LONDON -- Disneyland, the Kennedy Space Center and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush were all on the agenda during the NATO Parliamentary Assembly's visit to Orlando, Florida, this month. Missing were members of the U.S. Congress. They weren't in Istanbul 12 months ago -- apparently because of problems with their plane -- and they weren't in Prague last spring, which was too close to the Iraq war. Excuses are now running out as they remain conspicuous only by their absence.
If the United Nations was the first international organization to be comprehensively written off by a United States disappointed that the U.N. failed to echo its master's voice, then the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could be next. The problem, again, is "Old Europe."
Those that did come were all reading from the same script and lecturing the slow learners. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, embodied the hard version of the message demanding a NATO that transformed itself from static to mobile, regional to global, reactive to proactive -- in short, a new NATO for a new world.