Ideas: Sorry To See the Cold War

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The solution he proposes is ill defined but highly unsettling nonetheless: the "well-managed proliferation" of nuclear weapons. Perhaps, he suggests, when some latter-day archduke is assassinated on a bridge in Sarajevo, there will be enough fingers on enough nuclear triggers to scare everyone into salutary paralysis. Among the states that should get the Bomb, he says, is a unified Germany. That prospect appeals to few Germans and virtually no one else. A Germany armed with nuclear weapons would, almost unavoidably, raise the atavistic specter of militarism that would be threatening to neighboring states.

Mearsheimer knows his views will generate controversy. "Some people have called my ideas downright dangerous," he said last week. "I've tried to follow the logic of my analysis where it leads. I welcome the intellectual combat."

He holds out little hope for an alternative that he seems to agree would be preferable -- the rise of a multinational superstate. Mearsheimer believes the European Community, like the Long Peace itself, has been a benign by-product of the cold war. He expects the process of integration to slow down, even go into reverse as the Continent lapses into the anarchy of every nation for itself.

The good news about Mearsheimer's message is that the bad news with which he concludes is unpersuasive. His pessimism is unwarranted by what is already happening in Europe. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Europe's most unabashed opponent of the superstate, is increasingly the odd woman out. Other leaders, particularly Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany and President Francois Mitterrand of France, seem committed to moving in the direction that Thatcher disdains -- toward forms of political and military cooperation that entail the pooling of sovereignty.

The crumbling of the Iron Curtain has, if anything, accelerated the quest for ties that will bind across national frontiers. Now that the West is freed from its obsession with the menace to the East, statesmen are likely to be more vigilant against the dangers of nationalism in their midst. And the more willing they are to suppress old motives for making war, the more able they will be to restrain the proliferation of new means.