Storm over the Alliance

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difficulties in obtaining the full support of Western Europe and Japan reflect how drastically the relationship between the dominant ally and its partners has changed. Peter Jay, former British Ambassador to the U.S., quips that in the good old days "the roles were well defined. The U.S. decided, and the other allies complained." The fact that the process is now much more complicated is due in great part to the phenomenal successes of America's post-World War II policy of reconstructing both Western Europe and Japan. Says Harald Malmgren, former U.S. assistant special representative for trade negotiations: "We intended to build independent, strong allies. We're now in a position of parents who have realized that our children have grown up."

They indeed have grown up, and in some ways—also like children—have grown away. The economic change is particularly dramatic. The 1950s and most of the 1960s were a kind of golden age in the alliance, when business goals and interests were shared to an extraordinary extent. But today, in the words of Francis Wilcox, director of the Atlantic Council of the U.S., "the other allies have different energy needs from ours and even different dependencies."

A startling set of statistics documents the change. In 1958, the nine states that today make up the E.C. imported $3.5 billion worth of farm and manufactured products from the U.S., but only $342 million in goods from the Middle East, including oil. By 1978 (the most recent period for which complete figures are available) the E.C.'s purchases from the U.S. had jumped a respectable tenfold, to $35 billion. But purchases from the Middle East had soared to $42 billion, a sum spent in large part for crude oil and natural gas. In only two decades, the Middle East had become substantially more important than the U.S. as a Western European trading partner. Even more important, Middle East oil has become absolutely essential to America's allies. Small wonder that Europe and Japan are hesitant about taking any action against Iran that might incur the wrath of other oil producing states.

Trade also influences allied attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Bonn is Moscow's top trading partner in the West; their combined trading volume last year totaled $7.6 billion, compared with $765 million in 1970. Paris wants to increase trade with Moscow, which last year totaled $3.7 billion. As a whole, the E.C. sold $12 billion in goods to the Soviets last year, almost four times the $3.4 billion (mostly grain) sold by the U.S. Understandably, Western Europeans strongly emphasize trade factors when advocating a more restrained policy toward the U.S.S.R. Understandably the U.S. is not very receptive to such arguments.

The unstable U.S. dollar has also contributed to the changed economic relationships within the alliance. Since its link to gold was severed in 1971, the dollar has fluctuated substantially—at times almost wildly—in international trading and has lost value against every Western European currency. Much of the respect that the dollar commanded for the quarter-century after World War II is gone, even though it still makes up some 80% of the world's monetary reserves.

Tensions are also heightened by the different views that Washington and a Bonn or Paris bring to world problems. The U.S. is a global