West Germany Belongs : If We Cling to the Cliche Image, European Unity Will Be Lost

As the Cold War fades into twilight, the ghosts of long-dead issues are emerging from European graves. Soviet glasnost has led the Baltic republics to agitate for an end to their captivity. Moldavia, Macedonia, Ruthenia, Transylvania--places where peoples occupying ancient ethnic battlegrounds are stirring once again. But nothing excites more passion than the possibility that Germany will again be a dominant power on the continent.

It is this potential product of East-West thaw that lies behind the squabble that now divides the United States from West Germany. The proximate issue is nuclear weapons: whether the West Germans will continue hosting short-range nuclear forces as represented today by U.S. Lance missiles. But underlying the transatlantic bickering is new resolve in West Germany to be treated as a fully rehabilitated, fully sovereign, normal state. On the other side is U.S. reluctance to accept the political consequences of West Germany’s powerful and provident economic performance--contrasted with America’s incapacity to control its budget and trade deficits.

But in alliances, as in marriages, underlying disputes are often fought out in little things. Western security will not stand or fall on whether the West Germans agree to modernize Lance, an obscure weapon that has gained prominence only because its longer-range brethren are being scrapped under the 1987 Euromissile treaty. Nor will the alliance’s fate be determined by whether short-range nuclear forces negotiations take place with the Soviets as the West German government insists and the Bush Administration, egged on by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, has stoutly resisted.

The urge to cross the nuclear t’s and dot the i’s would make sense if there were risk of a European war. It would make sense if there were no other U.S. nuclear weapons nearby. And it might make sense if Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev were not nurturing West German unease about missiles that, if they went up, would likely come down on either West or East Germany. But with Gorbachev selling peace, the United States cannot sell nuclear weapons that occupy only a remote corner of Western strategic doctrine.

American pique at West German stubbornness has led to some outlandish statements. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has suggested “no nukes, no troops”--the idea that American GIs in Germany would be unprotected and thus might have to be withdrawn if short-range nuclear forces were negotiated away. Not only do these dark hints ignore the other U.S. nuclear weapons in and around Europe; they also misrepresent the key role always played by these weapons: to help Europeans believe in the U.S. commitment to use nuclear weapons if need be. Indeed, it is peculiar for the United States to press West Germany to embrace unpopular weapons that are there precisely to reassure West Germans.

Britain’s Thatcher has compounded the problem by averring that, once begun, East-West negotiations would succumb to West German public opinion and inevitably trade away all short-range nuclear force weapons. This view ignores both the record of arms--control talks (they can take forever) and Bonn’s long-standing support for equal East-West levels of weapons but not their elimination. Worse, it is a declaration of no confidence in West Germany.

The vagaries of history alone are sufficient caution against scrapping, without valid replacement, a European security system that has submerged the “German question” for four decades. But at the same time, West Germany’s new assertiveness, its leading place in the European community, its growing economic role in Eastern Europe and its efforts to exploit whatever promise there is in Soviet “new thinking” are not harbingers of a Hitler-Stalin pact or storm-troopers jackbooting their way across a cowering continent. Too many U.S. observers have not progressed beyond an image of Germany frozen in the likeness of the Third Reich, thus seeing in German ambitions the making of a fourth.

Most often neglected is Western success. U.S. containment policy contributed to the remarkable developments of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and U.S. economic policy promoted the great growth of Europe and Japan. Equally important, the primary purpose of European integration also has been fulfilled: to merge West Germany permanently within the democratic West.

It is natural to question this judgment. France has cultivated political and military ties with West Germany as insurance against fears that the United States will retreat from Europe. Thatcher, however, added to her distrust of Germany by lambasting the development of European integration, thus showing herself to be a latter-day Neville Chamberlain reluctant to commit British political and economic power to the shaping of Europe’s and Germany’s destinies.

The U.S.-German tiff clearly will be settled, so, at the NATO summit in Brussels next week, President Bush must do more: He must provide an effective counter to Gorbachev’s peace campaign and show that he can be leader of the Western world. He also must demonstrate that he trusts West Germany, its Western orientation and its commitment to the common values that are the bedrock of alliance.

It is no coincidence that the United States struggles with Germans over short-range nuclear forces while, half a world away, it decides what to do with Japan over FSX--the sale of advanced fighter aircraft technology. Both issues are about adjusting to the economic successes of former enemies who are now allies and rivals. It will be remarkable if President Bush, who has ably fashioned a positive response to Japan, fails in the case of Germany.