THE European Commission is warming up to telling Romania and Bulgaria that they can join in January.

It is making a lot of noise, implying that it has plenty of room for manoeuvre in that decision, but it doesn’t. It maintains that it has plenty of sanctions up its sleeve if they fail to reform once they are in the European Union, but it doesn’t.

The next official report from the Commission on the two applicants’ progress, or lack of it, is due on September 26. After that, the 25-member club will decide whether to admit the two new members in January, or delay for a year.

But in practice, the decision seems all but made, despite the lack of progress by Bulgaria, in particular, over the summer.

The Commission has too many incentives to press ahead regardless of its misgivings about the entrants’ readiness. Logistical pressures weigh against it: the cumbersome mechanisms for paying subsidies to farms are being put in place, and it would be difficult to unpick them in four months.

And those are trivial compared to the political pressures. The Commission does not want to do anything to boost the anti-immigration, antienlargement passions already swirling across the EU.

So it has resorted to warning Bulgaria and Romania that if they do not continue to improve it could impose penalties, coyly called “safeguard measures”, once they join. But the threat seems hollow. The Commission could withhold regional aid for a time if it showed that it might be fraudulently diverted. But that is a complaint about the standard of bureaucracy in some ministries; it does not offer much of a lever on the government itself.

An even more serious concern, particularly in Bulgaria, has been about the courts’ ability to tackle the breathtakingly pervasive corruption. Bulgaria’s failure to remedy this in the past year has alarmed Brussels.

In theory, the Commission could refuse to recognise the rulings of Bulgarian courts after it joined the EU. But again, what is the force of this sanction, once the country has joined? Not great enough to prompt rapid change: that is the implication of Bulgaria’s leisurely approach to reform.

Cold War could provide the answer to US troubles

THIS year’s survey of “world affairs” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies is a gloomy exercise. The London-based think tank, which specialises in security questions and has close ties with the US, reserves its sharpest criticism for Washington’s attempt to export democracy.

It expresses relief at the “passing of America’s revolutionary moment during which it aimed actively to change the status quo in unstable places”.

To replace the neo-conservative philosophy, it recommends a return to the Cold War tactics of deterrence and containment, particularly towards Iran.

Less usefully, it urges the US to “burnish its contemporary strategic anthropology” (try harder to understand Arabs and Muslims) and to nurture regional security deals with “skills that are more horticultural than architectural”.

But it ends with an essential message to the US’s critics that if they “rightly argue that America does not have the answers” then they have a “burden to offer some of their own”, lest its “enemies provide the more compelling arguments”.

Rogue scientist’s illness gives Musharraf a new headache

IF life could get more difficult for Pakistan’s President Musharraf, it just has, with the news of the serious illness of the “rogue” nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan. If Musharraf keeps up the scientist’s effective house arrest he will offend Khan’s many fans. If he doesn’t, he will offend the US, already aggrieved that Musharraf won’t let it interview Khan.

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