Nato Au Revoir, U.S.?

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, its members boast, is the most successful alliance ever. It deterred the predatory Soviet Union, won the cold war without firing a shot, and gave Europe its longest peace in this century. On the principle of not fixing things that are not broken, the Western allies could be expected to leave well enough alone now that the Soviet threat has ebbed. They are cutting back their armed forces and military spending, of course, but they might be wise to maintain the structures that served them so well.

In speeches and documents at this week's NATO summit in Rome, the 16 member heads of state and government will reaffirm their faith in the alliance and approve an updated Strategic Concept that has been in the making for more than a year. That 50-page policy statement calls for smaller, more mobile forces in Europe and for keeping NATO's multinational military command intact.

But behind this carefully constructed united front, a fundamental debate has erupted that could bring the entire U.S. presence in Europe into question. The allies are wrangling over how to produce a separate "European defense identity." In practice, that means the creation of purely European military units and raises the questions of how they should be linked to the U.S. and the alliance as a whole, and what would happen to the U.S. units on the Continent. Onlookers on both sides of the Atlantic wonder whether Europe is preparing to say au revoir to the U.S. -- or if that is the way it might look to the Americans.

All the European leaders insist it means no such thing. They repeat that they still consider NATO, with the U.S. fully engaged, as indispensable to their security. But their growing disagreements about the future shape of the alliance are now out in the open. The purported focus of their discussion is military, but the substance has become highly political. As the 12 nations of the European Community move closer together, its members are speaking up in NATO councils in favor of their own separate security identity to defend their Continent. A Bonn official explains that European economic and political unity logically implies a common foreign policy. And, he argues, "foreign policy without defense policy just does not exist."

So the Germans last month allowed the French to talk them into proposing a future European army to be directed by the Western European Union, whose nine member states also belong to NATO. Despite that potentially divisive effort, the French keep saying the politically correct things about the importance of the Atlantic alliance. Foreign Minister Roland Dumas last week called it "the primary instrument at the present time for Europe's security." But ever since President Charles de Gaulle pulled his troops out of NATO's integrated command in 1966, Paris has been trying to undercut American influence on the Continent. "NATO remains America's anchor in Europe," says Philippe Moreau- Defarges of the French Institute of International Relations, "but it cannot be the structure for Europe's future."