N.A.T.O. — western alliance or a continental drift?

Press, 8 July 1983, Page 13

N.A.T.O. — western alliance or a continental drift?

By

CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN

(below), a former Minister in

the Irish government writing in the London “Observer.”

People speak and write for and against “the Western Alliance,” but is there any such thing as a Western Alliance? If there is, what commitments does it involve, and what limitations, entered into by whom, accepted by whom?

It does not seem that any of these questions can be answered with the degree of confidence that is generally assumed in public statements by politicians.

When N.A.T.O. came into being, the United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson, its architect, assured the relevant congressional committees that the treaty did not commit the United States to any Particular course of action: the United States would decide in its own good time whether, when, and how to do anything in support of the treaty. Acheson had to give these assurances or Congress would not have ratified the treaty. So there is a treaty all right. However, what the treaty may require, in any particular conjuncture, remains a matter to be decided by the leading signatory of the treaty as far as its own action, or inaction, is concerned. In public statements on the treaty relationship, this non-com-mittedness is generally carefully ignored, and often implicitly denied. Sometimes a commitedness on the part of the United States is proclaimed, by a devoted ally or zealous spokesman, to exist, although the proclaimer is in a position to know that it does not. Thus Denis Healey, writing with all the authority of a former British Defence Secretary, told the readers of “Fortune” in August, 1980: “The bedrock of allied security is the commitment of America’s strategic nuclear forces to retaliation against the Soviet Union if it attacks Western Europe.” Some bedrock! Healey assumes — note the word “strategic” — that the United States is not only prepared but committed to bring down certain nuclear destruction

on its own cities by way of responding to a Soviet incursion in Europe. No Secretary of State could have carried that version of N.A.T.O. through Congress, that’s for sure. It is true that Robert McNamara, as Kennedy’s Secretary of Defence, did make public statements which, if accepted as true, might justify Healey’s confidence. The United States, according to McNamara in 1963, was prepared "to back up our commitments (in Western Europe) with our strategic nuclear power no matter what degree of damage might result should the deterrent aspect of this policy fail.” In fact, those were the days of sweeping rhetoric, of Kennedy’s “go anywhere, do anything,” and of lurching into the Vietnam war — about which McNamara was to make many statements which were not true and many pledges which were not kept. It seems more prudent to look to later, post-Vietnam, statements. In 1975, David Packard, Deputy Secretary of Defence from 1969 to 1971, said: “With the present nuclear balance, the United States will not use its nuclear force against the Soviet Union short of a dire threat to the survival of the United States.” There is no sign that the nuclear balance has altered, since that statement was made, in a way that would make it no longer applicable. General de Gaulle, in his day, had no belief in any such “bedrock” as has been discerned by Healey, among others. As de Gaulle said 20 years ago, at the same time as the McNamara speech: “No-one in the world, particularly no-one in America, can say if, where, when, and to what extent, American nuclear weapons would be employed to defend Europe.” This very uncertainty, and not

the alleged commitment, is in reality the ruling principle of deterrence in the form it has come to assume. As Theodore Draper says in his just-published and very penetrating American book, “Present History,” “The only thing sure about what the United States would do in the event of an attack on Western Europe, and on Western Europe alone, was that no-one could be sure.”

Where no-one can be sure that the consequences of an incursion — either into Warsaw Pact territory or N.A.T.O. territory — will not include nuclear war among either its direct or indirect consequences, no sane leader is likely to run that risk. Uncertain deterrence has worked up to now. Whether it will go on working has to be uncertain also.

Uncertainty also prompts speculation. On the Warsaw Pact side, the only speculation that counts is confined to the privacy of the Kremlin. On the other hand, N.A.T.O. consists of free nations, not so much bound as loosely

connected by a treaty whose chief merit is the uncertainty attaching to its consequences. In speculating about those consequences, national leaders and their followers have to look for ways out: means of ensuring national survival, even if N.A.T.O. is collectively at war. This implies limitation of such a war, but the different nations making up N.A.T.O. cannot help entertaining — though not flaunting — different ideas about what kinds of limitation are most desirable, or rather least undesirable.

From a European point of view, the Healey scenario is the least undesirable version of nuclear war. The Russian attack on Europe is stopped by America’s nuclear retaliation. When America in turn is crippled by Russia, Western Europe is left both free and relatively unscathed.

Henry Kissinger, who has no great love for America’s European allies, has interpreted their aspirations thus: their secret hope, which they never dared to articulate, was that the defence of Europe would be conducted as an international nuclear exchange over their heads; to defend their own countries, America “was invited to run the very risk of nuclear devastation from which they were shying away.”

Americans, however, are no more (and no less) unselfish than Europeans are. Having quoted Kissinger’s observation, Theodore Draper comments: “America’s secret hope, Kissinger might have added, was that the defence of the United States would be conducted on or through Europe — or at least anywhere but in the United States. The two secret hopes do not make for secret confidence between the United States and its allies.”

Of the two secret hopes, that of the United States has far the greater prospect of realisation, both because of America’s far

greater nuclear power and because the Soviet leaders must, in the nature of things, entertain a secret hope that embraces the American one, and utterly rejects the European one.

Nuclear war between the countries both of which possess nuclear weapons, is inherently unlikely, though not impossible. But if nuclear war should break out, it is inherently far more probable that it will be limited to Europe, west of Russia, than that it will involve the mutual destruction of the super-Powers on their home territories. Statesmen of both superpowers vehemently deny this now but if war should break out, their denials will become inoperative, as Nixon used to say.

The American secret hope is for real; the European secret hope is a dud. As these realities begin to be understood, opposition to the further emplacement of American missiles seems likely to grow, and the N.A.T.O. “alliance” to grow even more uncertain.

At present, the force that does most to shield the N.A.T.O. concept from coherent criticism is the peace movement, especially the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain. By identifying the potentially popular idea of keeping out new American weapons with absolute unilateralism and national defencelessness, C.N.D. helps to bring in the American weapons.

If the Labour Party were to say “No” to new American weapons and commitments, and “Yes” to Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, the indications are that the party (heavily defeated in last month’s election) could be on a winner. C.N.D.’s unilateralism, as long as it is accepted by Labour, helps to keep the Conservatives in power, Britain in N.A.T.0., and new American weaponry still coming into Britain. Copyright—London Observer Service.