New European Moment

For newspaper men and women of a certain age and ilk, it was a wonderful moment to click on the Internet yesterday afternoon and see pop up the photograph of Secretary Rice and Poland's foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, signing an agreement on missile defense. It is a sign of the rise of the new Europe, of its entente with America, and of the bet that each is placing on the other in the face of an irascible KGB-trained Russian premier and his Kremlin camarilla.

We first met Mr. Sikorski when he was a young freelance journalist wooing one of the most brilliant American foreign correspondents of the new generation, Anne Applebaum, then working in Warsaw for the Economist. He had been a student at Oxford when martial law was declared in his home country by the Soviet-backed general, Wojciech Jaruzelski. Mr. Sikorski decided not to go home, and he ended up in Afghanistan fighting — particularly with his pen — the Soviet Communist Empire from there.

When Solidarity triumphed and was given a mandate to form a free government in Poland, Mr. Sikorski returned home a hero, ending up as deputy minister of defense in the new government. He helped dismantle the Soviet bases of an evaporating Warsaw Pact. And then he was out and in and out of the various governments, sometimes working as a freelance journalist, sometimes as a government minister, sometimes as an entrepreneur, sometimes as a think tank leader in Washington. Along the way, he and Ms. Applebaum were married and started a family.

Eventually, as a democratic Poland began to form and un-form and re-form governments, Mr. Sikorski became a senator and minister of defense and then minister of foreign affairs. The missile defense, with the right guarantees for Poland, was one of his important projects as foreign minister. And it is terrific to see him sitting side-by-side an American state secretary, one of his own generation, placing their respective countries bets on a partnership.

We would not want to suggest it is a light moment. Given the saber rattling out of the Kremlin, it is anything but. How far into the old Soviet territories our alliances ought to extend, and the terms for them, is a debate well worth having. But were the flinching to have started with Poland, which has stood with us in the current war and is lead by individuals such as Mr. Sikorski, it would have been a tragic day. Instead the papers are signed for a system that is, by its very nature, only defensive. It cannot, as Secretary Rice put it, be targeted in an offensive way at anybody. It is a signal of the new generation.