NATO: The British Game

• Share

High in the balmy skies over Naples this week, planes from the U.S. Sixth Fleet will proudly spell out the word NATO. In the ancient German garrison town of Mainz, detachments from NATO armies will march in a grosser Zapfenstreich—the torchlight parade that is the German army's version of Britain's famed tattoo. In Washington the foreign ministers of the Atlantic nations are scheduled to sit around a V-shaped table to hear a speech from NATO's first commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

NATO is ten years old this week—and the occasion would normally be observed by congratulations on having kept the peace for a decade, mixed with strictures about the need for more strength. Instead, as has happened before, the Russians have given the Atlantic Alliance a jolt which shows that, below the surface, some basic disagreements exist in it.

Light Luggage. Last week, in language that in casual reading sounded virtually identical, the U.S., Britain and France—the three NATO powers with conqueror's rights in Berlin—fired off carefully coordinated notes to Moscow. They proposed a Big Four foreign ministers' conference on Germany, to begin May 11 and be followed," as soon as developments warrant," by the summit conference on which Nikita Khrushchev had set his heart.

But the apparently insignificant differences in wording reflected some major differences in attitudes. Of all the NATO powers, none is so eager to negotiate with Moscow as Great Britain. And as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made his stately progress from Paris to Bonn to Washington, Britain's popular press had clamorously accorded him one diplomatic triumph after another (MAC DOES IT AGAIN), as if one intransigent ally after another had been converted to Macmillan's concept of what kind of deal the West might make with Russia over Berlin.

In fact, as London's Economist soberly noted last week, "by the time he got it home, Mr. Macmillan's diplomatic luggage was pretty light." In the face of French, German and U.S. skepticism, Macmillan had dropped one pet concept after another. In the beginning the British press, taking its cue from the Macmillan-Khrushchev communiqué which mentioned a possible limitation of weapons "in an agreed area of Europe," had talked eagerly of steps toward "disengagement" of Western and Soviet forces in Central Europe. Macmillan's aides diluted this to a "thinning out" of the military, and finally to a simple "freeze" that would preserve the military status quo.