Disarming Threat to Stability

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Senator from Montana, proposed a measure, which came to be known as the "Mansfield amendment," to reduce the number of U.S. forces in Europe unless Europe spent more on its own defense. The amendment was twice defeated, and as yet there is no talk of it in Congress. "I don't think we'll have a fortress America," says former Kissinger Aide Sonnenfeldt. State Department officials express another worry: that the European peace movement could spill over to the U.S.

The first signs that this might happen appeared on Veterans Day, when activists conducted antinuclear teach-ins on 148 campuses around the country.

The obvious hazard of the peace movement is that its success could bring upon Europe the very cataclysm it seeks to avoid. Unilateral disarmament could make war more likely, not less.

Says Britain's Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington:

"The Soviet Union, now or at some time in the future, under tomorrow's leaders if not today's, might reckon that it could afford to threaten nuclear attack on Western Europe without risking retaliation against Soviet territory." Hugh Henning, director of the British Atlantic Committee, warns that the weakening of NATO could lead to "miscalculation, which is the greatest danger of all. The Russians would say, 'Ah, the Americans don't mind about Norway, they have withdrawn. We will therefore put some muscle on them and get some warm-water ports.' The Americans will then say, 'Hey, we do mind.' Then we will get bullets fired. The cause of both world wars was miscalculation by the aggressor."

If the U.S. withdrew its troops from the Continent, observe some analysts who have been looking worriedly ahead, Europeans might suddenly realize that the U.S. has protected them not only from the Soviet Union but from themselves. Says Gregory Flynn of the Atlantic Institute: "You wouldn't have a pacifist or a neutralist Europe. You'd have an unstable Europe. It would be the 1930s all over again, and all that meant in terms of economic nationalism." The Continent's chessboard would be open to dozens of political variations, ranging from neutralism to something potentially as destabilizing as the reunification of Germany. That prospect would surely alarm not only European nations but the Soviet Union.

If the fragmentation destroyed NATO, the U.S. could work out bilateral defense agreements with individual nations. Under those circumstances, it would be more difficult for Europe to adopt an effective and independent line in foreign policy, as it has on the Middle East, and to exercise the kind of united power it wielded in recent months to persuade President Reagan to take a serious interest in arms negotiations.

The vacuum left by a U.S. military withdrawal could be filled only if Europe decided to take its defense into its own hands. But in the absence of any strong political entity—the ten-nation European Community certainly does not qualify—that is not even remotely foreseeable.

Without the U.S., NATO would be totally outnumbered by the Soviet bloc in military power. The Alliance's combined armed forces would total 2.9 million men compared with the Soviet bloc's 4.7 million. The imbalance in armament would be even worse: 776 combat aircraft to 2,150; 14,053 tanks to 26,300.

With the