STYLE SECTION
The World's at Our Doorstep.
It Feels Like Another Planet.

Czech President Vaclav Havel, left, and President Clinton listen to translations of speeches at a NATO ceremony. (Bill O'Leary — The Washington Post) Related Links The Nightmare That Wasn't

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 24, 1999; Page C1

You learn so much at a NATO summit. Greece is also known as "the Hellenic Republic." Iceland claims to be a sovereign nation and not merely a volcano in the North Atlantic with some people clinging to the edge. The prime minister of the United Kingdom is "the Right Honourable Tony Blair," whereas our guy is just "the Honorable William J. Clinton."

People who run countries in Europe include Viktor Orban, Wim Kok, Kjell Magne Bondevik, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and Jean-Claude Juncker – all of them members of the ultra-secret Men With K in Their Names Alliance.

Fact: NATO spelled backward is OTAN, and that's what they call it in Europe. War spelled backward is raw, a fact that at some level must be important.

You also learn that a NATO summit has its own laws of physics. The central dogma of Natonian physics is that the presence of a NATO member distorts around him the fabric of space and time. A NATO leader travels in his own bubble universe, known as a motorcade. If he is given two minutes to speak he will dilate that interval to five minutes or 10. If his foot touches the ground without an intervening layer of red carpet, he will be instantly atomized.

He must sit at a circular table when meeting with other Natonians, to guarantee his equal status, even though his country may be a total joke, or, worse, Luxembourg.

Natonians cannot walk down a hallway alone. They need appendages, or "attaches." This causes confusion for summit planners, who must keep track of the relative ranking of attaches and foreign ministers and defense ministers, and know which ones can be allowed by protocol in which meetings.

"I would call it a protocol nightmare," a State Department logistician said yesterday inside the Ronald Reagan Building, which is new, antiseptic and rather confusing, with multiple levels and slanting corridors and hidden briefing rooms – an architectural Balkans.

"It's a mess," said a press secretary for a small central European country, struggling with a breakdown in press passes.

Among the complicating facts is that although NATO has 19 members, there are actually 44 delegations, because of this larger concept The summit, unlike the war, was intensively planned.

called the Partnership for Peace, also known as the EAPC countries, which stands for Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. (Not showing up, however, is Russia, which instead sent its man to Belgrade to jaw with Slobodan Milosevic.)

NATO also has started something called the European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI), which, according to a news release, will "strengthen the European pillar of the Alliance." There's also something called the Western European Union (WEU), which was founded a year before NATO. None of this should be confused with the European Union (EU), or the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), or the United Nations (U.N.), or any of the other organizations that, given an inch, would make a bid for Complete World Domination.

The most apparent fact of Natonian physics is the repulsion of most of the people from downtown Washington. Now we know what Washington will be like as the world is coming to an end. The downtown streets were rather ominous, Orwellian, lined with barricades and patrolled by cops, soldiers and armored cars. The Federal Triangle had become The Forbidden City.

The skies were dark, thundering, with a threat of hail and tornadoes. In the gray light, with the streets empty even of parked cars, The Forbidden City assumed a monstrous scale.

"When I was walking around Washington this morning I felt like a peasant from ancient Gaul visiting Rome," said Severin Carrell, a reporter for the Scotsman.

The Natonians are almost all male, including, without exception, the heads of state. There is no sign that the Natonians have gotten in touch with their feminine side. They are, after all, warriors. They prevailed in a war they didn't actually fight. Now they're actually fighting one, and it is not going so terribly well.

But the war is very far away. It is on the other side of an ocean, a sea, and many mountain ranges. The war is on the moon.

From this great distance, the Natonians declared that they were, indeed, winning decisively, having, for example, wiped out an artillery battery, six tanks and a "column of troops" on Thursday.

"We're winning, he's losing, and he knows it!" said Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's military commander in the conflict, with perhaps a bit too much volume, as though the extra decibels would make it so. He said NATO forces had made an "operational attack" designed to "isolate, degrade and interdict" the Yugoslav army, and that NATO had achieved air superiority "at mid-to-high altitude." When the news conference was over, he and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana left the stage to shouts from reporters of "What about ground troops?"

Discussions on such weighty matters ensured that the Natonians would not be kicking up their heels within range of a camera. The bar at the press party closed at 9 p.m. sharp Thursday night, and although the Atlantic Council affair at the Building Museum remained black tie, no one danced.

Still, the immense spiritual distance between the summit and the war was noticeable. It wasn't hard to scare up dyspeptic observers.

"It's almost surreal," said Ivo Daalder, a European security analyst at the Brookings Institution. "So far, what I'm seeing is a set piece diplomatic act as if nothing has changed. We're losing the war."

Another Brookings analyst, political scientist Jim Goldgeier, said, "The disconnect comes because they talk about prevailing, and they talk about Milosevic accepting NATO's demands, but meanwhile on the ground he's accomplished his objectives and NATO hasn't."

The summit, unlike the war, was intensively planned. There are more than 850 phone lines installed for the press. The press also gets free T-shirts, free postcards and a NATO 50th Anniversary Summit Host Committee shoulder bag – very upscale plastic, almost like leather, and black (never goes out of fashion). Not everything is free. The vendor selling NATO cuff links charges $50.

Inside the shoulder bag is the literature of the summit. There's a magazine called Joint Force Quarterly. There's a commemorative edition of NATO Review. There's a slick magazine with articles by NATO big shots surrounded by advertisements from transatlantic companies, many in the military and communications industries.

NATO is, at heart, an organization, and it says so right in the name. A summit is supposed to be an exercise in order, in keeping everyone in the right spot and on the right schedule. A summit is the opposite of a war.