WASHINGTON Europe is today a status quo power that resists and resents being hurried into a turbulent new post-Cold War era by the United States, Russia, Turkey, Israel and other global agents of radical change. It is not that the Europeans want to stop the world and get off, as some U.S. officials suggest. The current period of trans-Atlantic dissonance should be a temporary and tactical pause rather than a permanent cultural shift. The Bush administration can best pursue its goals at this week's NATO summit meeting in Prague by treating Europe as malleable and a still-significant security partner for the future. 

The Europeans need to come to Prague recognizing that their plea to the Bush White House to deal with the world "as it is" ignores how rapidly and dramatically the world is changing around them. Equivocation and tinkering - the heart and soul of Europe's current diplomacy - is rapidly falling behind history's ever-accelerating curve. 

Today's true foreign policy realists try to identify, cope with and influence the currents of radical change that fuel Islamic extremism, renewed political upheaval in the Middle East and the global wars on and by terrorism. Investing effort and treasure to shore up a disappearing world is a self-defeating endeavor. 

Diverging attitudes over what is sustainable and what is doomed are rapidly becoming divisive factors in trans-Atlantic relations. An intellectual investment in the status quo ties France, Germany and others to Arab governments of the Middle East at least as much as commerce and oil do. Cataclysmic change in the Middle East is a notion that falls somewhere between inevitable and desirable for the Bush White House. It is anathema to Europe's leaders and intellectuals. 

One telling example of how nations are arranging themselves along history's moving line came at the end of the hostage siege by Chechen guerrillas in a Moscow theater last month. A Russian deputy foreign minister called in Arab ambassadors and noted that none of them had offered to help. Up to that point, the official added, Arab countries had not even expressed sympathy to the Kremlin, which in Soviet days provided them with economic aid and weapons. 

Silence and inaction in such circumstances are acquiescence to terror, the Russians were saying. They implicitly echoed George W. Bush's declaration in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001: "with us or against us." Russia and the United States today share a sense of urgency and a willingness to act militarily against terror networks. Europe demonstrates neither convincingly. 

Prague is a fitting apogee for the golden age of NATO. The summit will consecrate the expansion of the alliance into the Balkans and the Baltics, which arrives unopposed and almost unnoticed by Russia. It will crown five decades of U.S.-European courage and common values that overcame the Soviet threat. .But resting on those laurels would amount to a death sentence for the alliance. Giant tasks will be resolved only if present American-European differences are overcome and submerged into a bold new trans-Atlantic program for global security.