As Gorbachev Mesmerizes, Is the Atlantic Alliance Perhaps Sleeping? : NATO: While the West is celebrating the end of the Cold War and the achievement of its objectives, its underlying cohesion is being hollowed out.

Rarely has a group of leaders met after having so completely achieved its objectives as did the participants at the NATO summit in London. With communism collapsing, even in the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and Germany unifying, the Cold War had clearly ended. All this has culminated in Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s consent to a unified Germany in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In the resulting euphoria, a word of caution may seem captious. But while the West is celebrating, its underlying cohesion is being hollowed out.

True, existing institutions must be changed in light of the dramatic developments of the past year. But progress toward German unification has been more rapid than progress toward solving underlying structural problems. Indeed, there is a danger in the London communique that the world it envisages will be safe only on the assumption of a permanent Soviet weakness; that Germany will be torn between its ties to the West and its temptations toward the East; and that the United States may become progressively irrelevant to the evolution of Europe.

One reason for the allies’ avoidance of these trends is the degree to which Gorbachev has mesmerized the West.

The Soviet president will undoubtedly go down in history as a figure who changed the destiny of his people. But do we understand what is required to help him through the wrenching process under way in Moscow? In so fluid a situation, is not the only sound course for the Alliance to put forward a program sustainable on its merit by any foreseeable Soviet leader?

There was a tendency in London to seek to co-opt traditional critics and to reassure the Soviet leadership by falling in with the premises of 30 years of anti-NATO propaganda. Several briefers argued that the communique would enable Gorbachev to tell his colleagues that NATO no longer posed a threat to the Soviet Union.

In what way was NATO ever such a threat? The end of the Cold War does not require a denial of 40 years of crises, repressions and documented assistance to global terrorism. What it does require is an answer to two questions: toward what threat and with what means is the Alliance to be directed? And what is to be the political role of NATO?

The London communique announced drastic reductions in conventional weapons and a new nuclear strategy. But since it did not define the nature of the Soviet threat, the various conventional measures--the reduction of forces, the ceiling on German forces, the lowering of readiness and a greater reliance on reinforcements--are hard to assess.

The domestic turmoil in the Soviet Union makes a conventional attack from it highly unlikely for the foreseeable future. But even after a strategic arms agreement, the Soviet Union will retain a nuclear arsenal 10 times larger than the combined British and French nuclear forces. This will pose the most plausible Soviet threat.

The new NATO nuclear doctrine is thus puzzling. The London summit announced the modification of the flexible-response doctrine, its readiness to withdraw all short-range nuclear weapons from the Continent and its commitment to use nuclear weapons only as a last resort.

But why has flexible response become so controversial? All it ever asserted was that NATO would use the minimum force to repel aggression. Even in nuclear war, a series of firebreaks would be attempted before the ultimate recourse. In what way does the new doctrine differ? Indeed, what is the new doctrine? We are in the midst of denuclearizing Europe, shifting from the withdrawal of intermediate-range missiles to the withdrawal of medium-range weapons and now to nuclear artillery. After all short-range nuclear weapons have been eliminated, only nuclear bombs on tactical aircraft will remain. How soon before they, too, come under attack? Indeed, what is their rationale?

Moreover, denuclearization is unlikely to be the end of the story. If Germany is serious about banishing the risk of nuclear war from its soil, it will come to interpret the doctrine of last resort as meaning no first use of nuclear weapons. Then America will be asked to risk nuclear devastation on behalf of a country unprepared to run such risks for itself. Is that not precisely the definition of the decoupling of the United States from Europe that 40 years of NATO policy has sought to avoid and Soviet policy to achieve? Are we then back to the doctrine of massive retaliation, with its choice of suicide or surrender?

