Clinton’s Missed Opportunity in London : Policy: He could have paid homage to the past while offering a vision for a North Atlantic community.

If any European city deserved to be singled out by the United States for a V-E remembrance, it was London, America’s most reliable ally both in the war and in the Cold War that followed. No better occasion is likely to arise to celebrate Britain’s unique contribution to the cause of freedom or to express U.S. appreciation for two generations of steadfast cooperation. That the moment was not seized--even as a stop on the President’s way to Moscow--was no mere oversight.

One of the curious attributes of the leaders who grew up during the Vietnam protest movement is that their obsession with transcending the categories of the Cold War imprisons them in the debates of the Cold War period. One of their articles of faith seems to be that the communist (or Soviet) menace was overdrawn, that the Cold War could have been most effectively ended by reassuring Russia rather than confronting it. Accordingly, Cold War attitudes and institutions, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, need to change their character. This indeed has been the rationale behind the Administration’s Partnership for Peace, which transforms NATO into an instrument of collective security akin to the United Nations.

While these attitudes are not uniformly held throughout the Administration, they are sufficiently powerful to explain the solicitude shown to Boris N. Yeltsin and Moscow, compared with the tone-deafness exhibited toward West European--and especially British--concerns. But so long as the cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance is not given anything like the priority the Administration attaches to placating Moscow, Russia will find ways to avoid the key challenge presented to it by the collapse of its empire: whether it can be satisfied to live as a normal state within non-imperial borders. A Russia that abandons imperial pretensions would soon deflect concerns from the field of security to political and economic cooperation, where no organic obstacles to closer ties exist even today.

How much better it would have been for Bill Clinton to stop in London and use the occasion of its V-E Day celebration to outline a new vision of the North Atlantic relationship. It has become axiomatic that the next phase of international relations will be shaped by a limited number of power centers: the United States, Europe, Russia, Japan, China and possibly India and Brazil. This confronts the United States with two broad choices: Theoretically, it is possible for the United States--so long as it remains militarily dominant--to conduct its policy purely on the basis of national interest. This would require a careful assessment of rewards and penalties for each region and a balancing of them to produce actions most compatible with U.S. national interest.

The wild card in such an approach would be the United States, which lacks a tradition of a foreign policy based entirely on national interest. A country founded by peoples who had turned their backs on inherited tradition and believed in the universal application of their society’s values cannot simply abandon the Wilsonianism that has dominated 20th-Century U.S. policy. This would work only if we reduce the regions for this kind of foreign policy as much as possible and extend the areas where a more cooperative--even Wilsonian--approach is feasible.

There are two regions where moral consensus can undergird cooperative relationships: the Western Hemisphere and the North Atlantic area. In both, the key countries have, for all practical purposes, forsworn the use of force in their relations with each other. In each, existing institutions are capable of serving as building blocks of a cooperative world order. But while the Administration has put forward an imaginative vision for the Western Hemisphere, it has failed to do so for the North Atlantic area.

NATO expansion, however, will not by itself create a new sense of Atlantic community. Security can no longer be the principal unifying bond of the Atlantic nations because, fortunately, there simply no longer exists a unifying threat. Common purposes, not common fears, must provide the cohesion in the new era in which economic and social issues are becoming dominant.

The time has come to put into effect a North Atlantic free trade area for manufactured goods and services, with negotiations to complete the process regarding agriculture to follow. Such a grouping would accelerate the movement toward the principle of free trade, to which the members of the World Trade Organization have committed themselves. Meantime, it would foster cooperation among the nations of the North Atlantic, whether or not these principles are ultimately implemented on a global basis. It would provide an institution within which common political goals can be elaborated. In time, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the North Atlantic free trade area could be merged, and new consultative machinery in the political and social fields could emerge between the Western Hemisphere and the European Union.

Not presenting such a concept on V-E Day was an occasion missed, not an opportunity lost forever. The United States should return as quickly as possible to what it has traditionally done best: to put forward its vision for how the nations of the North Atlantic can create a new world worthy of their democratic principles.