Can Allies Weather a Storm in E. Europe?

The daily drama of developments within the Soviet empire has mesmerized the West. Solidarity rules in Warsaw, an unprecedented popular politics has emerged in Moscow, and there is expectation that anything is possible. Yet if the experiment begun by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is halted or reversed--an ever-present possibility--the resulting Western reaction could provoke a major crisis within the Atlantic alliance.

It may be unseemly to dampen the hopes for major progress in East-West relations and in the enlargement of human freedoms. But there is sound reason for caution in assessing the prospects for an end to the division of Europe or for political liberalization from Budapest to Baku. The reason is the potential consequences if all turns sour.

Detente during the 1970s provided a potent lesson about expecting too much, too soon. Hardly had the Nixon Administration codified superpower behavior with Brezhnev’s Soviet Union than Moscow played a nefarious role in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Renewed East-West tensions culminated in the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. effort to impose sanctions against the Soviet Union and the political death of the SALT II arms-control treaty.

As American disillusionment with detente set in, however, reaction in Western Europe was less categorical. Thoroughly satisfied with the East-West agreements concluded during the early 1970s over issues like Berlin, the allies were reluctant to lose what had been achieved in East-West relations. The half-hearted European response to America’s call for sanctions was evidence of a serious difference of viewpoint.

Today, there is also risk of disillusionment. Few observers believe that a Gorbachev beset by economic failure at home would embark on new foreign adventures or invoke the specter of traditional enemies, although this could happen. More likely, Moscow would put the brakes on change within the empire. This does not just mean that events in Poland or Hungary--or potentially in East Germany, the most brittle of East European states--could produce another Soviet invasion. More significant is the current challenge to Moscow’s authority within the borders of the Soviet Union, and nowhere more striking than in the breathtaking efforts of the Baltic peoples to strike out for freedom and independence.

All may yet be well. Gorbachev may permit more latitude for the expression of personal and national aspirations than virtually anyone a few months ago dared to hope for. Or he may set limits and make them stick. Or leaders in the Baltic republics, alert to risk and able to effect a controlled release of pent-up frustrations, may be able to stop short of provoking the brutal reaction of which Moscow has historically been capable.

Yet Western expectations, particularly in the United States, are rapidly running ahead of what the Soviet Union is likely to let happen.

Throughout the postwar period, there has been a dual Western agenda: to promote human freedoms and to reduce the risks of conflict and gain control over the engines of destruction. For some observers, especially Americans, the two goals are inseparable, akin to the view that only a Soviet Union that is reformed internally will no longer pose a threat, or that only democracies can be relied on not to make war on their ilk.

As hopes rise for decisive change within the Soviet empire, there is also great risk that the crushing of another spring beneath Soviet tanks, as happened in Prague in 1968, would erode the political basis in the United States for prosecuting arms control or the other items on George Bush’s agenda, including an end to the Cold War and the division of Europe.

Soviet repression--say, in the Baltics--would produce disillusionment in Western Europe as well. Europe would be far less willing than the United States, with its tradition of greater Cold War hostility, to suspend efforts to transform security on the Continent and to demilitarize East-West relations. Especially in West Germany, most euphoric about the possibilities of change, it would be difficult to re-establish allied cohesion around a policy of confrontation just because U.S.-Soviet relations had again deteriorated over renewed Soviet brutality at home.

The caution flags are already flying. They can be seen especially in widespread questioning in the United States about West Germany’s reliability, its ambitions, and its future--which reflect remarkably widespread failure in the United States to understand how deeply the Federal Republic’s roots are sunk both in democracy and in the West.

It will be hard enough to keep the Western allies together when times are fair; West Germany is not alone in yearning for the end of East-West confrontation. If the limits of Soviet tolerance are reached sooner rather than later, the United States could find itself seriously at odds with key allies in trying to reimpose a hard line.

The Bush Administration has shown sensitivity to some of these risks. It has been reluctant to raise expectations about developments on either side of the Soviet-European frontier, and it is forcing the pace on conventional-arms talks in Europe, seeking agreement while the political sun shines. But the United States is curiously passive as tomorrow’s history is being written in Central Europe.

There is a critical need now for a comprehensive Western strategy, both to set clear goals for changing the face of European politics and to contain the consequences of possible failure. Otherwise, both allied cohesion and detente will remain hostage to Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe and at home.