1999 (34 page)

That was why Gorbachev made elimination of U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Europe his top priority in arms control. He desperately wanted the agreement he recently signed with President Reagan, certainly not out of the motive some gullible observers attribute to him—that of saving money which he can apply to much-needed domestic projects. Nuclear weapons are cheap, and the savings will be minimal.

Some naive arms-control enthusiasts have contended that Soviet acceptance of the zero–zero option is a victory for the West because Gorbachev gave up four times as many warheads as we did in Europe. They fail to ask themselves, “Why?” Gorbachev is not a philanthropist, and he is not a peacenik. Russians are the best chess players in the world, and the key to chess is to play for position early and always to think ahead several moves, anticipating and planning for the opponent's most likely countermoves. United States negotiators were obsessed only with the move in front of them—to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. Gorbachev was focusing on another part of the strategic chessboard: his goal was to decouple NATO and particularly the West Germans from the United States. He succeeded in demoralizing our staun-chest friends in Germany and in getting plaudits from the antinuclear activists. With the recent arms-control agreement, Gorbachev did not win Europe—but did improve the Soviet strategic position for doing so at some point in the future.

The third critical change since the formation of NATO has been in the distribution of economic wealth. The reason American leaders chose to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of
defending Western Europe in the immediate postwar years was that the Europeans themselves did not have the economic resources to do so. But that condition has changed. Western Europe has long since been rebuilt from the ruins of World War II. Today it stands as an economic equal to the United States, with its GNP of $3.5 trillion only slightly behind the $4 trillion U.S. economy. Moreover, the United States, given its large government deficits, is no longer in a position to pick up most of the tab for keeping the Warsaw Pact armies on the other side of the inner-German border.

Yet, despite its capacity to do so, Western Europe still contributes a great deal less proportionately to the common defense. The United States spends about 7 percent of GNP on defense, while the countries of Western Europe expend only about 3.5 percent. As former NATO Commander Alexander Haig has repeatedly pointed out, we should not underestimate our allies' contribution to the defense of Europe. They provide the bulk of NATO's forces, and they maintain a system of military conscription, while the United States does not. But it is no exaggeration to say that in absolute terms Americans spend more to defend Western Europe from Soviet attack than Europeans do.

Finally, the fourth basic change since the creation of NATO has been the deep divisions that have developed among the members of the alliance over Western policies outside Europe. In 1949, since all agreed that the likely axis of a Soviet advance ran through Europe, there was little thought given to countering Soviet expansion elsewhere. But apart from the contentious question of colonialism, all NATO members generally agreed that they shared common global interests, including that of preventing the spread of communism. As a result, when communist insurgencies arose in Malaysia and Indochina, the British and the French expected allied support in defeating them. When the North Koreans invaded South Korea, the United States expected the allies to send troops into that war.

But that comity broke down in the 1950s and 1960s and has virtually disappeared today. One of the greatest blows to allied cooperation outside Europe came when the United States decided to oppose the British and French effort to reclaim the Suez Canal militarily after Nasser nationalized it in 1956. President Eisenhower
had cause to oppose them: Britain and France had kept him in the dark, even lied to him, about their plan to seize the canal, and he did not want to appear to be supporting brazen imperialism. And they could not have picked a worse time for their action, coming as it did two weeks after we had condemned Khrushchev for sending Soviet troops into Hungary and one week before the American elections in which Eisenhower was running on a platform of peace and prosperity.

I supported the decision at the time, but in retrospect our opposing British and French efforts to defend their interests in Suez was the greatest foreign-policy blunder the United States has made since the end of World War II. I have reason to believe that Eisenhower shared that assessment after he left office. The bottom line was that we failed to empathize with our allies and to calculate the long-term damage this would cause to the solidarity of the West. For them, the Suez Canal represented a critical interest. The failed Suez intervention had a disastrous net effect: our allies ceased to play their roles of world powers and began a precipitate retreat from the positions they had held around the globe.

As they withdrew, we either had to take their place or had to risk seeing the Soviet Union do so. Moscow took its cue, and the focus of the Soviet threat shifted. By the mid-1950s, NATO had secured the central front in Europe—so the Kremlin then shifted its attack to the flanks. New expansionism would come in the developing world, as Moscow sought to move into the vacuum of power left by the retreating European empires. Over the ensuing decades, the Soviet Union became a formidable global power, with the capability to project its power around the world and to threaten Western interests and access to strategic sea-lanes, oil reserves, and mineral deposits. It was a challenge NATO never before had to face—and one for which the alliance has yet to develop a sound strategy.

Moreover, as our European allies ceded their responsibility for shaping the course of events in the world, some political leaders became increasingly irresponsible in the positions they took on key East–West conflicts in the Third World. In the Vietnam War, some Europeans denounced as immoral the U.S. effort to prevent the brutal totalitarian warlords in Hanoi from taking over all of Indochina.
They also came to pursue a reduction of tensions in Europe as a kind of absolute value, to be sought as an end in itself, regardless of whether Soviet actions elsewhere threatened Western interests. Soviet proxy wars in Africa, in their view, merited no response. After the direct Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they took no actions apart from verbal denunciations. Even Moscow's suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981 drew only hot rhetoric and lukewarm action.

