This Time, NATO’s Spat Hits a Nerve

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is in its umpteenth postwar “crisis.” This time, familiarly, it’s Washington and London against Bonn and the rest, more or less. We want to replace NATO’s short-range Lance nuclear missiles based in West Germany, while Bonn wants to throw the Lance into arms control with Moscow soon.

So, what’s new? We’ve seen this all before. As usual, there is less than meets the eye to this crisis. But for the first time there is also more.

There is less because the row is, for the United States, partly self-inflicted. The U.S.-Soviet treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces was distinctly popular, reflecting the success of Ronald Reagan’s 1981 zero-option proposal. Yet that line of policy, and the treaty, left in Europe only those nuclear weapons least palatable to Germans--those with ranges so short as to incinerate German territory. As the conservative’s foreign policy spokesman Volker Ruehe put it, “The shorter the range, the deader the German.”

A West German consensus against the weapons thus came as little surprise. The latest turn of domestic politics made the consensus into policy. A failing government in Bonn, that of conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl, clutches for straws of support. His is the urgency of the desperate. It is desperation in the context of a coalition government in which Kohl’s junior partner on the left, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and his Free Democratic Party, champions the Soviet leadership of Mikhail S. Gorbachev as a historic opportunity to overcome the division of Europe.

The transatlantic bickering is more than it seems, because publicly breaking with the United States is deemed good politics across all the parties in the Federal Republic. Manfred Woerner, NATO’s current secretary-general and a West German, is fond of quoting one of his early predecessors, Lord Ismay, on the purposes of NATO--to keep “the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.”

Now, for the first time since the end of World War II, there are real questions, not quite framed, about the future shape of Europe and Germany’s role in it. Whether he means to or not, Gorbachev is unfreezing a status quo in Europe that, for all the armament and sadness in Eastern Europe, has brought a stability that the Continent has rarely known.

How to respond to Gorbachev’s initiatives, especially in arms control, can be thought of along four lines: Much good can come from it; only good can come from it; no good can come from it, and some bad can come from it.

The first line is Genscher’s. For him, Gorbachev may or may not survive, but he’s the best Soviet leader we’ve had to deal with. Therefore, we should help him if we can, but in any case, use this opportunity.

The second is that of centrist Atlanticists in the United States. For them, the military confrontation in Europe is swollen beyond reason, onerous for Europeans and expensive for both the United States and the Soviet Union. It can and should be built down.

The third is heard at the edges of the Bush Administration. So far, Gorbachev has been mostly talk, with no proof yet that the words aren’t just tactics, designed to affect Western public opinion and divide NATO.

The fourth is implicit, only barely beginning to be heard. Gorbachev may be what he seems. But unfreezing the status quo in Europe is a momentous step, not to be done lightly and surely not without some idea of what is to replace it.

Genscher at least has some vision of that unfreezing process. It seems to be one of concentric circles--the European Community after 1992 as a platform for increasing German links eastward, with NATO as a kind of European lever on American dealings with the Soviet Union.

At its center the vision is fuzzier, and has to be--not reunification between the two Germanys but forms of “re-association” with an East Germany that is, after all, already a de facto member of the European Community through its ties to the Federal Republic.

No comparable vision guides American approaches. The caution of the third and fourth lines is fair, but without some vision, it looks like nay-saying. The second line amounts to counting beans first, deferring the politics for later and hoping for the best.

Imagine a new Yalta, a U.S.-Soviet deal to reshape Europe. The idea, mentioned by Henry A. Kissinger and others, is fool’s play, for Moscow and Washington cannot impose their blueprints on Europe, and our allies in particular would be deeply offended if we tried.

But let’s play. What would we ask from Moscow? And what would we be prepared to give in return? Would we want to withdraw our troops from Western Europe if they took theirs from Eastern Europe? Would they ask? And what would we say about Germany?

For 40 years we have presumed that everyone, East and West, save a few German politicians on Sunday, shared an interest in regarding the division of Germany as essentially permanent. Thus, one central task for the Atlantic Alliance has been to mute the cost of the division for those German politicians. Has that presumption changed? Should it?

We do not know the answers and so would not know what to ask of Moscow. But the fact that, for the first time in 40 years, the questions need answers is why there is more to the current NATO dust-up than meets the eye.