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To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (4743)	2/6/2003 11:15:00 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

February 6, 2003 REVIEW & OUTLOOK New Europe's Vision While the prospect of war is inevitably sobering, the number of countries pledging their support for a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime grows by the day. America's European allies are leading the way. Eight European countries last week backed the Bush Administration in a statement to this newspaper <WSJ>. Ten more -- Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia -- made a similar commitment yesterday. The reports of the death of the trans-Atlantic relationship were always exaggerated. The majority of Western European countries remain committed to a vital security link with the U.S. But the debate over Iraq highlights a new wrinkle in Europe: The emergence of the former Warsaw Pact countries as serious diplomatic players. The Easterners are shifting the balance of power on the Continent away from the traditional Franco-German condominium. Clearly the shift is toward a Europe less inclined to view America with suspicion or resentment. "This is just the beginning," Estonia's former prime minister, Mart Laar, tells us. "Central Europeans and others won't stand French-style anti-Americanism," he says. As the statement from the "Vilnius 10" noted yesterday, "Our countries understand the dangers posed by tyranny and the special responsibility of democracies to defend our shared values." It's a fallacy to tell Eastern Europeans that they have to choose between America and Europe. The two relationships are complementary, and will be more so as the world grows more interdependent. Certainly the Lithuanians and Poles who've greeted President Bush so warmly in recent months are grateful for his father's, and his country's, role in freeing them. The Cold War -- a formative experience for them as it never was for West Europeans -- may be history. But that experience has conditioned the new democracies of the East to look to the U.S. for leadership in meeting the moral and security challenges of the 21st century. URL for this article: online.wsj.com