A Necessary Vagueness

Small wonder that the leaders of the Atlantic alliance were so amiably vague about what they decided this week, what with the incredible pace of change in East-West relations.

For example, the final communique on the two-day North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Brussels attacked the Soviet Union for its presence in Afghanistan. The document was distributed at about the time the Soviets agreed to a Western timetable for pulling out their troops.

Even as President Reagan was renewing the NATO pledge that an attack on one member was an attack on all, Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci was coaching Congress on the most effective way to urge bigger NATO defense budgets to take some of the pressure off the United States.

A section of the communique that said that nuclear weapons in Europe remain a cornerstone of defense against a Soviet blitzkrieg attack was written in a time when nuclear weapons are losing their authority because superpower leaders keep saying that they should never be used.

What’s more, a White House commission on long-range strategy asked recently: “Can NATO rely on threats of (nuclear) escalation that would ensure its own destruction (along with that of the Soviet Union) if implemented?”

On one point the alliance was firm and detailed, and that was in a bill of particulars to the Soviets on the massive reductions that they must make in tanks and weapons along the East-West border in Europe in order to restore any sense of security from attack to the West.

Negotiations on the reductions of those and other ground and tactical air forces will begin some months from now in Vienna.

In the meantime, the Soviet Union’s “restructuring” of its economy and society and the perceived changes that a treaty to destroy all American and Soviet medium-range missiles will bring to Europe make it virtually impossible to go beyond the vague agreements of Brussels. Too many things are happening in too many places for anyone to know what the rules may be in a matter of mere months.

The NATO group gave President Reagan three cheers on his way to Moscow for a spring summit meeting, one at which it may still be possible to sign a treaty cutting in half the number of long-range missiles deployed by the superpowers.

But the message that the conference and the communique actually were designed to get across was summed up in a few words by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as she headed back to London: “So long as we stay firm, we have nothing to fear.” That is what they all went to Brussels to hear.