NATO Hopefuls Get the Nod

WASHINGTON: Welcome to the club, boys. NATO expansion became a moot issue as far as the Senate was concerned late Thursday night, when it voted overwhelmingly to embrace Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the Western Alliance. It's not a done deal yet -- the U.S. is only the fifth of 16 NATO countries to ratify their membership -- but for some senators, the prospect of going to war over Warsaw was just too much. "We'll be back on a hair trigger," cried Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). "We're talking about nuclear war."

But few of his collegues seemed concerned about taunting the Russian bear. In fact, the debate was confined to less than a dozen senators -- a measure of the motion's bipartisan support and the public's lack of interest. "When an entity works as well as NATO has," explained Chuck Robb (D-Va.), "the American people tend to ignore it or take it for granted." After all, the taxpayers' share of this expansion is a mere $400 million over 10 years -- peanuts in military terms. And for Czech-, Polish- and Hungarian-Americans, at least, it's money well spent.