Reaffirming Solidarity with the U.S.

Jacques Chirac, 49, Premier of France from 1974 to 1976, mayor of Paris since 1977 and leader of the neo-Gaullists, the largest opposition party in the National Assembly:

It is not unusual to look with skepticism upon summit meetings like the one that will take place at Versailles. Their past record is disappointing. How many such meetings have produced results? How many have been content simply to restate the points of disagreement among the world's seven great powers, each leader then returning from the summit to pursue the policies he intended to apply all along?

Nevertheless, the Versailles summit represents an opportunity for the Western world, which in recent years has known a series of crises: an economic crisis characterized by underemployment and inflation, a monetary crisis, an energy crisis. And, furthermore, a moral crisis with its diplomatic and military consequences that is even more serious, inasmuch as no one quite knows to what extent the West is determined to overcome current dangers through mutual cooperation.

If these crises are to be resolved, it is not enough to bemoan Japanese or other Asian competition, to underscore the power of the oil-producing countries, to observe that Third World countries are demanding a more just global order with increasing persistence. Or lastly, to condemn Soviet action in Europe, Asia, Africa or America, undertakings that aim to undermine the free world's resources, markets and close friends.

Responsibility for so serious a situation lies largely with the Western countries, because all too often they give the impression of not having chosen a clear policy, of not knowing exactly what they want and consequently of not pursuing a common purpose.

Hence, each side must meet the other halfway, casting aside any thought of recrimination. It is easy for the U.S. to resent its Western European allies for their uncertainties, to reproach them for not sharing its own view of the future of the Western world, to ask them to harmonize their essential interests with its trade policy. That is always easy, sometimes justified, but in any case insufficient. Such complaints seem all the more futile in that they place Western European countries in a position to ask the U.S. to clarify its own standpoint.

How can Soviet-backed regimes be efficiently opposed without accepting a reform of the international economic and trading system? Western Europe is not alone in condemning the situation in Poland and Afghanistan, while continuing to do business with the Soviet Union. How can the world be helped out of recession if at the same time there is a costly dollar and high-interest-rate policy? How can Europe be convinced that it will be defended, if there is doubt as to the terms and means of that very defense?