The fear expressed on May 11 by Latvian President Guntis Ulmanis, that the Kosovo crisis would reset the clock for NATO expansion and rearrange the list of potential members, has apparently been realized. NATO spokesman Jamie Shea today announced that NATO would supply long-term military aid to Albania and Macedonia and draw up plans to help the two Balkan countries meet the alliance's entry requirements. Representatives of both countries met with NATO officials in Brussels today to discuss their immediate security needs as well as long-term plans for restructuring and improving their armed forces.

So not only have Albania and Macedonia been bumped up the list, but NATO is looking into ways of funding the improvements necessary to raise their militaries to near NATO standards. The Baltics and other countries that have long been struggling to meet the standards for NATO membership will not be amused. NATO’s strategic planners should be equally concerned, though for a different reason. Once again, NATO political leaders are approaching expansion in a piecemeal and strategically dangerous manner.

ATO approached its first round of expansion like a gentlemen’s club, where membership was granted as a prize to those who lived up to the club’s social standards. As a result, the less than democratically ideal Slovakia was left out of the organization, creating a huge and potentially hostile salient into the center of NATO’s new eastern border and geographically isolating new member Hungary from the rest of NATO. Now NATO is framing membership as a bribe, to be offered to those who can help the organization in a pinch, and with little thought to future complications inherited with the new members. In this case, Macedonia has its own potential Albanian minority problem, and Albania helped foment the crisis in Kosovo in the first place, by backing the KLA guerrillas. By swiftly bringing in these new members in response to a momentary crisis, NATO succeeds only in increasing the odds that the next crisis will erupt from within the organization. Moreover, by dropping its admission standards for these two, NATO will harm relations with more strategically valuable candidate members.