Europe: Trouble in the Pipeline

The U.S. and its allies are at odds over how to deal with Soviets

It is more than a debate, deeper than a commercial dispute over narrow national interests. The public row that pits the U.S. against its major allies over the projected Euro-Soviet pipeline has exposed a gaping fissure in an issue central to the Atlantic Alliance's very existence: how to deal with the Soviet Union. Meeting in Brussels last week, the leaders of the ten-nation European Community sternly warned President Reagan of the "adverse consequences" of his move to block or at least delay the planned $10 billion pipeline that is supposed to deliver natural gas 3,500 miles from Siberia to the heart of Western Europe starting in 1984.

Reverting to his old hard-line approach, Reagan had extended the existing ban on sales of American products for the pipeline to include equipment manufactured both by U.S. subsidiaries abroad and by foreign firms operating under U.S. licensing agreements. So angered were some European leaders that the first draft of the Brussels summit's communique, later toned down, was described by a senior British diplomat as a "virtual European declaration of economic war against the U.S."

Taken amid mounting transatlantic trade tensions over steel, agriculture and textiles, Reagan's pipeline decision confirmed suspicions within the Community that Washington, in pursuit of its goals, was riding roughshod over Western Europe's economies. Rightly or wrongly, Western European leaders had been led by Secretary of State Alexander Haig and other officials to believe that the U.S. was willing to soften its opposition to the pipeline in the interest of harmony, and specifically in exchange for a European agreement—feeble though it was—to tighten credit to the Soviet bloc.

French President Francois Mitterrand took the lead last week in urging his European partners to consider retaliatory measures against the U.S. He declared: "We cannot be content to turn [summit meetings] into just so much internal propaganda for each of the participants. In that case, they should not be held at all." The French President was threatening by implication to boycott next year's summit, to be held in the U.S. Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took one look at the original Brussels text and told her aides, "I cannot put my signature to this declaration, which goes beyond what is acceptable in publicly criticizing our American ally." Backed by West

German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Thatcher succeeded in talking her European colleagues into a milder line that called for an "effective dialogue" with the U.S.