At Warsaw University in 2002, in what many believe to be his finest speech, President Bush advanced a vision of a free and complete Europe that would stretch "from the Baltic to the Black Sea." At the end of next month, when they gather in Riga, Latvia, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, Bush and the NATO allies will have cause to wonder what happened to their hopes for Europe's East.

At the most superficial level, things never go well in Europe when the United States is preoccupied elsewhere. This was true in 1956 during the Suez crisis, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, and again in 1968, when the Vietnam War drowned out interest in the suppression of the Prague spring. Given NATO's difficulties in Afghanistan and the bloody frustration of the United States in Iraq, it is not surprising to see Russia bullying its way around its former empire and threatening energy-dependent Europe.

But the newly powerful Kremlin, flush with oil money, is not the real problem of Europe's East. Even truculent Turkey, which now seems lost in a strange haze of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and vaguely Islamist nativism, is not the problem. Turkey has been the "sick man" of Europe for at least a century, and Russia has been a threat to its neighbors far longer. What has changed is that Europe has finally reached the frontiers of its influence and has no idea what to do with its new neighborhood.

To the south of Vienna lie Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo, which have been waiting on Europe's doorstep since the wars of Yugoslav succession ended in 1999. This year at the NATO summit the top three candidates, Albania, Croatia and Macedonia, can only hope for an honorable mention on the back pages of the summit communique.

The rest of the Western Balkans has even less interaction with Europe. Over 70 percent of university students in Serbia have never set foot outside their country. This may not be surprising to Americans, but it is shocking on a continent as interconnected as Europe. Albanian students have given up trying to get visas to visit Italy and now spend their vacations in Libya.

Comparatively, however, the Western Balkans are the most fortunate of the countries in Europe's East. In December, when Romania enters the European Union, Europe will border Moldova, whose gross domestic product is roughly half of Haiti's. Moldova's wine, by far its most important product, is embargoed both by Russia, because of Moldova's deviationist pro-Western tendencies, and by the European Union, because of the high quality and low cost of the wine itself. In a triumph of enlightened E.U. policy and in keeping with the law of unintended consequences, Moldova's largest cash export to Europe today is sexually trafficked women.

Like Moldova and the western Balkans, Ukraine also suffers from the tendency of both Washington and Brussels to isolate what they do not understand. Since the early 1990s the United States has pursued a manic-depressive policy toward the largest country in Eastern Europe -- and for that matter toward the country with the largest Jewish population remaining in Europe.

At first, in the infamous "Chicken Kiev" speech, delivered by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, we advised Ukraine to remain part of the Soviet Union. We then celebrated Ukraine's independence and its common-sense president, Leonid Kuchma -- until we decided that Kuchma was an autocrat who sold radars illegally to Saddam Hussein. It turns out that this did not happen, but you get the point. The same unpredictable volatility characterizes the ups and downs of our response to the coalition government in Kiev today. Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States and Europe cannot maintain a consistent policy toward Ukraine from one day to the next.

What confounds both Europe and the United States are the complexity of post-Soviet societies and the impotence of Western institutions. But instead of combining our efforts with those of the European Union to end the isolation of Europe's East, we have allowed the fecklessness of the European Union and the impatience of U.S. policy to re-create what the Soviet Union used to call its "near abroad." In effect, a vacuum of crime, underdevelopment and squabbling political elites now stretches from the Baltic states to the northern shore of the Black Sea. This is the sad Marshall Plan of our generation.

The problem of Europe's East is simply the loss of political vision in Washington and Brussels and the failure to keep the commitment to a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. One wonders: If this is the best Europe can do in its neighborhood and the best the United States can do together with Europe, what chances do we have in the Greater Middle East, where our ideas and influence count for far less than they do in Europe's unloved East?

The writer is president of the Project on Transitional Democracies and the U.S. Committee on NATO.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company