1999 (33 page)

Thus, for the United States, Western Europe continues to be the single most strategic piece of territory in the world. It contains over a quarter of the world's economic power and represents the forward line of defense against the Soviet Union. Yet, a profound crisis today threatens the future of the Atlantic Alliance. Harold Macmillan saw this coming thirty years ago when he told me, “Alliances are held together by fear, not love.” Ironically, today while the Soviet threat is greater, the fear of Soviet aggression is less. When it was established in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization represented an appropriate response to the threats we faced in 1949. But since then the world has changed. If NATO cannot adapt, it will not survive. It needs to grow to meet the new challenges we face, or it will perish.

The crisis of NATO has grown out of the profound transformation of the world in the last forty years.

When the leaders of the original twelve NATO states gathered in Washington to sign its charter in 1949, each grounded his decision to join the alliance on four common assumptions:

1. Moscow posed a dangerous military threat to Western Europe.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Western leaders were haunted by the nightmare of scores of Red Army divisions sweeping across Europe to the English Channel. European communist parties compounded the image of Soviet hostility by dutifully toeing the party line from Moscow and vigorously denouncing any West European participation in the Marshall Plan. As a result, no democratic leader—not even those of Europe's socialist parties—denied the danger. Among the democratic parties of Western Europe there was unanimity on one point: military aggression by the Kremlin was a real threat.

2. Moscow's superiority in conventional forces could be countered with American nuclear superiority.
In 1950, the NATO countries had fewer than 600,000 ground troops, while the Soviet Union had 1.5 million. But the leaders of the West stood firm in the face of the Soviets' two-to-one conventional superiority, because of overwhelming U.S. nuclear superiority. The United States had in its arsenal three hundred nuclear bombs, while Moscow had only tested its first crude nuclear explosive less than a year before. Thus, the members of NATO assumed that nuclear weapons could guarantee Western Europe's military security for the foreseeable future.

3. U.S. economic strength compared with Western Europe's enabled the United States to bear a major share of the financial burden of conventional defenses in Europe.
In 1950, the U.S. economy represented over half of the world economy, while the countries of Western Europe were still suffering from the economic devastation of World War II. America had reached its economic zenith; Europe was still digging out of the rubble. Western Europe had to demobilize in order to devote its resources to economic recovery. As a result, the United States stepped in to fill the breach, deploying more than 435,000 ground troops in Europe by 1953 and expending more than $60 billion in 1987 dollars on the Marshall Plan.

4. The military threat from Moscow was focused on the European continent.
In the immediate postwar years, the members of NATO assumed that the major target of the Kremlin's aggressive designs was Western Europe. If Moscow unleashed a war of aggression, they believed, its divisions would roll across the European plain. Moreover, the Soviet Union was not yet a global superpower. Moscow did not have then the capacity to project military power beyond the countries on its borders. Thus, the threat was only to Europe, and the response needed to come in Europe.

None of those assumptions are held in common by all the leaders of NATO countries in 1988.

First, a profound disagreement has developed between NATO leaders on the opposite sides of the Atlantic over how great a threat the Soviet Union poses to the West. Generally, Americans believe
that the Soviet threat remains as great as or even greater than ever. They point to the massive buildup of Soviet strategic and conventional forces—as well as to the continuing domination of Eastern Europe and the string of geopolitical gains Moscow tallied up in the 1970s—as proof of the Kremlin's hostile intentions toward the West.

Many in Western Europe agree with the American view of the East–West conflict. They remember the Berlin crisis in 1948, when only an airlift by the Western powers prevented Moscow from starving the city's western sector. They remember the malicious delight with which Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, the only wall in history put up not to keep invaders out but to keep its own citizens from escaping. They are well aware of the grimness of life under communism in Eastern Europe. Most of all, they know that the Warsaw Pact's forces always train to fight an offensive, not defensive, war.

But in recent years there has been a tendency among West Europeans, especially but not exclusively those on the left, to see the Soviet Union in a different light. The more responsible critics of the U.S. point of view believe that Americans are overreacting to a real but exaggerated threat. They argue that the Soviet threat is not so overwhelming and immediate as to require a frantic response. They point out that communism in the Soviet Union is not a historical success story. Given the Kremlin's great internal problems and its increasing difficulty in holding its East European empire, the Soviet Union is not in a position to threaten seriously Western Europe. Only a madman in the Kremlin, in their view, would consider launching a war of aggression across the central European plain. And the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack is minimal, because ruling over a Europe of destroyed cities and dead bodies would not be a rational war goal of any sane leader. They therefore believe that American anxiety and the American call for more vigilance and military preparedness represent an overreaction of an immature world power.

The less responsible European critics of America take this analysis a step further. They believe that the United States is a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union. They argue that Western Europe should opt out of the East–West struggle. Their heated
rhetoric accuses the United States of forcibly conscripting Western Europe in its Cold War with the Soviet Union and insidiously refers to American troops in Western Europe as “occupation forces.” They believe that a third world war is more likely to result from U.S. recklessness than from Soviet aggression. Unfortunately, two major European socialist parties, the Labour Party in Britain and the Social Democratic Party in West Germany, have succumbed to these views. Their platforms in recent campaigns have called for the complete removal of American nuclear forces from Europe and other steps which would lead directly to the dissolution of NATO.

