Allies Need to Help Prepare for U.S. Decline in Europe

Bring-the-boys-home sentiment is not especially strong in Congress right now, but that could change in an era of tight defense budgets and growing friction between America and its European allies on trade and other issues.

European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would be wise to take to heart the early warning signs evident in hearings this month before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), committee chairman, is convinced that the defense budget cannot be sensibly managed in the absence of a coherent national strategy matching military commitments, weapons choices and force levels with available resources. As he sees it, we have no such strategy now.

Nunn invited experts from inside and outside government to offer their opinions. Some of the most interesting testimony came from Zbigniew Brzezinski, national-security director under President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski pointed out that, fortunately for us, Soviet power is “one-dimensional.” With a backward economy and an ideology that repels more than it attracts, “Moscow’s only claim to the status of a world power is its military might.”

But the Soviets’ military power is very real, and in his view the West must maintain a level of strategic nuclear weapons and conventional forces able to deter them from the use or threat of military action to advance their interests at our expense.

Brzezinski argues that, as things stand, U.S. conventional forces are weakest in the Persian Gulf or Southwest Asia area, where trouble is most likely, and strongest in Europe, “where our allies have the greatest capacity for doing more on their own behalf and where the risk of a U.S.-Soviet clash is lowest.”

He called for a “gradual” withdrawal of perhaps 100,000 U.S. troops from Europe, leaving 250,000 American servicemen and women still deployed there, with the savings applied to a “significant expansion” of U.S. airlift capability. Manpower withdrawn from Europe would be absorbed into an enlarged Rapid Deployment Force available for use in the Middle East, Southwest Asia or Central America.

NATO, he added, “should become increasingly a European regional alliance, though with an active and major U.S. presence in it.”

Brzezinski’s proposal was immediately challenged by the Reagan Administration.

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger told the committee that, instead of prompting a surge in allied burden-sharing, reduction of the U.S. troop presence would “strengthen the hand of those in Europe who argue for . . . accommodation with the Soviet Union.” He also argued that savings would prove illusory, since the additional airlift capability needed to haul U.S. troops back to Europe in a crisis would cost more than $20 billion.

David Abshire, U.S. ambassador to NATO who is on temporary assignment in the White House, chimed in with a warning that any sizable withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe could provoke a situation in which the “only way to avoid war would be to give in to (Soviet) coercion.”

The British, French and West Germans actually are contributing more to their own defense than most Americans realize. But, as Abshire’s testimony suggests, there is reason for U.S. disquiet about the state of the alliance. (Europeans, disturbed by the erratic quality of leadership from Washington, have reasons for concern, too.)

The Europeans were alarmed when President Reagan, at the Reykjavik summit meeting, was seemingly ready to negotiate away the nuclear deterrent on which European security depends. They reminded Washington that reductions in nuclear weapons must be accompanied by a redressing of the Soviet advantage in conventional weapons; otherwise the result would be to make war more likely.

True enough. But the point would carry more weight if the allies had shown a willingness to spend the extra money needed to cure the conventional imbalance. They haven’t.

Abshire testified that, despite improvements in NATO forces, the Soviets have a large numerical edge in tanks, planes and ammunition stockpiles in Europe, and are narrowing the quality gap. There is an urgent need, he agreed, for improvement of NATO’s non-nuclear, conventional war capabilities so that NATO would not be forced to go nuclear in the first days of a war in order to avoid defeat.

The United States bears a share of the responsibility for the problem. But a major factor is the European preference, until recently, for keeping conventional defenses weak enough to guarantee the use of U.S. nuclear weapons if an invasion came. The theory was that the Soviets, not relishing nuclear war, would never attack in the first place.

European support for stronger conventional forces has been growing, but the damaging effect of past attitudes is still with us. As Nunn reminded Abshire, the European allies are still nowhere near meeting the decade-old goal of having enough ammunition on hand to fight for 30 days without being forced to resort to nuclear weapons.

It would help if the Europeans were more willing to help America defend Western interests in the Middle East. France and Great Britain are willing, up to a point, but most other allies are not.

Congressional pressures for reducing the U.S. troop presence in Europe are not as strong now as a few years ago. But the massive U.S. budget deficit, combined with resistance to tax increases, translates into a tight defense budget that will increasingly force defense planners to consider redeploying some of the U.S. European force in order to help meet American commitments elsewhere in the world.

To the degree that the U.S. role in the defense of Europe declines, it follows that American dominance of alliance decision-making should decline, too, as Brzezinski suggests. The Europeans do show a growing inclination to challenge U.S. decisions and to cooperate more among themselves on weapons development. So far, though, any talk from Washington of U.S. troop reductions is immediately condemned.

U.S. and allied leaders surely would be wiser to accept the long-term inevitability of a shift in the relative weight of American and European responsibilities within the alliance, and to begin working on a friendly, cooperative transition. By not doing so, they run the risk that change will come anyway--but in an atmosphere of recrimination and nationalistic resentments that would in fact destroy the alliance.