Bush adviser warns Europe to spend more on arms

US troops will not police all trouble spots, she insists

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A new Republican administration would press European nations to make massive increases in their defence budgets during the next decade to help free up the United States military from international peacekeeping, George W Bush's top foreign policy adviser says.

Condoleezza Rice, in line to become the first African-American woman to be national security adviser or even secretary of state should Mr Bush take office, said this week that the US must be much more selective in the future about deploying American troops to the world's trouble spots, saying that "doing good" was "not a strategic concept".

She added that the much-vaunted closeness between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would not make relations difficult if Mr Bush wins the presidency. "The British-American relationship is bigger than any single personal relationship," Ms Rice said.

In a clear warning to European countries that they may soon have to make a highly charged choice between in creased defence spending and existing government social programmes, Ms Rice said there had been a "near collapse" in military spending in some parts of Europe. She specifically excluded Britain from these criticisms.

"When you look at some of the things that Europe needs to be able to do to be a force and a presence in the region, some of them are expensive. Infrastructure, command and control, air support, these are expensive items. So yes, I think spending is probably going to have to increase."

The recent European defence initiative adopted by the EU at Helsinki last year was "in the United States' interests", Ms Rice added. "The greater danger is that European militaries will not do enough, not that they'll do too much," Ms Rice added.

US forces would only be deployed under a Bush presidency when there was a US strategic interest at stake, she said. "It's not that humanitarian issues aren't important. You can't ignore killing in Rwanda or Sierra Leone. But the question is whether these are places into which you would want to introduce American military power."

Ms Rice did not offer an exact definition of US strategic interest, but she said that treaty obligations and the threat of wider conflict would be prime examples.

"It can't be just for social en gineering. It can't be for civil functions that really are police functions. It can't be state-building like we tried in Haiti," she said. "Doing good is not a strategic concept, and it draws you away from the kinds of responsibilities that can prevent a wider war."

Kosovo "clearly fitted into the strategic category", she said, although Mr Bush wanted Europe to take over control there under "a process that puts us in a position to get our forces out".

Ms Rice was fiercely critical of President Clinton's handling of the planned national missile defence system, on which the US and Russia failed to agree this week. Mr Clinton had imposed so many constraints on US missile-testers that "we're not getting our best shot", she said, adding that she "wanted to look at" ship- and aircraft-based anti-missile defence systems as well as the land-based system now under examination.

Ms Rice, who is a former provost of Stanford University in California and who was a White House adviser to President George Bush, welcomed the fact that Mr Clinton and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, remained at odds on missile defence in their weekend talks in Moscow. "The positive thing about the trip was that there was not a grand bargain about missile defence which ties the hands of the next president," she said.

Mr Bush believes he can persuade Mr Putin that it is time to "move beyond the old cold-war logic" of the 1972 ABM treaty, which bars the development of anti-missile defence systems, even though Mr Clinton failed to do so, Ms Rice said. She called Mr Bush's recent statement that he wanted to make missile-defence systems available to America's European allies and Israel "a commitment to consultation".

A Bush administration "would want to build a system that wouldn't decouple the defence of the allies from the defence of the United States", she said. The Clinton plan, which seeks to protect only the US from missile attack, "clearly decouples", she said.

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