Analysis : Proposed A-Arms Cuts Force Europeans to Think Hard About Bolstering NATO

Ever since last October, when the possibility of U.S. missiles being withdrawn from Europe was raised at the superpower summit in Reykjavik, a great debate has been shaping up in Europe’s capitals over how to strengthen the European dimension of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Among the questions being asked are these:

-- Will France and West Germany form an integrated military unit, as France has proposed?

-- Should Britain and France collaborate on developing a cruise missile to replace the American missiles that may be withdrawn?

-- Should France deploy its own short-range tactical nuclear missiles in West Germany?

-- Is it time to revise NATO’s structure and procedure in order to again include France in discussions on strategic planning?

“A lot of soul-searching is going on in France, and all kinds of proposals are being made,” Francois de Rose, a former French ambassador to NATO, said the other day. “There is a general questioning of old doctrines and the strategic outlook. Views are not yet crystallized, but they are moving, and maybe six months or a year from now, we shall see where the dust has settled.”

Many Ways to Cooperate

Lothar Ruhl, the West German Defense Ministry official in charge of policy planning, said: “The Federal Republic of Germany is not interested in leaving the integrated command within NATO, and France is not interested in going back there. But once you have said that, there are many ways of practical cooperation and many ways of doing this in concrete and flexible terms.

“It is my prediction that we will see an evolution in the French practice of doing things, and we will see a progressive strengthening of the whole European part of the alliance, to reinforce and rationalize and strengthen the European contribution, because the Americans will force us to do so.”

In the past, these periodic bouts of discussion and argument over whether the Europeans are doing enough to defend themselves have usually been not much more than Europe’s defensive responses to American prodding and criticism. This time it is the Europeans who are questioning themselves, their attitudes and doctrines. Above all, it is a debate that has been initiated by top political leaders, not by think tanks or commentators.

The Reykjavik summit meeting was a rude shock to the Europeans. When President Reagan abruptly re-embraced the “zero option” formula to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe, alarm bells began ringing almost immediately in defense establishments in Paris, London and Bonn. Europeans thought that this idea had been shelved.

Problem Becoming Acute

Even though the allies now profess to be satisfied with NATO consultations on the arms negotiations, the problem of what kind of a defense Europe will have when the missiles are gone becomes more acute as the negotiations move forward.

French President Francois Mitterrand effectively began the debate with a speech he delivered in London in January to the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. Although it was a simple call for greater European cooperation, it was notable for the fashion in which Mitterrand was obviously moving away from rigid Gaullist doctrine.

A few weeks later, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher paid her annual visit to Paris for Anglo-French consultations. Then the two governments issued a statement saying they had decided to explore closer cooperation in the nuclear field. This was a far cry from the days of President Charles de Gaulle, who had pushed his military into developing its own nuclear arsenal.

Meanwhile, there has been a marked change in Britain’s attitude toward reinvigorating European defense cooperation, together with political and strategic discussions within the Western European Union, which links Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Geoffrey Howe, Britain’s foreign secretary, referring to the need for a European response to the changing superpower outlook, said in April in a speech to the Belgian Institute of International Relations:

“Europe no longer dominates American thinking as much as it did in the past. A distaste for reliance on nuclear weapons is not a new phenomenon in America. It is not in the American nature to be happy when held hostage to an irresistible threat. Some have long questioned whether the U.S. would ever be prepared to use nuclear weapons in response to a Warsaw Pact conventional attack in Europe.”

Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt then came to Paris to make a speech urging sweeping integration of the non-nuclear military forces of West Germany, France and the Benelux countries. This would create an army of well over a million men, with a roughly equal number in reserve.

Soon after that, former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a close friend of Schmidt, said in the French National Assembly, “We must not leave West Germany alone with its nuclear fears and apprehensions.”

‘Its Own Vital Interests’

And Laurent Fabius, the Socialist who was premier before the conservative Jacques Chirac came to office, declared: “France must treat Germany’s defense as part of its own vital interests. We must now think about extending our nuclear defense strategy to protect the federal republic.”

With the political groundwork thus broken, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl came out on June 19 with his proposal for a Franco-German integrated brigade.

This received a cautious but encouraging response from Mitterrand, Chirac and the French defense minister, Andre Giraud. A discussion of the proposal has already taken place in Paris at a special meeting of French and German officers.

Giraud has suggested that if the brigade is actually formed, it must be outside the integrated NATO command structure and must be covered by France’s independent nuclear umbrella.

“The question now,” Giraud said, “is how to use this unit, because we cannot envisage putting French soldiers in a position where they would not be covered by some level of nuclear deterrence. There can be no security in Europe unless conventional defense is linked to nuclear deterrence.”

A Surprise Proposal

Meanwhile, another surprise proposal has come from Francois Heisbourg, a former official in the French Defense Ministry who is soon to become director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Heisbourg, writing in the periodical Politique Internationale, says that budget cuts are likely to lead to reductions in U.S. forces in Europe--along with the withdrawal of nuclear missiles. In the event of a modest cutback of, say, 50,000 U.S. troops, he says, France should move troops into Germany to replace them.

De Rose, the former French ambassador to NATO, has proposed--with the support of Ruhl, the West German defense official--a relatively simple overhaul of NATO’s procedure at its headquarters in Brussels to open the way for French participation in strategic planning without France’s actually rejoining the integrated military command structure. At present, all defense questions at NATO are dealt with by the Defense Planning Committee, which was set up without the French after De Gaulle’s pullout in 1966. But France is still represented on the North Atlantic Council of permanent ambassadors to NATO.

Taking Part Again

De Rose proposes that strategic discussions be resumed in the NATO Council instead of being held exclusively in the Defense Planning Committee, so that France will once again be able to take part.

“We certainly want closer relations with our allies,” De Rose said, “but we don’t want our forces in a position of being assigned or earmarked for assignment, and we don’t want to have officers in the hierarchy of the alliance. But we have strategic discussions with the Germans, we have them with the British, we have them with the Americans. We still don’t have them within the NATO Council, where it would be useful to solidify that European pillar. But for heaven’s sake, don’t raise unnecessary difficulties.”

Ruhl, the German, said he expects “to be able to build up considerable Franco-German cooperation” after the French presidential elections in the spring of 1988 and the formation of a new French government.

“We have to wait for French rapprochement in strategic and military thinking within NATO to develop,” Ruhl said. “In the meantime, we must work with the French within NATO to alter procedures and institutional arrangements in order to offer the largest possible measure of cooperation to France. This is a question of pragmatic practical policy-making.”

All this adds up to the most important groundswell of re-examination, development and change within the alliance since Gen. de Gaulle’s walkout more than 20 years ago.