If NATO Goes Down the Tube--U.S. Should Welcome Europe’s Growing Independent Spirit

Sir Geoffrey Howe, the British foreign secretary, made a speech earlier this year in which he urged his fellow Europeans to begin thinking of how Europe will defend itself if the Americans leave.

It was good advice, and the rethinking that he prescribed is in fact under way. U.S. policy-makers, instead of ignoring or resenting the growing European spirit of independence, should welcome it.

The notion that the United States would even consider withdrawal from the Atlantic Alliance, or make a major reduction in our commitment to Europe’s defense, is ritually dismissed by most of this country’s defense and foreign-policy Establishment. The idea that we might in effect be pushed out of Europe by the growth of neutralism or anti-Americanism is dismissed just as impatiently by most pillars of the European political and defense Establishment.

The British and the West Germans have had elections this year in which opposition parties deemed to be soft on defense were convincingly defeated. The truth is, nevertheless, that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s political and military foundations are increasingly shaky.

According to the pro-NATO London Times, a Brussels-based think tank has predicted that the Atlantic Alliance will not survive in its present form beyond the year 2000. If you look at what has happened since the U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in Reykjavik last October, that is hardly outlandish.

Helmut Schmidt, who supported NATO and its strategy of nuclear deterrence when he was the Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany, would now base European security on a Franco-German conventional army, with the expectation of ultimate participation by Britain. Such a force, Schmidt has said, could defend Western Europe without substantial involvement by U.S. nuclear or conventional forces.

Willy Brandt, the grand old man of the Social Democrats, also betrays a flagging enthusiasm for NATO as it now stands.

In an interview with New Perspectives Quarterly, former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, a leader of the basically pro-American Socialist Party, said that the evolution of a European defense system essentially independent of America is probably inevitable.

France, he stressed, will not abandon its own nuclear force as long as the Soviets have nuclear weapons that are capable of hitting France. But he said that the development of an independent European defense system would not necessarily be thrown off track by the return to power of the anti-nuclear Social Democrats in West Germany.

The circle might be squared, said Fabius, by a partnership in which West Germany went “for conventional forces” and France would provide the nuclear muscle. That, he suggested, is really what responsible, sensible elements of the German Social Democrats have in mind.

Pierre Lellouche, the highly respected deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations, comes to much the same conclusion.

France does not suffer these days from any special animosity toward Washington. The French reading of the Soviet threat, and the means necessary to cope with it, is very close to ours. But the French, along with European defense specialists, have been unsettled by what they see as the inconstancy of U.S. policy.

Leaving aside what they saw as the naivete of Jimmy Carter, they were shocked by President Reagan’s apparent willingness at the Reykjavik summit meeting to bargain away the nuclear deterrent on which European security has rested for 40 years. Then came the American acquiescence to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s proposal to eliminate not only medium-range Euromissiles but also shorter-range missiles.

The Soviets’ show of reason delighted man-in-the-street Europeans but frightened the defense professionals, who saw Washington as embarking on the “slippery” slope of denuclearization. And that would leave Europe vulnerable to bullying on the basis of Soviet superiority in conventional arms.

The disaffection shows up in remarks like those by Sir Geoffrey, who works for Reagan’s friend, Margaret Thatcher, as well as in West German conservative ranks, where there is talk of U.S. “betrayal” and an increased tendency to believe that the reunification of Germany might be pursued more realistically through cooperation with Moscow.

You can split hairs, but the basic explanation of the U.S.-Europe schism is that Washington is backing away from its pledge to precipitate mutual nuclear destruction if the Soviets dare to invade Europe--and the Europeans are finally drawing the appropriate conclusions.

As long ago as 1979, Henry A. Kissinger served notice that the suicide pact was a thin reed on which to base European security. Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara has disclosed that he advised Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson not to push the nuclear button under any circumstances other than direct attack on the United States.

Meanwhile, the enormous U.S. budget deficit forces Congress to ask whether our military commitments have outrun our economic ability to sustain them.

The Europeans cannot be expected not to notice. Rather than wilt into Realpolitik accommodation to Soviet pressures, they are beginning to ask why they shouldn’t look after their own defense. From the U.S. perspective, what is wrong with that?

The French are not anti-American. But they draw an obvious conclusion. France long ago expelled U.S. forces; the only nuclear forces in France are French. The result is a strong consensus, cutting across party lines, in favor of a nuclear deterrent. Elsewhere in Europe, especially West Germany, nuclear forces have a bad name precisely because they are American--and thereby open to the suspicion of serving U.S. rather than European interests.

For America, the name of the game should not be an effort to perpetuate the unappreciated U.S. role in Europe, but to work rationally with Europeans to bring about a safe and sane transition from the American nuclear umbrella to something bearing an unmistakable European label.