ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Map, News) - The Bush administration said Wednesday that the successful NATO summit in the former Soviet republic of Latvia, which is now free, proved that democracy can also take root in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Don’t sell freedom short,” said Dan Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. “What looks impossible today may become taken for granted in a number of years.”

Fried made the remarks on Air Force One as President Bush flew from the NATO summit in Latvia to an Iraq summit in Jordan. Bush also spent time this week in Estonia, another democratic Baltic state that endured half a century of Soviet subjugation.

“During the 1980s, the thought that the Baltics would be free was considered so improbable that serious people didn’t discuss it,” Fried said in response to questions by The Examiner. “It was considered irresponsible, ideological, extremist or simply fanciful to even talk about the Baltics being independent, much less NATO members.”

He added: “The lesson is we often overestimate what we can achieve in the short run. But we often underestimate what we can achieve in the long run. And the long run sometimes isn’t as long as you think.”

Presidential advisers said Bush made a conscious decision to swing for the fences at the NATO summit in order to demonstrate that he is not a lame duck in the wake of the GOP’s defeat in the midterm elections. So Bush unapologetically ruled out any premature withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Although some NATO members have publicly criticized Bush’s Iraq policy, they mostly expressed solidarity in closed-door meetings on Tuesday, according to Fried.

“The debates about Iraq that have gone on in the United States, and have gone on between the United States and some European countries, should not be allowed to spill over into a larger debate about the purpose of the alliance,” Fried said. “It was one of the underlying political facts of the past couple of days, that you had a strengthening of allied solidarity in the face of the debates about Iraq. And that’s no small matter.”

bsammon@dcexaminer.com