Omissions Set The Tone

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31922, 25 February 1969, Page 17

Omissions Set The Tone

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) BRUSSELS, Feb. 24. Within a few minutes of his arrival in Europe last night, President Nixon had set the tone for his entire tour, not by what he said but by what he did not say, the New York Times News Service reported.

Eschewing what he called “showboat diplomacy,” Mr Nixon offered Brussels none of . the inflated rhetoric by which others have sought to flatter it as the “capital of Europe.” Nor did he rattle the might of the “grand alliance” that makes its headquarters in Brussels. Surrounded on ail sides by the abundant symbols of United. States military and industrial, might pp the Continent, President Nixon offered himself in the low key that he believes the sensitivities of the Western allies now require. Though determined ip demonstrate that they will not be neglected by his Administration, he came equally determined to prove that his will not be a crushing embrace. So he spoke against nothing except “aggressive nationalism” and only for peace and “a sense of co-oper-ation or obligation” to neighbours. He modestly dropped from iris prepared

arrival statement even an innocuous tribute to great Flemish artist’s whose work has been whisked off to the museums of the New World. If Mr Nixon needed any reminder of the usefulness of modesty, he obtained it quickly on the drive from the airport into Brussels. Flanking the portals of the Brussels international airport were the custodians of American rental car agencies. The biggest signs along his route were for Esso, Gulf and Caltex petrol, for the Pan American and Trans World Airlines that carried the press party, and for the Hilton Hotel, wall-to-wali American style, in which the. President spent the night. Brooding, massively at one side of the road was the huge new headquarters compound of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the symbol of United States nuclear protectiori for Western Europe, but also of the’failure of genuine military integration among the allies. It is an annex to Brussels, not a part of it—just like the headquarters of the European Economic Community on the other side of the city.

The President chose to start his tour in. Brussels so that he could meet first the officials of these two organisations, which had long borne the hopes of Americans for genuine political unity in Western Europe and partnership across the Atlantic. But the competing national interests of the larger nations on Mr Nixon’s itinerary have.

frustrated those hopes and made it all the more necessary to start the tour in Belgium lest the British, French, West Germans or Italians took offence at not being first. In the judgment of most Europeans, and a growing number of Americans, the revolutionary impulse toward political and military cohesion in Western Europe is now spent and the current tempest over the terms by which Britain might aspire to economic association with the Continent is sadly cited as only additional evidence. And with the Europeans Competing in the sustenance of their agricultures and their currencies, and making no progress in a common search for new energy sources and military or civilian technologies, the hopes that they could some day form a counter-weight to the United States inside N.A.T.O. are also fading. Much is still being written about the need to unite at least industrially to match the United States corporate strength that assaulted President Nixon along the road tonight. But the evidence amassed since President Kennedy’s European tour more than five years ago suggests that United States industry has so far been the most massive beneficiary of the Common Market arrangements. And far from provoking the European industries to unite against them, the American giants are thought to have lured them into a diverse scramble for collaboration

with one or another across the Atlantic.

As Anthony Sampson, of the London "Observer” writes in a provocative new book, “Anatomy of Europe,” the side-by-side presence of N.A.T.O. and the Common Market headquarters in Brussels has not bridged the gulf between them or between the separate European nations and the United States as he discovered throughout the Continent, only Americans “talk about Europe as if it really existed” and only American industrialists in search of their own “common” market have successfully applied that assumption. President Nixon, throughout his political career, has shared the American dream of transatlantic partnership and has hoped that European trends might be otherwise. But he came here determined to avoid the grandiose pronouncements of unity that dominated American rhetoric in the Kennedy years while also wishing to erase the appearance of American preoccupation in Asia that marked the Johnson years.

King Baudouin invoked the language of gold when he greeted Nixon with reference to the great international organisations in Belgium and their work in “advancing on the road to unity.” But the President, in unmistakable contrast, spoke of his pleasure to be on the hallowed ground of Belgium, whose devastation by war made it the right place to start his search for peace.