NATO: The Shield

• Share

(See Cover)

Seven years ago, under the urgency of fear, and with the leadership of the U.S., twelve nations of Europe and America made solemn compact, one with another, that an attack upon any one of them was an attack upon all. Under the urgency of fear they pledged to unite their forces and resources on the continent of Europe under a single command. Under the urgency of fear NATO's forces grew to become the most powerful peacetime alliance of free powers in the world's history.

But the fear is gone, or at least the urgent sense of it. "There ain't gonna be no war," cried Britain's Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in the afterglow of Russian smiles at the first Geneva meeting at the summit. Last week the NATO nations, sweaty in their armor under the fitful post-Geneva sun, were somewhat shamefacedly wondering aloud whether all that weight was really necessary. They sometimes had the air of men trying to remember what all the excitement had been about. Implied but never stated was a bigger question: "Is NATO itself really necessary?"

Cry for Cutbacks. All over Europe NATO's citizens cried for reduced taxes, reduced drafts. Examples:

Belgium in the last two years has deactivated one of its three NATO divisions, and cut its draft period from 21 to 18 months.

The Netherlands has stripped four of its five divisions down to skeletons.

France, fighting for its life in North Africa, has robbed its four NATO divisions of its elite troops and replaced them with conscripts.

Denmark "cannot meet its NATO promises, and we admit the reasons are political," says Denmark's Minister of Defense.

Britain is lopping 100,000 from its defense forces.

West Germany, nine months after receiving its sovereignty, had not yet passed even a conscription law, has only 900 volunteers actually in training. Its pfennig-pinching Finance Minister Schaefer protests that the most prosperous country in Europe can only afford a modest $2 billion a year for the new army.

And to protests against such a performance, most nations answer that the U.S., too, has reduced its defense expenditures and is cutting 400,000 men from its Army.

Gone are the tremulous uncertainties of 1949, when small nations who had seen Czechoslovakia go under were wondering "who's next?"—those days, as one NATO official recalled last week, "when you could feel a tremor go around the council table every time one of the smaller nations received a Soviet note, and NATO, since we had no effective military organization, seemed more like a source of trouble than of strength."

To some extent, NATO is a victim of its own success. Statesmen, who are politicians when they get back home, have found it all too easy to believe that their security is the result, not of their own strength but of a change in Russian hearts. "The threat of war is diminishing." they chant.