March 31 (Bloomberg) -- The spirit of Donald Rumsfeld is stalking NATO: From the war in Afghanistan to confronting the Kremlin, the U.S. once again has more support from ``new'' Europe than from ``old.''

Rumsfeld launched a broadside at France and Germany in 2003, when as U.S. defense secretary he dismissed them as problematic ``old Europe'' for resisting the Iraq War and said that ``the center of gravity'' was shifting east, where new allies like Poland had joined in the coalition against Saddam Hussein.

With North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders meeting in Bucharest this week, the pattern is reemerging on two fronts. The first is Afghanistan, where Western European governments are balking at putting troops in harm's way. The second is the future shape of NATO itself, with the same old allies frustrating U.S. goals of taking in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine from the former Soviet heartland.

NATO is evolving into ``a two-tier organization: those that are willing to fight and die for democracy and those who are not,'' says Gary Rice, a retired Canadian colonel who is an Ottawa-based independent military analyst. NATO risks becoming ``just another alliance that's had its day,'' he says.

Its strategy was straightforward during the Cold War, when it faced a single enemy, the Soviet Union. Now the threats are farther away, in the rugged terrain of Central Asia, and more diffuse, in the form of stateless terrorism.

`Flirting With Irrelevance'

``If NATO members fail to broaden the alliance's outlook beyond Western Europe, the alliance risks flirting with irrelevance in the 21st century,'' Rumsfeld, who resigned from the Pentagon in November 2006, said in response to questions for this article.

New allies like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary -- the first three Warsaw Pact alumni to join NATO, in 1999 -- equate the alliance with freedom from tyranny.

``They endured five decades of Communist occupation,'' says Rumsfeld, 75. ``The people of Eastern Europe understand the threat posed by any totalitarian ideology, and they have been among the first to step forward to confront it.''

The Eastern Europeans are pushing hardest for further NATO expansion, calling for the April 2-4 summit to declare Ukraine and Georgia eligible for membership. Neither is a perfect candidate. Ukrainians are torn between ancient loyalties to Russia and the attractions of the West. Georgia faces Russian- backed secession movements in two regions that call its territorial integrity into question.

Putin Confrontation

A confrontation is pre-programmed: Russian President Vladimir Putin, 55, who has denounced NATO's designs on the two nations as evidence of U.S. aggression, will meet with the bloc's leaders at the end of the summit, the last for President George W. Bush, 61.

``We have a divided NATO about what to do,'' says James Collins, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and now an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. ``If we think Russia will just swallow this and it won't affect our relations with them, I think we're dreaming.''

Two visions of NATO collide in the enlargement debate. Some, such as Germany and France, want to limit the alliance to guaranteeing security for its members, embodied in the declaration of its 1949 founding treaty that ``an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.''

Merkel's View

Two days after a trip to Moscow this month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 53, dismissed Ukraine by ruling out countries where only ``the political leadership of the moment'' backs NATO and slighted Georgia as a country ``embroiled in regional or internal conflicts.''

The Clinton administration pushed through a bolder view over initial Western European opposition in the 1990s, casting NATO as a foster parent for fledgling democracies in Eastern Europe, giving them cover to build free-market economies and pluralistic societies. For such countries, NATO membership has paved the way for entry to the European Union.

A leading beneficiary was Estonia, a Baltic republic annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. Independent since 1991, Estonia struck a partnership with NATO in 1994 and joined both the military bloc and the EU in 2004. Economic growth soared as high as 11.2 percent in 2006.

Balkan Expansion

Historical enmities shadow the second plank of NATO's enlargement strategy: further expansion into the former Yugoslavia, a cauldron of instability for a century. NATO was drawn into the Balkans in bombing campaigns in 1995 to halt the bloodshed in Bosnia, and in 1999 to end Serbia's crackdown on Kosovo.

Two Balkan countries -- Croatia and Albania -- are all but sure to win membership this week. The prospects of a third, the Republic of Macedonia, are endangered by neighboring Greece's objection that the country's name implies a territorial claim on the northern Greek province of Macedonia, homeland of Alexander the Great. The United Nations so far hasn't been able to broker a compromise, in talks that will go on until the summit.

``Seventy-two hours is a long time in politics,'' NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters in Brussels today. ``I would hope -- I underline the word `hope' -- that the results might be an invitation for all three.''

Stirring Up Trouble

By letting in the three countries, NATO's aim is to write one of the final chapters in the breakup of Yugoslavia, bring more of southeastern Europe into the western fold -- and prevent Putin from using Russia's influence with longstanding ally Serbia to stir up trouble in the region.

Macedonia symbolizes NATO's dilemma in Afghanistan. As one of 13 non-NATO contributors to the alliance's 47,000-strong force in Afghanistan, Macedonia has sent 130 troops -- about the same as Greece, a NATO member with five times the population.

NATO stresses are acute in Afghanistan, in a war the alliance took full control of in 2006 as the U.S. was getting bogged down in Iraq. NATO is neither winning decisively against the resurgent Taliban nor on the verge of being chased out like the Red Army in the 1980s.

NATO is mired in ``a very deep strategic divide'' over Afghanistan, says Julianne Smith, Europe program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. ``We have a bit of a blame game going on between Europe and the U.S.''

Burdens

With Germany, Italy and Spain ruling out combat roles for their troops in strife-torn southern Afghanistan, the burdens are falling on countries like Canada, which has threatened to pull its 2,500 troops out of that combat zone unless NATO sends in 1,000 reinforcements.

President Nicolas Sarkozy said last week he will announce at the summit a boost in France's 1,500-strong Afghan force. While his offer will help rebalance the military mismatch, Sarkozy also will exacerbate strains by moving to rejoin NATO's coordination regime, known as the integrated military command.

NATO's 25 other members coordinate their armed forces from the alliance's headquarters in Belgium. Without withdrawing from NATO itself, France pulled out of the command 42 years ago, a move by then-President Charles de Gaulle to show his independence from the U.S.

French policy skidded the furthest away from the U.S. after the fall of Baghdad, when France, Germany and Belgium launched a short-lived European defense initiative.

In a speech to the U.S. Congress in November, Sarkozy made a bigger French role in NATO conditional on the U.S. accepting an independent EU defense capability. It was this demand that scuttled an attempted rapprochement between France and NATO by Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, in the 1990s.

``Whether the United States is really ready for that is problematic,'' says Robert Hunter, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who is now a Rand Corp. senior adviser. ``The focus has been on `Gosh, isn't it nice that France wants to rejoin allied command operations, the integrated command,' rather than on what the requirements are.''

To contact the reporter on this story: James G. Neuger in Brussels at jneuger@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 31, 2008 11:34 EDT