NATO, for more than 40 years the United States’ premier military alliance, is dead.

R.I.P. NATO, even though President Bush has traveled to Prague for his first NATO summit.

The old NATO, created by President Harry Truman to defend America and its European allies against the Kremlin, died of success in the early 1990s. Now that President Bush and Vladimir Putin are pals and the Soviet Union is defunct, who needs NATO to protect them?

Not the Americans. Not the West Europeans.

The answer for the last decade has been: the East Europeans.

The NATO of the 1990s became a democracy club: Former Eastern Bloc countries sought membership to allay their fears of a Russian imperial comeback (three have already joined; seven more will be admitted at the Prague summit). But that era, too, is ending.

Europe is finally “whole and free” ” something that seemed unimaginable when NATO was founded. President Bush is calling on NATO to resurrect itself into an alliance that will fight terrorism with a new rapid-deployment force (RDF) that can go global.

There will be huzzahs and corks popping in Prague. But despite the hype, neither Washington nor its European allies are willing to do what’s necessary to make NATO relevant again.

Many Europeans think George Bush is a military cowboy. They prefer to fight terrorism with social action and police forces. They don’t want to spend the money to update their militaries.

Many on the Bush team think the Europeans are wimps and it’s too much trouble to get NATO into the action. They’d rather persuade individual NATO members to join anti-terror efforts without formally involving the alliance.

Both sides are shortsighted. A new NATO could fight terrorism and do peacekeeping as well. NATO troops, predominantly from European countries, have done vital peacekeeping work in the Balkans. There is even talk that the NATO alliance may take over command of the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan after next summer.

In a world where the Bush administration seeks to exercise anti-terrorist muscle but has no appetite for nation-building, a renewed NATO is a crucial peacekeeping resource. But the Europeans disdain the idea that U.S. troops should do the fighting and European forces pick up the pieces afterward.

“They won’t go for a division of labor in which the U.S. does the cooking and the EU does the dishes,” says the Brookings Institution’s specialist on European security, Ivo Daalder.

In that case, the Europeans have to do some cooking, too.

If a new NATO is to have meaning, it must be equipped to fight terrorism. Sooner or later, terrorists are likely to strike urban targets in Europe with the same ferocity that leveled the World Trade Center. To fight back, Europeans will have to upgrade their military capabilities and integrate them with U.S. forces.

However, no new NATO forces will emerge, nor will Europeans cough up the funds, unless they are given some say in where and how an RDF should operate. Nor could U.S. officials just cherry-pick special units from NATO ” say, a Czech team that specializes in anti-chemical warfare ” without consulting leaders of member countries about the mission.

Yet this kind of consultation is just what some Bush officials want to avoid.

The anti-NATOists believe that the U.S. military can do just fine without bothering with NATO. That may be true in absolute military terms. But the political and even military price will be high.

The end of NATO would deprive an overstretched U.S. military of help in key military missions (NATO countries offered to help with fighting in Afghanistan, and the Pentagon refused). It also would eliminate vital assistance from NATO peacekeeping troops.

NATO’s demise would increase U.S. isolation as well as the global resistance to the idea of American empire. It would reflect, and widen, the breach between Western democracies that need to stand together against terrorism and global chaos.

U.S. and European officials should reflect hard on the costs of burying NATO. They’ll miss it once it’s gone.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubin@phillynews.com.