This problem will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better. NATO is a victim of its own success. Western Europe has enjoyed unprecedented stability, prosperity, and security largely as a result of the alliance. As Michael Howard has observed, “It takes only one generation of successful peacekeeping to create the belief that peace is a natural condition endangered only by those professionally involved in the preparation for war.” NATO's success in deterring a Soviet attack has led many to question whether a threat existed in the first place. With the new Gorbachev leadership in Moscow more attuned to public relations, the problem will become greater. Some public-opinion polls already indicate that West Europeans believe that the actions of the United States threaten peace as much as or more than those of the Soviet Union. If this becomes a trend, it will make not communism but neutralism the wave of the future in Europe.

The second major change has come in the overall East–West strategic and conventional balance of power and has had profound consequences for NATO's strategy for defending Western Europe.

On the conventional level, the Soviet Union continues to enjoy a decisive margin of superiority. In Europe, the Warsaw Pact has 2.7 million troops, 47,000 main battle tanks, and 5,400 tactical aircraft. NATO has 2.4 million troops, 23,000 tanks, and 4,000 aircraft. The Warsaw Pact has huge potential reserves in the Soviet Union, which are only a few miles away, while NATO's reserves in the United States are four thousand miles away. While NATO's forces have the advantage of technological superiority, they lack
an integrated command structure and must defend a front 4,200 miles long, while fully integrated Warsaw Pact forces need only to break through at a single point. Moreover, the countries of Western Europe have been so lax in maintaining military readiness that NATO would quickly run out of ammunition in a conventional war.

The greatest concern is that, unlike the early years of the Cold War, the United States today does not have unquestioned nuclear superiority to counter the threat of Moscow's armies. From 1945 to 1949, the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. From 1949 to the mid-1950s, it had a monopoly in the means to deliver a significant nuclear strike on the other side's territory. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it had a significant, but eroding, margin of nuclear superiority. In the mid- to late 1970s, the Soviet Union first achieved parity with the United States in strategic weapons, and then pressed forward to forge a significant degree of superiority in land-based ballistic missiles.

When the United States enjoyed absolute nuclear superiority, it adopted the doctrine of “massive retaliation.” According to this doctrine, if Soviet forces broke the trip wire in Central Europe, the United States would respond, not only by firing tactical nuclear weapons at attacking Soviet armies, but also by unleashing the full force of American strategic forces on the Soviet Union itself. But we could threaten a massive nuclear retaliation only because Moscow did not yet have the capability to respond in kind. Once the Soviet Union developed a major strategic arsenal of its own, an American nuclear retaliation to conventional aggression would in turn involve millions of American casualties in a matter of hours. Thus, the threat of massive retaliation became a threat to commit mutual suicide—and therefore lost its credibility.

As a result, the United States and its NATO allies adopted the doctrine of “flexible response” in the 1960s. In the event of a Soviet conventional attack, it called for NATO forces to stop the enemy with whatever forces were necessary—but at the lowest possible level of violence. If conventional forces could not stop the Warsaw Pact attack, NATO would use first battlefield nuclear weapons, then intermediate-range-theater nuclear forces, and finally
American strategic weapons as a last resort. U.S. leaders would therefore be able to respond with flexibility to the situation on the battlefield.

That shored up the security of Europe despite the erosion of American nuclear superiority. Since NATO could certainly stop Soviet armies in their tracks with battlefield and theater nuclear weapons, the doctrine of flexible response left the ultimate burden of deciding to escalate to the level of all-out strategic nuclear war squarely in the Kremlin. Soviet leaders therefore had to include the risks of
total
war in their calculation of the risks of launching
any
war. That, in turn, undercut the possibility that Moscow could exploit the threat of its conventional superiority to blackmail Western Europe.

Theater, or intermediate-range, nuclear forces—U.S. missiles and bombers based in Western Europe that can strike deep within the Soviet Union—were recognized as the linchpin of the doctrine of flexible response. Only these forces could execute the vital mission of destroying Soviet conventional reinforcements long before they reached the front. Moreover, only these weapons could keep deterrence in Europe credible. Strategic parity had diminished the credibility of the threat of a U.S. strategic retaliation to a conventional attack. To bolster deterrence, the United States therefore needed to develop the capability to threaten to retaliate against the Soviet Union from Europe.

NATO as a whole recognized that fact. For this reason, the West European members of NATO requested in 1979 that the United States station ground-based cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in Europe. Our allies knew that in the event of war NATO bombers not only would be unable to penetrate Soviet air defenses, but also would be desperately needed for conventional bombing missions at the front. They further knew that U.S. sea-based missiles were not accurate enough to hit military targets in the Soviet Union. These ground-based missiles were therefore critical to deterrence in Europe. That was why the West European governments—despite enormous antinuclear street demonstrations—were willing to pay the political price for deploying these U.S. missiles in 1983.

With these weapons in Western Europe, NATO's strategy to deter a Soviet aggression became a seamless web. Moscow knew
that, even if it succeeded initially, a conventional invasion would inevitably lead to nuclear strikes on the territory of the Soviet Union—a risk the leaders in the Kremlin would not dare court.

Without these missiles, however, a gap would open up in NATO's deterrent. At best, it would become far from certain that the United States would employ its strategic arsenal—and therefore ensure a massive counterattack on American cities—to prevent the conventional defeat of NATO. At worst, it could leave the countries of Western Europe vulnerable to intimidation and blackmail in a crisis. Moscow might therefore prevail in Europe without firing a shot.