Reports of Its Demise Are a Bit Premature : Nobody loves NATO but everyone fears a Europe without it

What is the case for NATO, two years after the Berlin Wall was battered into rubble and the Warsaw Pact began its march toward oblivion? What is the case for continuing history’s most successful military alliance after its archenemy has become enough of a friend to be invited to its annual meeting as a well-wishing observer?

One case for the 16-member organization was stated succinctly by a European diplomat on the eve of this week’s meeting in Rome. “We need NATO,” said the Dutch official, “to protect us against ourselves.” The NATO that the official has in mind is clearly one in which the United States will go on taking a lead role. The protection he envisages is against the often xenophobic nationalism beginning to ripple disturbingly across Europe and the Soviet republics. Educated Europeans, steeped in an awareness of their continent’s tragic history as few Americans can be, have not forgotten what demons unrestrained nationalism let loose in the past. One of NATO’s great appeals now is the degree to which it forces national military identities to be diluted in an international--in fact a transatlantic--organization. This is what the diplomat was talking about.

This worry about the darker impulses that are emerging in post-Soviet Europe--and that in Yugoslavia have produced a brutal civil war--is a major reason that even those alliance members most jealously protective of their sovereignty want the U.S. military presence in Western Europe to remain strong for now. President Bush, choosing in Rome not to take anything for granted, demanded a vote of confidence in America’s NATO role--in effect telling the West Europeans if you don’t want us to stay, just say so and we will fold our tents and go home. The Europeans, not excluding France, which has always resented the U.S. role in NATO, were quick to assure Bush that they very much wanted the Americans to stay.

So the alliance will go on, even as it adapts to a new strategy and seeks to define and adjust to a new role, with the United States continuing to make a significant contribution to it. Significant but nonetheless considerably diminished, because the U.S. defense reductions now under way aim to cut the number of Americans in NATO virtually by half, to 150,000 by 1994. That 150,000 is the Bush Administration’s goal. Congress, long uncomfortable with the NATO costs borne by the United States, could seek to impose a lower figure.

The Rome meeting, typical of NATO gatherings, left a number of key issues unresolved, among them the French-German plan to create a European defense grouping separate from NATO--that is, without U.S. participation. While welcoming the new spirit of conciliation with its former eastern antagonists, the alliance also made clear its concern that the political fragmentation of the Soviet Union might see--witness what is already happening in the Ukraine--the emergence of separate and powerful republican armed forces that could threaten stability. It’s a legitimate and growing worry. Sooner rather than later, NATO may have to decide in detail just how it will respond.

America in Europe The decrease in personnel of U.S. air and ground force in NATO. 1990: 322,000 1991: 261,000 1992: 225,000 Source: U.S. Dept. of Defense