Crisis in Nato : The Brussels Summit : NATO’s Success Spawns a New Crisis for Alliance

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary here Monday and Tuesday with a meeting of the heads of government of its 16 member nations, is struggling with a major crisis--how to survive its own success.

NATO’s reason for being--its deep-seated fear of the Soviet Union--is receding in the face of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s bold, rapid moves to reduce arms levels. All of a sudden, the Soviet Union is accepting in principle NATO’s demand to reduce the massive armies that have confronted each other across Europe’s East-West divide since the end of World War II.

So intense are the pressures these apparent concessions have generated inside NATO that President Bush has seemingly been forced to modify his go-slow, wait-and-see posture on arms control. Bush is expected to present his fellow NATO leaders with a proposal for removing more than 30,000 U.S. troops from Western Europe as part of an eventual U.S.-Soviet agreement on curbing conventional forces.

Such a reduction, far bigger than previous U.S. proposals, reflects the pressure on Washington to catch up with dramatic maneuvering by the Soviet leader--at least at the level of public relations.

“Gorbachev is dancing to our tune, to the principles of the Atlantic Alliance,” said Paul H. Nitze, veteran U.S. arms negotiator and an expert on European issues.

And NATO’s very success has precipitated the fifth major crisis in its 40-year history.

West Germany, demonstrating a new-found independence within the alliance, has called on the other members to accept the Soviet offer of quick negotiations to reduce short-range nuclear missile forces in Europe. But the United States and Britain are not ready to abandon some of the weapons they believe have played an essential role in deterring Soviet aggression.

The West German challenge was long in coming. NATO’s first supreme commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said in 1950--as he took over military command of the fledgling alliance--that he bore no resentment toward the defeated Germany and hoped it would “line up with the rest of the free world.”

It did, but only now has West Germany begun to speak out in a voice commensurate with its political and economic strength, rather than in the muted tones of the vanquished aggressor in World War II. And now that it is speaking out, it is doing so with considerable force.

“We are not a great power,” President Richard von Weizsaecker said last week in an address marking West Germany’s 40th anniversary, “but we are also not a playing ball for others. . . .”

The need for NATO to move beyond a purely defensive military alliance was forecast from the start. George F. Kennan, in a 1947 article that helped give birth to NATO, wrote that the purpose of the West’s containment policy toward the Soviet Union was not to perpetuate the conditions left in Europe by World War II.

“It was to tide us over a difficult time and bring us to a point where we could discuss effectively with the Russians the drawbacks and dangers of the status quo and to arrange with them for its peaceful replacement by a sounder one,” he wrote.

That “difficult time” lasted far longer than expected. But NATO has now reached the point, forecast by Kennan, when a sounder relationship with the Warsaw Pact is possible. It is up to the NATO member nations to decide where they want to go, and at what pace.

Seldom has there been a time when NATO has not been described as in disarray. The alliance was born in 1949 in response to the Soviet takeover of what became its satellites in Eastern Europe, to such threats to the West as the Berlin blockade and the first Soviet atomic bomb test.

It has experienced many challenges, including four major crises, but each time the Soviet Union took action that helped draw the alliance back together.

West Germany’s rearmament and its admittance to NATO in 1955 created the first NATO crisis. The Soviets responded within days by creating the Warsaw Pact. The divided and anxious atmosphere in NATO was greatly deepened a year later when the United States publicly chastised France and Britain for their invasion, with Israel, of Egypt over Cairo’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. But the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 reunited NATO against the common threat.

The second crisis began in 1958 when French President Charles de Gaulle started to pull France out of NATO. But in 1961, Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev told the West that “we will bury you,” attempted to take over Berlin, erected the Berlin Wall and precipitated the Cuban missile crisis.

The third difficult period came in 1966 when De Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s unified military command. But two years later the Soviets reminded NATO of its purpose when its forces led a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The fourth crisis began in the late 1970s with the massive Soviet military buildup in Europe. NATO made the controversial decision in 1979 to reply by deploying U.S. Pershing 2 missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles, a decision aided by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that year. The alliance began deploying its missiles in 1983, and the Soviets, despite earlier threats, returned to the bargaining table and negotiated a treaty that banned such weapons on both sides.