Today, there is unprecedented dissension within NATO about issues outside Europe. Our allies would not allow us to resupply Israel from their territory during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was sharply criticized by those who opposed her decision to allow the United States to use British air bases as a jumping-off point for the strike on Libya in 1986, and France denied our bombers the right to pass over French territory en route, thus forcing them to fly thousands of extra miles. Today, NATO allies have only reluctantly agreed to cooperate with the United States in protecting freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, and U.S. efforts to prevent a Soviet beachhead in Central America receive little support and meet with much uninformed carping criticism.

The major problem NATO now faces is not the threat of Eurocommunism but rather the pernicious effect of Eurocriticism. It has robbed NATO of goodwill among members of the Congress. In the 1970s, NATO was attacked by liberal isolationists, who almost succeeded in passing the Mansfield Amendment to cut back U.S. forces in Europe. Today, the opposition to NATO comes from the conservatives. They believe not only that our allies are getting a free ride on defense spending, but also that the alliance restrains the United States in acting to defend its interests in the Third World. They have even gone so far as to argue that NATO weakens the West and undermines the national security of the United States. The overwhelming bipartisan support of NATO in 1949 has evaporated.

Given these four profound changes in the assumptions that undergirded NATO from the start, it is clear that this is not the garden-variety crisis which has led every few years to calls for “an agonizing reappraisal” of the alliance.

There is a real danger of a psychological decoupling in NATO. No alliance can survive if its members dispute its central purpose for existing. No alliance can survive if its members refuse to share fairly the financial burden of their collective security. No alliance can survive if its members disagree on the nature of the threat to their security. No alliance can survive if its members question the sincerity or the good intentions of some of their partners.

Unless the United States and its West European allies address these problems, we will look back in 1999 and see that the disputes of today were the first signs of the final disintegration of NATO.

As President, I sought to make 1973 the Year of Europe in order to focus the energies of my administration on resolving the problems which had arisen from changing times. We did not achieve the progress I thought was possible, and no administration since has made a concerted effort to deal with these issues. Therefore, whoever succeeds President Reagan in 1989 should dedicate his first year to solving the problems in the Atlantic partnership. The next President will be strongly tempted to put at the top of his agenda the Soviet–American relationship. Some will urge that he seek an early summit meeting with Gorbachev. This would be a mistake. Before seeking better relations with our adversaries, we should repair our relations with our friends. This means consulting seriously with our major NATO allies before meeting the Soviets, rather than perfunctorily informing them afterward.

Upon entering office, the next President should gather the NATO heads of government to initiate ministerial-level negotiations on the issues that divide us. These negotiations should reforge the bonds of the alliance and culminate in a NATO strategic summit at the end of the year. This would be a most fitting commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of NATO—and will enable the alliance to reach its fiftieth anniversary in 1999 with renewed vitality and purpose.

It is vital that we strengthen, not weaken, the alliance. Europe is still the major geopolitical target of the Kremlin. A Finlandized Europe would give a massive boost to the economic power of the Soviet Union and would lead to an economic disaster for the
United States. Nor can the United States afford to sink into self-satisfied neo-isolationism. It needs the help of its allies to defend Western interests around the world. As Franklin Roosevelt said in 1945, “We have learned that we cannot live alone, in peace.”

Moreover, to break with Europe would be to rend the fabric of our history. We are largely a composite of European peoples and ideals. We share values, faiths, and cultural and philosophical heritages with Europe. Our military alliances and our close economic and cultural relationships are expressions not only of a common external threat, but also of our common heritage.

In a new Year of Europe, we must focus our energies on recasting the strategic underpinnings of NATO. In recent years, the alliance has become a master at producing meaningless communiqués by mating ambiguity with obfuscation. Its leaders have preferred to paper over disagreements rather than hammer out a clear accord. It is time to set forth with crystalline clarity our common understanding of the threats to NATO's security and our common strategic response. Putting it bluntly, there is a new threat, and we need a new NATO to meet it.

We first need to reach agreement on the nature of the adversary. Many claim that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev is no longer a dangerous threat to the West. That view is wrong. There is no evidence—so far—that he has changed the geopolitical thrust of Soviet foreign policy. He has not let up on the Soviet military buildup. He has not cut back on supporting Soviet client states in the Third World. He has not changed the status of Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

If Gorbachev does change the Soviet Union at home—and pacifies its foreign policy abroad—the West should welcome his actions. But we must be sure that we wait for him to make these changes before we give him the credit for doing so. We should not reward him with a change of our policy toward him until he changes his policy toward us. He cannot have it both ways—a relaxation of tensions with the West while he still engages in actions which threaten Western interests.

We must also agree on the nature of the Soviet threat. The fact is that Moscow threatens the security of the West both on the central front in Europe and in the Third World. It is easy to recognize
the threat in Europe, for it comes in the form of over 100 divisions primed and ready to roll west. But the difficulty in detecting the hidden hand of Moscow in the Third World makes the threat no less real. While American superhawks need to concede that not all anti-Western movements and insurgencies result from Soviet actions, West Europeans need to accept the fact that some do and that the West must respond to this indirect aggression.