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At a 1999 summit in Washington, D.C., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization welcomed its first new members of the post-Cold War era: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. The expansion was broadly hailed in Europe and the United States as a bridge-building effort to seal the Cold War rift. Moscow did not agree, and the expansion condemned Russian-Western relations to the deep freeze for three years.

Once the brouhaha of the summit died away, however, there were some uncomfortable questions that NATO's supporters had to deal with. The alliance was formed to defend Europe from the Soviet Union; what would it do, now that the Soviet threat no longer existed? The answer from the new members was simple: Soviet = Russian. The answer from the Russians was equally simple: Disband NATO. Others felt that NATO should evolve into a political talk-shop, a peacekeeping force, a military adjunct to the European Union or some other nebulous confidence-building organization.

Five years later -- 15 years after the Berlin Wall fell -- it is a different world and a different NATO. On March 29, the alliance admitted the three remaining former Soviet satellites (Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia) and three former Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), as well as a piece of the former Yugoslavia (Slovenia).

But the expansion did more than add 50 million people and rationalize NATO's eastern border.

For the most part, the confusion of 1999 is gone; with the 2004 expansion, NATO knows exactly what it is -- even if some members are not happy with the outcome. NATO is an instrument for Western (read: U.S.) influence globally. The alliance now has troops operating in long-term missions in Afghanistan, and soon will have troops in Iraq. Because the United States remains the pre-eminent power in the alliance -- and in the world -- it is Washington that calls the shots.

Core NATO members such as France and Germany certainly disagree with this turn of events, but have lacked the influence to stop it. That has become -- and will continue to be -- the case because of the admittance of NATO's newest members. All of the fresh blood can be safely grouped into the "new Europe" that U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so charmingly coined in the lead-up to the Iraq war. These states all share historical experience in betrayal by France and domination by Germany and Russia. It is only natural that such states would search further abroad for allies to help guarantee their security. In the 1999 Kosovo war, the United States was able to use NATO to generate a veneer of international respectability for actions that it could not get the United Nations to sanction. From Estonia to Bulgaria, the United States now has 10 new -- or newish -- states within NATO that Washington can count on for support when such a state of affairs surfaces in the future. The 2003 Iraq war is a prime example; Bulgaria practically led the charge at the United Nations for Washington.

Russia might not be thrilled with this development, but it is certainly glad NATO's eyes are casting about the planet and are not riveted solely on the East. Further smoothing Russian-NATO relations is the fact that -- although U.S. influence over the alliance is stronger than ever -- NATO forces in Europe are weaker than ever and are only expected to be further downsized. Germany, long the European bugaboo, has cut its military forces to the point that it has next-to-zero power projection capacity, while the United States is openly discussing pulling troops out of bases across Europe (much to the Berlin's chagrin, we might add).