Until General Gotovina is brought before the UN war crimes court in The Hague, the United States will not agree to any suggestion that NATO should normalise its relations with Croatia or ask that Croatia join NATO, Burns told reporters ahead of his visit to the Balkans scheduled for next week.
He said the US believed Croatia had not made sufficient progress in locating and arresting Gotovina.
Burns said the US would not support the admission of Serbia and Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina to NATO's Partnership for Peace programme as long as runaway indictees Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were on the run.
The US official said that ten years after the Srebrenica massacre it was time that Karadzic and Mladic be arrested. This is about the lack of political will on the part of the authorities in Belgrade, Burns told reporters.
Asked whether he thought that the Croatian government knew Gotovina's whereabouts but lacked the political will to arrest him, Burns said he did not have an answer to that question.
Burns and Assistant US Secretary of State Daniel Fried informed Croatian Foreign Minister Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic of this position of the US Administration at talks in New York several weeks ago.
Asked whether the EU made a mistake by launching membership talks with Croatia although Gotovina was still at large, Burns said the US was not in a position to criticise the EU whose member states he said were US friends and allies.
He, however, said that in 2002 NATO foreign ministers established a principle under which Croatia would not be allowed to join NATO and Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro the Partnership for Peace programme, unless the war criminals were arrested.
Burns said Albania, Macedonia and Croatia - signatories to the US-Adriatic Charter - were in the final stages of candidacy for NATO membership.
He said the three countries made excellent progress in the process of joining NATO adding, however, that Croatia needed to solve the issue of General Gotovina.