Bending the Alliance

Leaders of Britain’s opposition Labor Party properly scolded Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger for his recent warning that implementing the party’s defense platform could trigger the breakup of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Weinberger’s remarks, televised by BBC on the eve of the Labor Party’s annual conference, came through as a crude attempt to interfere in British politics. But the British themselves should have raised the question, because it needs discussing.

Neil Kinnock, Labor Party leader, has done an impressive job of reestablishing Labor’s credentials as a moderate party that can be entrusted with the responsibilities of power. Labor was trounced in the 1983 elections, but the party has come out ahead of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in most public opinion polls this year. With new elections to be held no later than 1988, a Labor return to power--most likely as the dominant partner in a coalition with a smaller party--is a possibility.

That means that Labor’s not-so-moderate defense platform, which pledges elimination of Britain’s separate nuclear force and the removal of all U.S. nuclear weapons from the British Isles, must be taken seriously.

Approval of the platform by the party conference came on the eve of the Reykjavik summit, where President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev came close to a deal that would have removed all Soviet and American medium-range missiles from Europe. The British and other Europeans were as disappointed as anyone that the deal fell through because of the Big Power disagreement over Star Wars.

But Labor’s defense platform would be a dubious proposition even if the deal on medium-range U.S. and Soviet missiles is glued back together because the platform would require the unilateral withdrawal from British territory of U.S. nuclear-armed submarines and fighter bombers.

For 40 years the Western Alliance has depended on American willingness to risk nuclear war to deter or stop a Soviet attack on Western Europe. It’s worth remembering that the U.S. nuclear presence in furtherance of this strategy owes more to European nervousness than to American pushiness. The Europeans, as a matter of fact, have usually resisted U.S. arguments that buildups in conventional, non-nuclear forces would make the need for nuclear weapons less compelling.

NATO’s 1979 decision to approve the deployment of U.S.-made medium-range missiles to counter the deployment of Soviet SS-20s was taken at the initiative of the Social Democratic government then running West Germany; the United States initially doubted the deployment was necessary. The Social Democrats, now out of power, have disowned their own policy.

The fact that no European government has been thrown out for carrying through on the missile decision suggests that those who favor unilateral nuclear disarmament are not in the majority. However, elections in democratic societies are not usually decided on foreign policy issues. Unemployment, inflation and perceived social injustices weigh far more heavily in the scales.

Americans cannot prudently overlook the fact that the Socialist and Social Democratic parties of northern Europe--including those in Britain, West Germany and the Scandinavian countries--have been waving the flag of unilateral disarmament in a troubling atmosphere of America-bashing.

European Socialists, including the Labor Party in Britain, should be clear about one thing: The idea of U.S. disengagement from Europe has a strong potential appeal in the United States. From the perspective of many Americans, pulling U.S. nuclear weapons out of West Germany and Britain would make war between the United States and Russia that much less likely. And once nuclear weapons were withdrawn--weapons essential to deterring a Soviet attack that would embroil U.S. forces in Europe--the case for getting the troops out would look much more compelling.

Kinnock and his Labor Party associates should think of these realities now rather than later.