WEST GERMANY: Between Two Chairs

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When West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer rose to address a Catholic congress in Brussels last week, his audience expected to hear nothing more than an innocuous tribute to the ideal of European unity. What it got was something stronger. Said Adenauer: "In the long run, the European countries cannot fully develop their great energies ... if they continue to find their salvation and security exclusively through the patronage of the United States . . . What are vital necessities for the European countries do not always have to be vital necessities for the U.S., and vice versa; from this fact may result differences of political opinion which may lead to independent political action."

In Washington, Adenauer's speech caused scarcely a ripple. As U.S. official dom saw it, the Chancellor had simply restated some harmless truisms about U.S.-European relations. Some European diplomats, however, were bewildered by the speech, felt that Adenauer was altering his own stout stand against a foreign policy of neutralism, a policy he had so long disdained with the comment: "One cannot sit between two chairs."

Change in Emphasis. In the last three months testy, old (80) Konrad Adenauer has been making a reappraisal—one that might be called "agonizing"—of U.S. foreign policy. Adenauer's disillusion with the U.S. began when he learned (through press reports) that Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tentatively proposed that the U.S. take advantage of increased nuclear firepower by lopping 800,000 men off its armed forces in the next four years. To Adenauer, who had just pushed a highly unpopular conscription bill through the Bundestag in response to U.S. pressure for West German rearmament, it was particularly galling that his old friend John Foster Dulles had not given him advance warning of the Radford plan (TIME, Sept. 3). U.S. assurances failed to calm him. The more he pondered, the more Adenauer became convinced that the U.S. was on the verge of withdrawing to "Fortress America." Under such circumstances, he decided, West Germany had no choice but to abandon unquestioning loyalty to U.S. policy and start looking after its own interests in its own way.

No sooner had Adenauer publicly enunciated this principle in Brussels than he proceeded to put it into practice. For months the Chancellor had stoutly argued that West German conscripts must be required to serve for 18 months. Last week, two days after the Brussels speech, Adenauer and his Cabinet approved a bill that would oblige draftees to serve only a year. Announcing the Cabinet's decision, the West German government's information office bluntly declared that it was all the fault of the U.S. Said the communique: "When news appeared in American papers of a plan to reduce greatly the manpower of U.S. forces, the Chancellor . . . was convinced that in the light of the new situation the Bundestag would no longer be prepared to vote for an 18 months' service period."