(5 of 5)
It is official U.S. policy not to talk of alternatives to EDC. Yet they obviously exist:
¶ To continue NATO without German arms. But Western military men insist that German arms are needed "to plug the gap in the middle."
¶ To press for German membership in NATO itself. Advantage: German troops could be speedily recruited for Western defense, without the cumbersomeness of intermixed commands. France almost certainly would veto this plan; it could make the veto stick not only as a NATO member, but as one of the three Western powers occupying Germany.
¶ To negotiate a U.S. pact with Germany outside NATO, as the U.S. has already done with Spain. But geography alone would make it difficult for the U.S. to support the Germans without French collaboration: the very supply lines for U.S. bases in Germany traverse France. Even more disastrous would be the sundering of the Western alliance implicit in any break with France.
The hard fact is that Germany can only be safely and effectively allied with the West through some multinational coalition in which the French acquiesce. Yet the threat of a separate U.S. agreement with Germany may well prove the strongest single weapon in the U.S. diplomatic armory. Washington cannot forever let French political weakness keep Europe (including France itself) at the mercy of the Red army.
EDC, with all its faults, seems better than any alternative that now appears realizable. The question is whether the energy, courage and imagination necessary to put it across can be summoned up at this late hour by the U.S. and by an increasingly lethargic Western Europe. The opposition is not someone with a better plan, but the complacent figure of old Mr. Micawber, always hoping that something better will turn up somehow. In Micawber's case, it never did.
* Germany will have an air force, but a clause in the EDC Treaty forbids it to build warplanes, atomic weapons, guided missiles and battleships.