PRESIDENT Clinton arrives in Paris today to sign the NATO Russia pact while critics at home accuse him of endangering European security in insisting on the expansion of the alliance.
There are also allegations that the US misled the then Soviet leader, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1990 by assuring him that there would be no eastward extension of NATO in return for his agreement to German reunification.
The NATO Russia Founding Act, which will give Russia consultative status but no veto in the alliance's policy, will prepare the way for a formal invitation in July to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO in spite of strong Russian reservations. Mr Clinton will have also have a one to one meeting in Paris with President Yeltsin.
Mr Clinton will go from Paris to the Netherlands where he will take part in a ceremony tomorrow marking the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan of US economic aid to a war devastated Europe.
He will then fly to London on Thursday for a brief six hour stop over during which he will meet the British Cabinet and give a press conference with the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair.
On Saturday, Mr Clinton is expected to make a foreign policy speech at West Point military academy setting out his arguments for expanding NATO in the face of Russian reservations.
While the President and his aides are hailing the NATO Russia agreement and NATO expansion as triumphs for US diplomacy, there is growing unease in the US that there has not been sufficient debate on the implications of what the New York Times has called "an epochal change in the map of Europe that is now racing towards realisation".
The NATORussia agreement is not a legally binding treaty and does not have to be ratified by the Senate but the future expansion of the alliance will.
The US will have to bear some of the cost of bringing the new members' defence forces and military equipment up to date. The total over 13 years is estimated at $27 billion to $35 billion.
But critics also point out that Americans have not grasped the significance of the US having to defend former communist countries against any future aggression.
Mr Clinton is accused of being too influenced by a wish to mark his second term by foreign policy initiatives and by domestic considerations in pushing for NATO expansion.
He announced the decision while campaigning last year in Detroit where there are strong Central European ethnic populations.
Mr George Kennan, the former US diplomat who devised the "containment" strategy towards the Soviet Union in the Cold War, has opposed NATO expansion, describing it as unnecessary and likely to endanger European security because of Russian distrust.
It is also pointed out that expansion is likely to force the Russian Parliament to refuse to ratify the Start 2 Treaty under which the US and Russia are to reduce their nuclear arsenals by over 3,000 missiles.
Mr Clinton defended his decision last week in meetings with reporters. He said: "We now have a chance to create a European continent where nation states for the first time say they are going to respect each other's borders and work together on common security problems.
"To find a framework which accomplishes that and which also keeps the United States . . . tied to the security and the freedom and the territorial integrity of Europe is an extraordinary achievement and it gives us a chance to write a whole new chapter in the 21st century," he said.
The President of the Czech Republic, Mr Vaclav Havel, has also argued recently in the American press for expanding NATO to become "a guarantor of EuroAmerican civilisation and thus as a pillar of global security".
Mr Havel wrote that the thinking of critics of expansion "is deeply rooted in the bipolar world of the past and they grossly underestimate the variety of dangers that exist for democracy, peace and freedom in the Euro Atlantic region and elsewhere in the world".