U.S. Finds Itself Dealt Out of European Debate

Europeans are beginning to perceive that Americans are unwilling and dissatisfied as never before with the burden of defending Western Europe, and comments from the Continent are taking on a new tone.

Significantly, the debate is going on for the most part within Europe, and, strangely, we in America seem set on ignoring it.

Some strong signals have crossed the Atlantic from the United States, and the Europeans are not obtuse.

The Europeans know that we are running huge trade deficits with them, and that we have run several billion dollars into debt to them to finance our budget deficits. They heard former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s calls to relocate American troops from Europe to the Middle East, and they watched Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) sponsor a measure to recall 90,000 troops from Europe and saw it fail to pass the Senate by only a half-dozen votes. They are aware that many Americans doubt a strategy that leans on the first use of nuclear weapons to cover for inadequate conventional strength, and they share those doubts themselves. Most of all, they see the hunger of the Reagan Administration for an arms-control agreement that would remove tactical nuclear weapons from Europe.

They were startled at the rapidity with which President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to terms at their meeting in Reykjavik last October, and they feel pushed into a deal that was made over their heads. They know that there is no time to meet their concerns in the rush to an autumn summit meeting, and that the summit must take place this fall if there is to be a ratification from the Senate before the next election.

The American who is the most in touch with the Europeans’ strategic concerns, outgoing North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander Bernard Rogers, spoke for many of them when he protested at his farewell news conference, “Somebody ought to stand up out there and say to NATO, ‘Time out, dammit!’ . . . When the future of Western Europe is at stake, I don’t know why it so necessary . . . to rush into this, other than the fact that certain administrations are going out of existence.”

The Europeans are talking, and for the most part they are dealing the Americans out of the discussion. The dialogue is fascinating, and is little reported in the United States. It should be news when former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt proposes that West Germany effectively put its troops into the hands of France. “Now is the time,” Schmidt said, “to replace the 20-year-old flexible response strategy with a new approach--for example, by massing sufficient conventional forces through the integration of German, French and Benelux troops under a unified French command.”

We in America should cock an ear when a former French prime minister, Laurent Fabius, proposes in turn that France spread the small nuclear umbrella of its force de frappe to cover West Germany. Together these measures would, if ever implemented, make the American troops, the American command structure and the American nuclear presence redundant and dispensable. French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl have already gone at least as far as announcing the creation of a “Franco-German Brigade” under joint command.

Nor are these the only proposals afoot. There exists an array of unilateral nuclear disarmament proposals (such was the official line of Britain’s Labor Party in the recent election), but there are also serious and responsible voices, particularly in West Germany, that are speaking of discarding altogether a strategy based on tanks and missiles in favor of a militia-style “defense in depth.”

All this ferment raises the most disruptive geopolitical and strategic issues. Our actions set off the debate, yet now we are ignoring it.

To the Reagan Administration, Europeans’ concerns are inconvenient obstacles in the drive toward an agreement with the Soviets. Reagan’s advisers calculate that any agreement, no matter what its consequences for NATO, would be a foreign-policy triumph that would put the Iran- contra debacle behind them and help them finish strong. When Rogers made his complaint, Secretary of State George P. Shultz at once silenced him, calling the general’s concerns “ridiculous.” To the Democrats, calling attention to Europe’s concerns is unthinkable, since it would be depicted by their opponents as raising nit-picking objections to an agreement that would do away with two entire classes of nuclear weapons. To the arms control community, European voices only raise unwanted complications--it won’t let distant issues in Europe throw a monkey wrench into the first chance for an arms treaty in eight years.

So we all sit tight and try not to notice the debate among our closest, most crucial partners. We may be witnessing the early stages of a great reshaping of European-American cooperation, a project that has defined the West since World War II. We exclude ourselves from the debate and never suspect that we are ourselves being excluded. We fail to see what Europeans see clearly--that trade and budget deficits and a faltering Administration require certain strategic contractions, at least in the short term and probably even more so over the long term. They see the writing on the wall, and they are responding to it. For our part, it is no good trying not to notice.