face of Western hegemonic tendencies."

Egypt's Al Ahram noted widespread tendencies to "reject American hegemony and the unipolar order." To make multipolarism triumphant, it suggested that it would be enough for Russia and China "to gather the necessary mobilization of regional powers" by "challenging American hegemony over the world at the UN Security Council."

As these comments show, degeneration toward multipolarism is already in a seriously advanced condition. The Russia - China declaration marked an entire stage of degeneration. The Brazilian Folha de Su Paulo summed it up as a "signal" of the end of the post - Cold War period and "the emergence of a new scenario in international politics."

Be that as it may, unipolarity is still the main reality of the world. The trans-Atlantic "unipole" has been growing economically ever since the discovery of America, democratizing ever since the Enlightenment, and uniting ever since the end of the nineteenth century, when the Atlantic idea was revived in movements for English-Speaking Union and Atlantic Union. Since then, the unipole has grown stronger with each new generation and incorporated former enemies after each conflict. In the world wars, it incorporated France. In its Cold War generation, it incorporated Germany, Italy, and Japan. With the collapse of its Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, it became by default the core of a unipolar world. As it enters its fourth generation, the question is not whether a unipole exists, but whether it will render its unipolar position secure by incorporating again its main former enemy-power, Russia, thereby gaining a long-sustainable margin over all competitors. Or whether it will instead await a revival of counterposed poles of power and influence.

The very fact that Russia signed the Founding Act, with its paper pledges of consultation, was an expression of the attractive power of the unipole. At the same time, we should not overestimate the role of paper. It took more than paper to integrate Germany and Japan into the Western unipol after 1947. Sober voices in NATO are now saying that the Founding Act has to be made to work. If this is done in a serious way, unipolarity may yet emerge stronger than ever before.

The choice of which world system we will live in is before us. If we expand NATO in a way that truly engages Russia, we will have a shot at a sustainable unipolarity -- a world that is based concentrically on the North/West/America, and that is capable of drawing other countries in as they mature economically and democratically. But if we expand in a way that keeps Russia permanently on the outside, we will slip back into multipolarity -- a world in which the dangers of the Cold War have metastasized into a chaotic balance of opposing nuclear powers.

A menu for strategic collaboration might include:

-- cooperation against Taliban in Afghanistan;

-- Western realignment away from Pakistan toward India;

-- Russian realignment away from China -- from multipolarist ideology and from deliberately arming emerging powers;

-- cooperation in strategic defense;

-- replacement of mutual deterrence with joint nuclear programming in relation to potential dangers from terrorists, Islamists, and China;

-- a standing invitation to Russia to come to North Atlantic Council meetings as an observer, with a "voice not a veto," instead of always holding separate meetings with Russia

-- the development for the longer term of a procedure for Russia to have a vote in NATO that will be less than a veto, but more than just a voice;

-- the eventual extension of NATO membership to Russia at the same time as to the Baltic states or Ukraine.

A menu of such a scope -- with whatever variations of the specific points -- is what is needed for consolidation of Western unipolarism. If the current agenda of the West falls far short of this, then it is failing to serve the fundamental interests of the West.