NATO faced its most serious emergency in more than 50 years last night when America traded angry verbal exchanges with France and Germany after they blocked Turkey’s request for military protection.

After hours of crisis talks in Brussels, Nato officials admitted that they had failed to resolve the transatlantic split, which pitted France, Germany and Belgium against the United States and most of the other 15 members.

The division at the heart of Nato even showed signs of deepening last night when Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said that Washington was prepared to bypass the Western alliance to prepare for war against Baghdad.

The cause of the row was a joint move by the trio to block Nato from moving military equipment to defend Turkey in the event of war against Iraq. They argued that it was premature to prepare defences for war because they would undermine diplomatic efforts to head off the conflict.

Turkey wants Nato military planners to prepare contingencies for deploying Patriot air defence missiles, Awacs early warning aircraft and chemical-biological protection units to the country, in case Iraq launched an attack on it.

In a move used only once before in Nato’s history, Ankara invoked Article 4 of the Washington Treaty, which forced all 19 members of the Alliance to discuss its request for help against a possible attack.

As officials negotiated in Brussels, the Bush Administration signalled that it had run out of patience with its European partners. Mr Rumsfeld, fresh from a heated debate over Atlantic security in Munich over the weekend, said that if necessary America would ignore Nato’s 54-year-old creed of collective action and mobilise anyway.

Raising the extraordinary prospect that Nato’s other 16 members “would form an alliance” without Paris, Berlin and Brussels, Mr Rumsfeld said that plans to use the assets of Nato countries to strengthen Turkish defences would proceed “at a good clip”.

Asked if the blocking tactics of the trio as they try to slow Washington’s march to war would affect American planning, Mr Rumsfeld said: “No, because the planning’s going to go forward outside of Nato if necessary. In the event that the three stand out at the end, my guess is that the other 16 nations of Nato would form a coalition to provide that kind of assistance.”

He was withering in his criticism of the French-led rebellion. “It’s unfortunate that they are in stark disagreement with the rest of the Nato allies,” he said. “There’s three countries. There are 19 countries in Nato. So it’s 16 to three. I think it’s a mistake.”

Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, described the crisis as “the gravest in the Atlantic alliance since its creation” and insisted that Washington should not back down.

“If the United States yields to the threat of a French veto, or if Iraq, encouraged by the action of our allies, evades the shrinking non-military options still available, the result will be a catastrophe for the Atlantic alliance and for the international order,” he wrote in The Washington Post.

Experts on Nato said that the Alliance had weathered divisions before, most recently in Kosovo when the US-led air campaign came under heavy criticism across Europe and hawks in Washington vowed at the time never to “go to war by committee” again.

“In the end Kosovo was regarded as a success,” Dana Allin, an expert in transatlantic security at the International Institute for Strategtic Studies, said. “France and Germany are very important countries. They are not irrelevant. We needed them in the Balkans and Afghanistan. We will probably need them again in Iraq.”

Certainly there are precedents for yesterday’s dispute. Turkey had to enforce Article 4 in 1991 when Ankara was concerned about its security as the US-led coalition prepared to launch Operation Desert Storm. But that was done without the glare of worldwide publicity and caused no real division in Nato.

This time Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the Nato Secretary-General, was forced to concede defeat and called for another meeting today to discuss Turkey’s urgent request for help. Talks were expected to go on overnight. After hours of fruitless negotiations with the three dissenters, a grim-looking Lord Robertson said: “I am not seeking today to minimise the seriousness of the situation. It is serious.”

He said it was evident that Turkey’s concerns were “legitimate and the threat is real”.

Turkey is host to US bombers and is expected to approve a request from Washington next week to allow up to 20,000 American troops to be based in the country.

France insisted that it was premature to discuss deploying Nato Patriot missiles to protect Turkey when every effort was still being made to solve the Iraq issue by peaceful means. A French Nato official said: “We are concerned about the security of Turkey but we do not think that there are immediate measures to take.”

Senior French diplomatic sources said that France’s whole approach was tied in with the United Nations process, and highlighted the importance of the next report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, to be presented on Friday by Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector. “Our calendar is fixed to that of the United Nations,” one source said.

However, military sources said that time was running out. If Patriot missiles were to be deployed in time to protect Turkish territory before a war began in Iraq, the ground-based anti-aircraft weapons needed to be on the way soon. US commanders are known to have late February to mid-March as the ideal “window” for an invasion of Iraq.

Nicholas Burns, US Ambassador to Nato, said: “Nato is now facing a crisis of credibility.”

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