Are America’s troops in Europe about to decamp?

Press, 29 May 1989, Page 18

Are America’s troops in Europe about to decamp?

Ian Ball

reports from New York for the “Daily Telegraph”

THE NEW WORLD is viewing the Old in a new light this spring. There is fascination, of course, with 1992 and beyond, but also headscratching over both the “Kohl War” with the German chancellor over N.A.T.O. modernisation and the logical implications for 300,000 American troops of the so-called “Third Zero” — no nuclear weapons of any kind in Europe. For those who care about anniversaries, there is also mounting concern that the alliance is moving towards a thoroughly gloomy fortieth birthday party in Brussels today.

Seasoned American internationalists see this as tangible evidence of an historic epoch in the making: Europe’s entry to the post-post war era. The tone of the criticism being heard — and it comes from a few distinguished liberal voices as well as from the Right — has the ring of parental rebuke to unappreciative offspring. One is put in mind of one of those nineteenth-century Thomas Nast cartoons in Harper’s magazine

Uncle Sam to Ingrate:

“Together, thanks to my nuclear deterrent, we have kept the peace in Europe longer than any period in centuries. If we want to maintain the spur to Soviet reform and good behaviour, now is not the time to disarm prematurely. Who are you to decide on laying down the burden — when, where and how? If we are to lower our guard at all, let us do so according to some long range plan, and with an eye on both Gorbachev and his successors.”

Ingrate to Uncle Sam.

“The Cold War is over! There is perestroika in the East and a promising new Euromarket for 320 million people in the West. There is trade to be won, money to be made, German brothers to be reunited, billions in obsolete swords just ready for recycling. Why bind us into stale and useless political-military links when there is so much else to be done? Think green, not red!” At least the squabbling is being done entirely in the open. Or is it? What worries many observers here is that important cards are still face down on tables across the Atlantic, most of them in Bonn and Moscow.

The "New York; Times,” through two of its commentators, has given us a look at an extreme flank of the new American concerns. “Never mind public statements; test yourself,” A. M. Rosenthal, the paper’s former executive editor, now pundit, advised his readers the other day. "Each person can look into himself and answer whether the fear of a Germany unbounded has gone.” His theme was that nobody has been telling the truth in the weeks of arguments and pronouncements about West Germany, N.A.T.O.’s future, Soviet needs and intentions, and the short-range nuclear weapons in central Europe: “No diplomat, politician or national leader has had the courage to say plainly what lies beneath it all ... Until

now, the West could soothe its fears by assuming the Soviet Union was just as opposed to anything that would make Germany the world’s economic super-Power, unfettered. Mr Gorbachev’s goal is to rescue the Soviet economy. He may decide great German treasure is worth great German power — if it is allied with the Soviet Union.”

Mr William Safire, once Mr Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, explored the same ground. Is it over over there? he asked. He went on to remind us that the Secretary of State, Mr James Baker, felt sure he had negotiated “defence in our time” — until Bonn’s bombshell on Lance missiles, “our nuclear equaliser.” He described as a small signal to the cocky allies, “those nine-teen-ninety-tooting Europeans,” the Bush Administration’s largely overlooked announcement that 4000 American troops were coming home this spring. These were the soldiers who manned the missiles that have been pulled out under the I.N.F. treaty.

“Those returnees are the first of the many,” Mr Safire w’arned. “For after the third zero, ending the chance of effectively defending Europe from a Soviet attack, comes the fourth zero; no American troops. Send the word, send the word to our dangerously overconfident ally: If Germans will not defend themselves, then it’s over over there.”

In all this handwriting over European euphoria about the new turn in geopolitics, Mrs

Thatcher is held up as an estimably cool head (even by those who once excoriated her for her supposed infatuation with Mr Gorbachev’s “new thinking”). With this goes the usual brief history/geography lesson about the special things Britain has learnt from being an island nation.

But, for the time being, Britain is on the sidelines of the argument — a situation that would change overnight were our warheads the only nuclear weapons under N.A.T.O. control on European soil. We are also seen as having leaders who put more emphasis on the first part of realpolitik than the second, who do not charge ahead of reality when big issues, like N.A.T.O.’s future, are at stake. What is certain as Europe prepares to merge into a closer confederation in three years time is that there is bound to be a lessening of American influence in both political and military arenas. (The Reagan Administration, I suspect, marked the end of an era of truly triumphal Presidential tours of Europe.) Almost axiomatically in the new arrangements, Britain will have a proportionally more important and demanding role as the connecting rod between the democracies on each side of the Atlantic.

But first we have N.A.T.O.’s fortieth birthday to observe and celebrate on the soil of a revitlised continent. Preoccupied as he is with a bandit regime in Panama, is President Bush get-

ting himself in the right frame of mind for the event?

The need is for a grand design in the manner of the alliance’s eighteenth anniversary present, the comprehensive strategy review that was the Harmel study of 1967, still largely the N.A.T.O. blueprint. Alas, there is no sign of one. Mr Bush is going about things with the tactical caution we fully expected of him — but no bold vision and no firm guidance for Europe on what the American shield will be, say, a decade from now.

In the waiting-for-George hiatus, ingenious politicians on both sides of the East-West divide have been staking out new forward positions. One, a formula advanced recently in The Hague, seems to provide a rational starting point for Western co-opera-tion, by combining prudence with a recognition of the new order — and new thinking — in Europe.

The Dutch proposal is for a N.A.T.O. pledge to negotiate on European battlefield nuclear weapons — our Lances and Plutons and their Scuds, Frogs and SS-21s — after the successful conclusion of a comprehensive treaty on conventional weapons reductions.

So far, it has received scant attention in Washington. But with a bit of White House tinsel, it could be packaged attractively. In a Europe concerned nowadays more with its forests, rivers and coasts than with military buildup, it might, with some fine tuning on phasing and verifica-

tion, be just the right offering from New World to Old. Certainly the West looks to President Bush for something more imaginative than a rehash of a 34-year-old proposal — his resurrection last Friday of President Eisenhower’s' "open skies” plan. In 1955 Ike’s idea had merit; at that point in the Cold War, an agreement allowing N.A.T.O. and Warsaw Pact countries to fly unarmed surveillance planes over each other’s territory could have contributed to confidencebuilding. Today, with spy satellites aloft around the clock and far less uncertainty about the Kremlin’s weaponry, "Open Skies ’B9” seems gimmicky if not anachronistic.

With Mr Gorbachev stealing the spotlight with ideas that capture the European imagination (thus creating fresh problems within the alliance), time is running out for Washington if it wants to shape the arms control agenda for the 19905.

In a world undergoing rapid change, the political rationale behind defence spending and strategy must — without throwing caution to the wind — change just as nimbly.

As for ourselves, we should not forget that three times this century we have welcomed a massive G.I. buildup in Western Europe. They arrived quickly, at great cost to the U.S. taxpayer, when their presence was required; they can leave as speedily.