Can West Hold Without Common Threat? : U.S. Security Views Changing, and Alliance Will Have to Cope With It

Between the last and the next Soviet-American summit meeting, many observers concentrate on the unanswerable: Has the Cold War really come to an end? Perhaps they should ask the more pressing question: How can the Western alliance continue to hold together when harmony seems to have broken out between Washington and Moscow?

Nobody can tell if the Cold War is over. Perhaps it is in its more confrontational manifestations, and that would only be for the good. Only the next crisis--and there will be a next crisis--can tell if the change in the atmosphere, coupled with sizable progress in arms control, really amounts to durable, substantive change in East-West relations.

The complex structures of military competition that have grown over the decades between the East and West will not be quickly dismantled. The values of the market-oriented democracies cannot be readily reconciled with those of the communist states, even if these should become less centralized and restrictive. In the economic and technological fields the gap between East and West is likely to grow rather than shrink.

Yet President Reagan is not entirely wrong when he talks about a new era. But it is one that will manifest itself at least as much, and probably more directly than in the East-West context, in the evolving relationships within the West. And its main effect will be to loosen one of the major brackets that have held the Western world together--the sense of a common threat shared between Western Europe and North America.

American conservatives often suspect that West Europeans are only too ready to fall for siren sounds from Moscow. But it may well be public opinion in the United States that is first and foremost affected by the fallout from the “new thinking” in the Soviet Union. Europeans, after all, know that they share, by the laws of geography, the continent with the Soviet Union; that is why they have always had a particular stake in detente. But they also know that, however promising arms control may turn out to be, the basic fact of European security will not be altered. The Soviet Union is the military superpower on the European continent.

For the United States, on the other hand, the obvious Soviet desire to promote a closer cooperative relationship with Washington removes much of the fear of the past. American security concerns, while not dismissing Europe, have been preoccupied with strategic nuclear competition and, more recently, with Soviet activities in the crisis spots of the Third World. The one dominant strand in Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s diplomacy has been to remove these U.S. concerns as much as possible.

The treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces and, to a greater degree, movement toward a strategic-arms-reduction agreement that would drastically cut into the nuclear arsenal have allayed the U.S. preoccupation with a whole gallery of “windows of vulnerability.” And Moscow’s decision to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan and the apparent readiness to show similar restraint elsewhere in the Third World have done much to remove American worries over “Soviet worldwide expansionism.”

As a result, Americans today find it more difficult than Europeans do to define just why they should be concerned about the Soviet Union. When one asks people in Washington and elsewhere in the United States what they are afraid of, they are most likely to mention the drug barons of Colombia or the economic challenges from Japan and Europe.

That is a significant change. For most of the postwar era, geography did not determine the outlook on security in the West: Americans and Europeans were equally convinced that the central challenge lay in Europe and that the central dangers were the weight and thrust of Soviet power. Now the United States is no longer quite so sure. Geography is finally reasserting itself.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the changes that are under way in the Soviet Union are likely to benefit not just the United States but all members of the alliance as well. Many Europeans have long urged their American partner to seek a more cooperative relationship with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Nor is the sense of a common, identifiable security threat the only bracket that holds the West together. The fact that the alliance has lasted for 40 years during periods of East-West tension and detente testifies to that. It has survived so long precisely because, in addition to being a security pact, it also has become a club of friends.

Yet this club is currently facing a number of serious disagreements--protectionism, burden-sharing and troop reductions. In the past, when Americans and Europeans saw their security challenged by the same power to the same degree, similar disagreements were never allowed to become divisive. To cope with them now, when security no longer means the same thing for both shores of the Atlantic, will require significantly more skill and foresight than in the past--commodities that the Europeans as well as the Americans have reason to believe they do not have in abundance.