It has been a good week for NATO. There was more common ground than disagreement at meetings between member foreign ministers in Budapest and at the five-day NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which convened in Vilnius, Lithuania. There were even tangible accomplishments on such thorny subjects as Turkey and Macedonia. Those successes will also serve as confidence builders as NATO tackles difficult topics such as expansion and missile defense, issues that are sure to absorb and frustrate NATO leaders in the months ahead.
The agreement between Europe and Turkey is important to European efforts to build a more credible defense and foreign policy. The European Union wants access to NATO assets to prepare its rapid-reaction force. Turkey has two reasons for objecting. First, there is the Ankara government's resentment of the way Brussels has treated its EU membership application. There is also concern over the use of those assets outside the alliance; Turkey worries that it may end up committing to deployments over which it has no say and in which EU and Turkish interests might diverge. After months of negotiations, diplomats announced that they had reached a deal in principle.
The second achievement was the announcement by Mr. Javier Solana, the EU's foreign-policy chief, that he had persuaded Macedonia's political leaders to resume political cooperation in a national-unification government. Although Mr. Solana deserves credit for his power of persuasion, NATO needed to be unified behind him if he was to have any clout. While it is hard to see who could object to a unity government, there is always room for disagreement in the murky world of Balkan politics.