Now that the Senate and Clinton administration have committed sending U.S. troops, as needed, to the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, the public may wonder what made these nations deserving enough for inclusion in the NATO club. The answer should come next year.

Five more nations — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Romania — are expected to apply for NATO membership then, and senators will be forced either to include these new countries or explain their reasoning for, say, Poland but not Lithuania. Notice too that one nation missing from these lists is also the one in which the turn toward the democracy marked the end of the Cold War.

Russia, NATO enthusiasts believe, will accept the organization’s creeping line of defense without fear, anger or political regression. The former adversary is supposed to endure its continued exclusion without seeking solace among other neighbors — say, a billion-person Communist neighbor. To the contrary, an expanded NATO makes itself a superbly convenient target of blame within Russia for whatever ill Russian leaders care to assign it — political, economic, social; it is a veritable El Nino of international agreements.

Though nearly 200 years of military history — starting with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and certainly going through Japan’s and Germany’s losses in World War II — dictates that the way to lasting peace is to bring the vanquished back into the fold as quickly as possible, supporters of NATO are hoping the usual reverberations of war will be suspended in the event of a cold, rather than hot, war. Don’t bet on it.

John Lewis Gaddis, Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University, recently wrote that, “Some principles of strategy are so basic that when stated they sound like platitudes: treat former enemies magnanimously; do not take on unnecessary new ones; keep the big picture in view; balance ends and means; avoid emotion and isolation in making decisions. … NATO enlargement manages to violate (ital) every one (unital) of the strategic principles just mentioned.”

Professor Gaddis is mistaken on one count: Keeping the big picture in view, for politicians, means preparing for the next election cycle. The NATO vote prepared them, with help from the expansion’s biggest supporters, with funding that beat out even Big Tobacco’s contributions. Military contractors — the real winners in this — spent $51 million on lobbying campaigns during the last two years, most of it on NATO expansion, according to the New York Times. Dozens of arms-related companies contributed $32 million to congressional candidates since 1991, beating out the tobacco lobby by $5 million.

With luck, Russia will be too busy with its own economic problems to spend a lot of time worrying about NATO. With luck, its politicians won’t use the expansion as an excuse to make alliances that NATO members may someday view with alarm.