Britain and France have dissociated themselves from the new nuclear concept. Other Europeans oscillate between seeing in it nothing significantly new to equating it with no first use of nuclear weapons. Is such ambiguity helpful for deterrence? Does it mask an underlying assumption that there is nothing to worry about because the Soviet Union will remain permanently weak--a curious position for Allied leaders who keep proclaiming their commitment to the success of a perestroika designed to make the Soviet Union strong?

What about the enlarged political role for NATO? Only two relevant political proposals were made: that Gorbachev address the NATO council, and that liaison missions from the Soviet Union and other East European countries be established at the NATO council.

What is the purpose of either measure? Since Josef Stalin’s day, the Soviet Union has sought to make NATO irrelevant by offering to join it. What exactly does the Alliance expect from a meeting with the Soviet leader other than a recycling of the oft-repeated statements that NATO is unnecessary, if not dangerous? Moreover, the meeting is patently redundant: Gorbachev will already be attending--at more or less the same time--the summit of the European Security Conference, where he will also meet all NATO’s leaders. How long will democratic public opinion support an alliance that calls its former adversary a “partner in security”?

And what are these liaison missions supposed to accomplish? To whom are they accredited? If to the NATO Council, can Soviet observers attend its sessions? Even if not, the missions will either become part of the Brussels decision-making process or duplicate the current role of Soviet missions in allied capitals. Significantly, the communique is silent on a political role for NATO that would be truly new--some mechanism for dealing with conflicts outside the NATO area.

The failure to define a serious political role for NATO becomes the more unsettling when compared with the communique’s relative precision on the role of the European Security Conference. The conference is described as subsidiary; in practice, that is lip service. The European Security Conference has been touted for years by the Soviets and by NATO’s opponents as an alternative to the Atlantic Alliance. The proposed CSCE summit conference includes conflict prevention and conciliation of disputes among member states on its agenda. This edges the conference onto the field of security where the veto of each member equates the threat with the remedy.

The proliferation of summits will encourage the increasing emphasis on nationalism. Within six months, there will have been two NATO summits, a European Security Conference, an economic summit and the regular monthly summits of the European Community, with more or less the same leaders meeting. A kind of Gresham’s Law threatens to begin operating, whereby the more inclusive conference--that on European Security--comes to dominate all the others. This is all the more true, because it is at the CSCE that the Soviets will be present and the opportunity for publicity will be greatest.

This maze of institutions will enable countries to shop for the one that best serves their interests. Summits will come to ratify national decisions rather than shaping them by consensus. For example, Germany announced a major aid program to the Soviet Union shortly before the NATO summit. One explanation for this is the unusual complexity of the contemporary international environment. Every leader has to consider not only the substance of the subject at hand but also his domestic constituency and the constituencies of all his opposite numbers. And somebody is always up for reelection. In the process, drafting a communique may become its own purpose; procedure and domestic politics inadvertently overwhelm long-range thinking.

This is why one of the most dramatic results of the NATO summit was Germany’s dominant role. No Western leader has a more immediate problem than Chancellor Helmut Kohl. His imperatives are clear: to reassure the Soviets, to pay both fiscally and politically what is necessary to culminate his masterful diplomacy of unifying Germany and winning a national election in the same year.

What is less clear is the U.S. reluctance to introduce a broader perspective. There is now a real danger that Germany’s membership in NATO will be purchased by draining the Alliance of military substance and subsuming its political role in the European Security Conference. If current trends continue, NATO will, at best, become a unilateral U.S. nuclear guarantee enabling individual European nations, especially Germany, to pursue their national goals in the East on their own. At worst, political pressures in America could undermine that guarantee.

The Western leaders still have every opportunity to define a genuinely new relationship with the Soviet Union, to integrate Germany into a larger system and to strengthen the links between America and Europe. But they must raise their sights to a vision of the world they are striving for. To do so, they must come up with a new concept of security, and they must be able to devise new political objectives. Maybe the problem is insoluble. But if it is, the London summit will be remembered not for the renewal of the Western Alliance but for the beginning of its demise.