Europe Has Hardly Gone Soft on Terror

When President Reagan announced the severing of America’s links with Libya in response to the Arab terrorist attacks last month at the Rome and Vienna airports, there was a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm in Western Europe for supporting his call for the allied governments to impose similar economic sanctions.

At the government level, this lack of enthusiasm has much of its origin in disagreements over both the appropriateness and effectiveness of such measures. At the public level, however, the lack of enthusiasm as much represents objections to the style of the President’s pronouncement as to its content.

Most Europeans do not understand why the President’s executive order states that the actions and policies of Libya “constitute a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” It is readily accepted that Col. Moammar Kadafi is a detestable “madman” whose support of Arab terrorism goes well beyond the norms of accepted civilized behavior. But to assert that his actions threaten the security of the United States, with its vast military and economic power, seems patently absurd. It is seen as further evidence of the propensity of the Reagan Administration to overreact and to see the use of military force as a solution to problems that it otherwise finds difficult to influence. It also is seen as stemming from an overly simple and excessively pro-Israeli analysis of the Middle East conflict in which Arab hostility to Israel is associated with expanding Soviet influence and Soviet-backed terrorism.

Europeans also find it difficult to understand the President’s reported statement that by supporting terrorism, Libya had engaged in armed aggression against the United States under international law just as if it had used its own armed forces. This is seen as equating international terrorism with “war.”

The European view is very different. Public opinion in Europe has to a considerable extent become desensitized to the outrages of the terrorist--but not to the risk of war. The risks of terrorism have become an unpleasant but accepted part of the daily lives of people in Europe, just as Americans have grown used to a level of urban violence much higher than in any West European country. The chance of being killed by a terrorist bomb is still far less than the chance of being killed in a road accident.

Much of the terrorism to which Europeans are subjected is national, rather than international, in character--even though it may cross national borders. The violence of Northern Ireland spills over into the rest of the United Kingdom and into the Republic of Ireland. The Basque separatists of northern Spain spread their terror into regions of southern France. The Red Brigades in Italy and the Red Army Faction in West Germany have frequently operated across international frontiers.

Nevertheless, people in Europe see the actions of these terrorist groups as being a challenge to society rather than to national security. They must be dealt with firmly, but within the due processes of the civil law. To resort to the use of naked military force is seen not only as going well beyond the processes of the civil law, but also as an action that is likely only to lead to further and escalating acts of reprisal by the terrorists. Thus the Israeli action in conducting an air strike against the Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunisia, in response to the Yom Kippur murder of three Israeli civilians in Larnaca, Cyprus, was widely condemned throughout Europe. President Reagan’s apparent initial support for the Israeli raid, and insensitive handling of some of the subsequent events, provided further evidence to re-enforce the “international cowboy” image of American foreign policy.

The advent of the nuclear age, in which the use of armed force by one nation’s state against another has become increasingly dangerous, seems to have brought with it a much higher level of individual violence than has hitherto been known in our societies. The problem of dealing with this introduces new difficulties in drawing an appropriate line between the use of civil forces of law and order and the use of military forces.

It is in differing American and European public attitudes to this problem that one should seek the explanation for the reluctance of European public opinion to support U.S. sanctions against Libya; it is certainly not a matter of the Europeans having “gone soft on terrorism.” I personally had experience of the strong British reaction to the Libyan Embassy affair of April, 1984, which took place in London only two doors away from the offices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in St. James’ Square.

For its part, U.S. public opinion needs to get away from the view that those in Europe who do not support every action of U.S. foreign policy are not sincere friends of the United States. We cannot on either side of the Atlantic afford the “those who are not with us are against us” syndrome on every issue.