THE popping of champagne corks to celebrate the signing of NATO's new pact with Russia took none of the fizz out of an increasingly heated US debate about President Clinton's push to enlarge the western alliance.
Influential voices in the United States are already questioning the wisdom of Mr Clinton's policy, which is expected to reach full bloom at a NATO summit in
Madrid in July. At that meeting, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and perhaps others, are likely to be asked to join NATO.
Political pundits such as the Washington Post's David Broder and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and a sizeable number of academic experts have expressed doubts about the move, which cannot proceed without US Senate approval.
Mr Friedman has described Mr Clinton's advocacy of NATO expansion as "the Whitewater of Clinton foreign policy", a comparison to the complex web of legal, ethical and financial questions that has clouded Mr Clinton's presidency.
"The question of how the United States will stretch a shrinking military force to protect Warsaw, Prague and Budapest has not been addressed, nor has the question of how those struggling countries will finance the modernisation of their forces needed to bring them up to NATO standards," Mr Broder wrote last week.
"Even more vague is the question of how far this process goes - and what happens if the Baltic countries and such former Soviet Republics as Ukraine are brought into NATO or forever barred," he said.
President Yeltsin has said Moscow would not look kindly on any NATO expansion involving former Soviet republics.
US critics of enlargement say the price of the policy may be a Russian failure to make promised cuts in its nuclear arsenal, and ask how such a trade-off would advance US national security.
They also claim the policy was inspired by Mr Clinton's 1996 re-election strategy of wooing voters of eastern European ancestry in pivotal Midwest states, although administration officials deny this.
"The President set this course back in 1994, when he first articulated it," the US National Security Adviser, Mr Samuel Berger, said. "Our view is that by embracing the emerging democracies of central Europe in an enlarging NATO, we can begin to help build the stability in the east that NATO has in the west."
Mr Clinton's critics say that a better way to promote European stability would be for Washington to push for greater economic integration on the continent. US officials counter that this week's French parliamentary elections showed the inherent weakness of that approach.
The first round of the voting, which left President Chirac's government in crisis as the Paris ceremony unfolded, showed strong gains for the Socialist and Communist opposition, which has criticised austerity imposed to qualify for a single European currency, and for the extreme-right National Front, which opposes further European integration.