At a TIME conference, Europeans and Americans assess NATO's problems
"Treaties are like young girls and roses: they last as long as they last."
—Charles de Gaulle, 1963
As a peacetime alliance the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is, at 34, an extraordinary survivor, perhaps even a historical aberration. It has weathered so many crises, real or imagined, that there has been a tendency to minimize periodic symptoms of decline. Today, though, that brave front is no longer possible or realistic. The vitality of the transatlantic partnership has been draining away, not so much because of specific clashes of interest but because of mounting differences between the U.S. and Western Europe over how to deal with the Soviet Union.
The situation bears enormous risks for both sides. The U.S. simply cannot be secure in a world in which Western Europe's freedom and independence are in question because of Soviet pressures; Europeans, for their part, know all too well that the fundamental guarantee of their security and survival still rests in the partnership with U.S. strategic forces through the 16-member NATO alliance. What is increasingly undermining this transatlantic pledge is European doubt, compounded by erratic U.S. diplomacy. As the Soviets continue their vast military buildup, including both nuclear and conventional forces, the U.S. security guarantee has come to be seen as less convincing and, paradoxically enough, too frightening for a new generation of skeptical Europeans. Peace movements have spread. A long recession has helped foment cynicism about the need to defend an ailing consumer society, and the allies increasingly have been quarreling over financial and trade issues.
Western Europe—with its huge economic potential, its industrious 236 million people—is critical for both Europeans and Americans. Should it slide slowly out of the alliance orbit in order to seek accommodation with Moscow, the global balance of power would change drastically.
Against this backdrop, TIME last week held an Atlantic Alliance conference to assess the differences that now separate the U.S. and its West European allies. The setting was Hamburg, which, as Helmut Schmidt, the former West German Chancellor, pointed out, is only 25 minutes by car from the frontier with the Soviet bloc and only twelve minutes more from the nearest Soviet armored division. For three days, 45 political leaders, government officials, strategists and economists from the U.S. and Western Europe diagnosed the alliance's ills, aired their grievances and sought to find remedies.
In his address, which set the tone for the debate, although it also provoked significant disagreement, Helmut Schmidt mentioned no fewer than eight times the need for a "grand strategy" by the Western allies to deal with the Soviet Union. Like other West Europeans, Schmidt is reluctant, at least for the moment, to accept the Reagan Administration's tactics as the basis for such a strategy. Said he: "The deterioration of diplomacy into shouting matches, the idea of economic warfare ... all these, I think, are characteristic of the political crisis that faces the world."