Rumsfeld Presses US Defence Plan at Baltics Meeting

[mastodon]

Reuters Newswire

U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, winding up a whirlwind European tour, pressed Nordic and Baltic defence ministers on Saturday on the need for new Western defences for the 21st century.

Rumsfeld repeated calls made to NATO defence chiefs and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov this week to join the Bush Administration in "a new architecture," including a controversial strategic missile defence, to deal with emerging threats from long-range missiles to so-called terrorism.

Speaking to a gathering of ministers from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Rumsfeld also said that while no decisions had been made on expanding NATO, the alliance would keep an open-door policy.

Rumsfeld's one-day meeting with the Nordic and Baltic defence leaders came less than a week ahead of a June 14 summit involving U.S. President George W. Bush and European Union leaders in Gothenburg, Sweden.

NATO will make no decision on expanding the alliance until next year, and the Baltic former Soviet states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, remain hopeful of consideration.

"He will be talking about an open-door NATO policy, which will welcome new members as they are ready to join," a senior U.S. defence official told reporters ahead of the meeting in this seaside former capital of Finland.

Any admission of the Baltics would be likely to anger Moscow, which is already bitterly opposed to Bush Administration plans to test and develop long-range missile defences even as it debates Russia, China and its European allies on Washington's controversial demand to change or scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile defence treaty.

Rumsfeld told reporters travelling with him earlier in the week that it was too early to begin speculating on which countries might follow former Communist East bloc states Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO.

The U.S. defence official said Rumsfeld was pressing ministers at Saturday's meeting to realise that the ABM treaty, which forbids strategic missile defences, was an outdated product of the Cold War. Bush has announced plans for deep unilateral cuts in U.S. nuclear arms as part of a new architecture that would also "move beyond" ABM.

Ivanov on Thursday told reporters after meeting with NATO ministers, including Denmark and Norway, that Russia remained opposed to changes in the ABM treaty. He noted that the treaty was part of an international regime of more than 30 security agreements and wondered how Washington planned a "new architecture" without it.

But Ivanov conceded that he agreed with Rumsfeld on new threats, including terrorism, and said he had accepted an invitation from his U.S. counterpart to visit Washington.

Rumsfeld was flying back to Washington later on Saturday at the end of a six-day trip, which also took him to Turkey, Ukraine, Macedonia and to visit American peacekeepers in Kosovo.