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Brussels, the President's first stop, is the capital of a tiny nation divided by ethnic schism. Yet, as the headquarters of both NATO and the Common Market, it is also the capital of European cooperation. It is, as well, the European base for a growing U.S. industrial complex. The main route into the city from Zaventem airport passes through what is known locally as "Little Texas"—an unmistakably American creation that includes a new Esso research center as well as plants built by IBM and Honeywell. Nixon will enter the city with King Baudouin. On the President's first-night Brussels schedule were conferences at the Palais Royale de Bruxelles with Belgian Premier Gaston Eyskens and Foreign Minister Pierre Harmel.
Next morning, he was to visit NATO's prefabricated new headquarters. There he planned a brief speech to the ambassadors from the 15 NATO member nations. Afterward, he was to hold private conferences on the state of the alliance with NATO Secretary-General Manlio Brosio and various NATO ambassadors. Before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, some NATO experts regarded the original raison d'être of the alliance as outmoded and hoped to transform it from a military deterrent into a means of relaxing East-West political tensions. Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger, who is accompanying Nixon, has never believed that NATO is a fit instrument for detente and deterrence alike. "If we try to get both simultaneously, we shall get neither," he argues. The Czechoslovak scare forced
NATO's European members to abandon plans for lowering their troop commitments, and in fact, since August, they have worked to upgrade equipment, improve reserves and increase mobilization capability.
The Europeans are fearful that the U.S. plans to make further cuts in its 210,000-man troop level in West Germany; they consider airlifts from the U.S. no substitute for forces permanently based on European soil. No one pretends, however, that ground forces are anything but a first line of defense for Western Europe—especially now that the Soviets have more troops in Eastern Europe, and closer to the West's defense perimeter, than at any time since 1945. The Czechoslovak experience cast grave doubt on the once-fashionable doctrine of graduated response. Behind the troops must be the U.S. nuclear-missile deterrent, and the European allies want reassurance that it will be used if needed.
After the NATO meetings, Nixon was to confer with Common Market Commission President Jean Rey, a doughty Belgian Eurocrat who once observed: "Building Europe is like building a Gothic cathedral. The first generation knows that they will never see the work completed, but they go on working." Among the topics up for discussion: U.S. problems with inflation and balance-of-payments deficits, the possibilities for a "Nixon round," and speedy implementation of special drawing rights within the International Monetary Fund—"paper gold"—to ease perennial pressures on gold and on the two international reserve currencies, the dollar and the pound sterling. One current source of U.S. irritation is a proposed Common Market tax of $60 a ton on imported vegetable-oil products, from which the U.S. earns $450 million a year.
London: Crocuses and Gold