LONDON– The most dangerous frontier of the post Second World War world was the Iron Curtain, the ideological barrier which at the command of Soviet Russia fell in 1945 from Lubeck Bay on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic. It was given its name by Winston Churchill and as Jan Morris has observed, “it separated not just states, or people or territories, or histories, but ideas”

The apex, the epitome and the most public shame of the Iron Curtain was the Berlin Wall. When that was breached in 1989 we knew that European communism was dead, liberty was restored and military confrontation that came close to nearly incinerating half the planet was over. Or did we?

We had not counted on President Bill Clinton’s decision 9 years later to expand the military alliance Nato, whose sole raison d’etre was this Iron Curtain, right up to the western frontiers of the old Soviet Union, taking in the former Soviet allies, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

This is arguably the most shortsighted, dangerous and counter- productive act since Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev introduced nuclear missiles into Cuba. It smacks of the same hubris that led Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to say during last month’s Iraq crisis, “It is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future”.

Left to their own devices, West European leaders would never have thought up the expansion of Nato. It was foisted upon them by Mr. Clinton. Still, they have a mouth if they choose to wag their tongues. They don’t. Not a word of criticism has surfaced from European Union leaders.

Moreover, European media has given the matter only cursory attention and the voters are somnolently unaware of what is afoot. Surprisingly, this is also true in eastern Europe. In the Czech Republic the leader of the pro-Nato campaign, in a futile attempt to drum up public interest, gave out 100 fresh carp last Christmas to the first 100 people who showed up in Prague’s main square wearing pro- Nato buttons.

If only there was the same somnolence in Russia then perhaps Mr. Clinton’s gamble with history would be alright. But in Russia there is a deep and profound outrage. “Who lost Russia?” is a question that the next generation will sweat over, just as the pre-World War II generation sweated over a resurgent Germany under Hitler. As John Maynard Keynes had argued, the Versailles peace treaty imposed after Germany was defeated in the First World War was designed not to heal the scars but to keep open the wounds. Bitterness and vindictiveness became ingrained in the German psyche.

Russia if not defeated in a military campaign knows it was decisively beaten in the Cold War. Part of its polity became resentful and potentially revengeful. Another part felt liberated and open to all that the West had to proffer. The trouble is that the West has offered so little, missing two great historic openings, one economic and one military.

Russia’s great reform government led by prime minister Yegor Gaidar was appointed by President Boris Yeltsin in mid-November 1991. This was a crucial moment–leadership had been bestowed on a tiny group of young radical economists committed to building a western-orientated capitalist country. If the West had seized the moment it would have done what it had then recently done for Poland–write off the debt and create a huge stabilization fund. Instead it sent in the debt collectors. President George Bush dispatched David Mulford, the Treasury undersecretary to Moscow with only one item on his agenda, the Soviet debt. The window of great opportunity was ignored.

The second profound mistake was to allow Senator Jesse Helms to effectively torpedo ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that is meant to reduce the number of long-range nuclear weapons from 6,000 to 2,500. By holding up ratification at a crucial time in 1995 Helms allowed his obscurantist counterparts in the Russian parliament a chance to assault it in Moscow. The momentum to rid the two nuclear superpowers of their massive armouries has been totally undermined. Russia’s command and control systems are visibly deteriorating, as are the rockets themselves. The risks of an accidental launch are ratcheted up by the week.

And now comes the expansion of Nato likely, unless there is an unexpected great debate, to be approved by the U.S. Senate later this month. As a group of mainly conservative experts, including Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s National Security Advisor, wrote in the New York Times a couple of months ago, “antagonism is sure to grow if the alliance extends ever closer to Russia…We will have misplaced our priorities during a critical window of opportunity to gain Russian cooperation in controlling nuclear arsenals and preventing proliferation.”

For what? For American hubris? Mr. Clinton had better come up with a better reason. It seems he has none and history will surely judge him for having missed the twentieth century’s most promising chance of a great peace