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At the same time, Democrat Thomas Foley, the majority whip of the U.S House of Representatives, voiced concern over the frequent bitterness of Western European public opinion vis-à-vis the U.S. Said he: "Europe has been a bit too quick to pick up the random follies that this Administration has perpetrated and run them up the flagpole. I have the sense that perhaps American policy is not as Dad as many of us say it sounds." Richard Perle, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, former State Department counselor, repeatedly pointed out to their West European colleagues that the U.S. was sincerely seeking an arms agreement with the Soviets under very difficult circumstances, which were being made even worse by allied skepticism about Washington's motives.
Robert Hormats, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, noted amid a chorus of agreement that "one of the other dimensions that hold us together is the economic one—shared economic values in the sense that prosperity in Europe is beneficial to prosperity in the United States and vice versa." Said West German Social Democrat Ulrich Steger, his party's spokesman on international economic affairs: "The economic issue is a topic that affects our people and the Western alliance more than all the quarrels about missiles." According to Steger, 95% of West Europeans believe that American economic policies have pushed them deeper into the recession. But the experts also recognized that coordinating economic policies among the Western industrial nations was easier said than done. Explained former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, now deputy leader of the British Labor Party: "What is meant by convergence [of economies] is that everybody should do what I'm doing, but who moves toward whom is still not discussed."
The conference was divided into three committees. The highlights:
Political Concerns. In a prepared paper, former French Foreign Minister Jean François-Poncet submitted that although its long-range objectives remain the same, Soviet foreign policy has shifted emphasis in recent years. "Since the invasion of Afghanistan," he explained, "the pendulum of confrontation has swung back to Europe."