There are indications that Britain is coming round to proposals pioneered by France and Germany for greater EU cooperation on defence, but it is also standing fast against the creation of an independent military HQ.

Italy meanwhile is set to propose a "virtual" command structure as a means of circumventing the brewing row over the quartet's plans to build a new EU HQ at Tervuren, outside Brussels, sources said.

The US ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, said the military alliance remained supportive of EU defence plans under a framework cooperation accord known as "Berlin Plus".

"What we cannot support and will not support is the creation of an alternative EU military headquarters, whether it's in Tervuren or some other place, in Brussels or elsewhere," he told reporters.

"That would be, we think, duplicative, needlessly costly and that would be in essence a contradiction to the Berlin Plus agreements," Burns said.

"There's just a very few countries that are thinking about going in a separate direction. We would hope that those plans would not be materialised because it would not be productive for the future of NATO-EU relations."

The plan for the base at Tervuren was launched at a controversial meeting in April among the leaders of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg as a means of giving the EU a military planning capability independent of NATO.

All four countries opposed the US-British war in Iraq and, Luxembourg aside, fought for weeks against US plans to boost the defences of NATO member Turkey in readiness for the conflict.

Diplomats say Britain is ready to discuss the Franco-German ideas for expanding the EU's military flank at upcoming talks to finalise the bloc's first-ever constitution.

But Downing Street has denied that it agreed to anything that would undermine NATO, such as the Tervuren HQ, at a summit of the British, French and German leaders in Berlin this month.

Sources said that Italy would propose, at an EU defence ministers' meeting in Rome this weekend, the creation of a "virtual task force" as a compromise alternative to Tervuren.

The idea would be for staff officers from EU countries to come together to discuss military planning on a more informal basis, one source said.

The EU quartet's controversial initiative is not the only issue clouding relations between the United States and some of its European allies.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has suspended funding for a new NATO building in Brussels in anger at a spate of lawsuits brought against US officials under a Belgian war crimes law.

The law has now been revised but the US ambassador said it was too early to say when the funding would be unblocked.

"We need to... be assured that in the new law that's been passed that there will be no possibility of a repetition of this very sorry episode of these nuisance lawsuits against officials of my government," Burns said.

The envoy had conciliatory words for France, which he said has been "a leader" in plans by NATO to launch a 21,000-strong response force capable of deploying to hotspots at short notice.

But Burns conceded that similar levels of cooperation in Iraq would remain elusive for the foreseeable future.

"There's never been a realistic possibility that NATO would go into Iraq collectively, as we are say in Afghanistan or Kosovo, because we have not agreed. You have to have consensus," he said.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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