Gorbachev has repeatedly sounded a call for nations of the “common European home” to work together to solve their political problems, a formulation that would include Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union but exclude the United States.

The U.S. view is that the alliance rests on what Secretary of State James A. Baker III calls “shared Western values.” President Bush will argue at the summit conference, Baker said last week, that NATO was created to promote the common defense of these shared common values--democracy, human rights, the rule of law, free enterprise and respect for the individual.

These values are inspiring peoples in many parts of the world, including Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union, Baker said, and they will be the principal basis for ending the division of Europe and drawing Warsaw Pact nations and the Soviet Union into a community.

But at the same time, Baker said, NATO must continue to ensure a strong defense, although possibly at lower levels of arms as negotiators make progress in Vienna toward agreements to reduce non-nuclear forces on both sides.

In what appeared to be a diplomatic way of encouraging the separation of East European nations from Moscow, Baker said the NATO members should look for ways to “further the peaceful decentralization of economic, political and social authority in Eastern Europe.” Vestiges of the Cold War, such as the Berlin Wall, must be removed, he said.

Some of these points may be reflected in two documents that Manfred Woerner, the NATO secretary general, wants the summit conference to produce.

One is a “comprehensive concept” statement that would spell out force requirements for NATO and arms reduction possibilities for the future. The other is a statement on broad NATO political policy toward the East Bloc that would map out the way ahead.

On a more personal level, European leaders here will be carefully observing the performance of Bush, who is attending his first NATO summit meeting. The alliance has instinctively looked to the U.S. President for firm leadership, but as Western Europe has grown stronger, it has also grown more independent and more critical in its appraisal of U.S. leadership.

Several European members, particularly West Germany, believe that the Bush Administration has been slow to respond to Soviet arms control proposals. For this reason, the White House is expected to work hard at this conference for a compromise on the knotty issue of short-range nuclear forces.

That controversy threatens to focus world attention on NATO’s differences, with West Germany and some other NATO members pitted against the United States and Britain.

Basically, Washington and London favor modernizing the aging Lance missile, then deploying a new missile in the mid-1990s.

But West Germany, where virtually all Western short-range nuclear weapons are deployed, fears that if such weapons are ever used, they will almost certainly be used on German soil. It wants the decision on modernizing the short-range nuclear weapons delayed until at least 1992, and it has called for early negotiations on reducing both sides’ short-range nuclear forces.

The United States and Britain have resisted such talks on grounds that Soviet pressure to ban all short-range missiles would become all but politically irresistible. That, they say, would jeopardize the doctrine of “flexible response,” which they credit with deterring Soviet aggression for the last two decades.

Short-range nuclear weapons, the Americans and Britons argue, have served as the balancing force against the Warsaw Pact’s overwhelming superiority in conventional arms arrayed along the East-West border.

The United States and Britain want the conference to produce a statement that short-range nuclear weapons will not be totally abolished. The West Germans are reluctant to commit themselves to such a policy.

Some NATO and U.S. officials believe that a compromise can be reached by setting up a committee to study linking early short-range nuclear forces negotiations with demonstrated progress at the Vienna talks on reducing non-nuclear forces. A statement ruling out--for the present--a ban on all short-range nuclear weapons might have to be part of the bargain.

In the view of many experts in NATO affairs, the missile issue is only the most obvious manifestation of West Germany’s new assertiveness.

Some U.S. government officials put little stock in the West German challenge on the missile question. “It’s a minor issue,” a senior official in Washington said. He implied that West German politicians have exaggerated the significance of short-range nuclear forces in order to distract attention from domestic controversies over taxes and immigration.

But to Nitze, who was former President Ronald Reagan’s arms control adviser, “the main problem of NATO is the future of (West) Germany. The alliance must recognize that Germany deserves a more important role. The United States has had the central role in NATO until now. But now (Germany) is the Continental power.”

As President von Weizsaecker put it in his 40th anniversary speech:

“The alliance, Western Europe and the whole Continent are decisively dependent on our contribution. Our political weight derives from our central location, the special situation of Berlin, the size of our population, our productivity and our stability.”