Washington ? Freed from the immediate burdens and dangers of a 45-year Cold War centered on its terrain and its allegiances, Europe is today a status quo power that resists and resents being hurried into a turbulent new 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 and commentators 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 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 global diplomacy – is rapidly falling behind history’s ever-accelerating curve.

Today’s true foreign-policy realists attempt 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 the 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 small but telling example of how nations are arranging themselves along history’s moving line came at the end of the tragic hostage siege by Chechen guerrillas in a Moscow theater last month. A Russian deputy foreign minister called in the capital’s Arab ambassadors and pointedly noted that none of them had offered to help during the siege. Up to that point, the official added, Arab countries had not even expressed sympathy to the Kremlin, which in Soviet days provided many of 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: “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.

European leaders and intellectuals still express sympathy for the aims of Bush’s war on terrorism. But they increasingly criticize its tactics and direction for, among other things, allegedly undermining the existing authoritarian regimes of the Arab world.

“America is simply expanding Israel’s pre-emptive assassination policy to a global level and creating an unending new sea of recruits for the terrorists,” a French friend asserted to me recently in a representative comment. “Bush acts as if America’s only real allies are Israel and Russia, while Europe is an obstacle.”

The Prague summit will underline the superficiality of that assessment :quot; if Europe and the United States can effectively shift the focus of their security cooperation away from the Old Continent, which is no longer platform and prize in a superpower struggle, toward the imploding zone of wars within Islam stretching from the Middle East to Indonesia.

Prague is a fitting apogee for the golden age of NATO. The summit will consecrate the alliance’s expansion, unopposed and almost unnoticed by Russia, into the Balkans and the Baltics. It will showcase the remarkable talents of NATO’s civilian boss, Secretary General George Robertson, and its top military commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston. It will most importantly embody 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 :quot; such as anchoring Turkey’s increasingly democratic society more firmly in the West :quot; will be resolved only if present American-European differences are overcome and submerged into a bold new trans-Atlantic program.

Americans can learn from and let their readiness for action be tempered by Europe’s deep sense of history. But the Europeans cannot go on shunning the reality that we all stand on the cusp of cataclysmic change around the world. That change must be anticipated and channeled, not ignored.