Foreign Relations: NATO's Dilemma

Of all the difficulties deferred until after the U.S. elections, none has greater implications for U.S. and free-world security than the strain within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Last week, in conferences with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, President Johnson discussed the NATO problem at length. McNamara also held long consultations in Washington with West Germany's visiting Defense Minister Kai-Uwe von Hassel; U.S. Under Secretary of State George Ball was in Europe trying to sell the idea of a multilateral nuclear force (MLF), and former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer injected himself back into the discussions with a visit to Charles de Gaulle to "try to clarify existing difficulties between France and Germany."

Blame It on Charles. While recognizing NATO's problems, U.S. officials have a distressing tendency to 1) place the responsibility for solutions on the European allies and 2) blame everything on De Gaulle. Thus, Rusk said, "when one talks about NATO needing reorganization, I am sure it is quite clear in the organization that the members of NATO would study with great seriousness any proposals made for changing the organization." But, he added, "we haven't had those proposals." And he pointed the inevitable finger at France, saying: "We sometimes are puzzled by some of the things that we hear from a capital like Paris, when general expressions seem to have very little content in terms of specific ideas or specific proposals." This attitude is put more bluntly in the Pentagon, where a NATO specialist declares: "There is nothing wrong with NATO except Charles de Gaulle"—a view echoed by many U.S. cartoonists anxious to use their most savage pens (see cut).

All this amounts to a vast and dangerous oversimplification. To be sure, De Gaulle's blackball of Britain's proposed entry into the Common Market, his insistence upon developing his own nuclear force, his outright opposition to the U.S. plan for a multilateral nuclear force, his vision of a unified continental Europe dominated by France, all have been major irritants within the NATO alliance. Yet the full weight of NATO's problems cannot be justly heaped upon the unbending shoulders of De Gaulle.

Points of Conflict. The power relationships among the allies are not nearly so simple as when NATO was created in 1949. The U.S. then was not only the sole nuclear power but the overwhelming economic power. Most European nations were still rebuilding their war-shattered economies. In the practical terms of dollars and military capability, the U.S. was NATO and NATO was the U.S., and Europe was content to have it that way. Now, nearly all of Europe is thriving. Britain and France have a nuclear capability, however limited, of their own. West Germany yearns for the same. With growing independence, new tensions are natural.

At the same time, the Communist threat against Europe has eased, and so has some of the feeling of urgency that bound NATO together. NATO's defenders insist that this is due in large part to NATO's very effectiveness. In any event, the allies now feel freer to pursue narrower national interests.