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An imbalance such as the one now existing cannot be corrected by "consultation," however meticulous. In the long run, consultation works only when those being consulted have a capacity for independent action. Then each side takes the other seriously; then each side knows that the other's consent has to be won. Otherwise consultation becomes "briefing." Agreement reflects not conviction but acquiescence for want of an alternative.
The present imbalance is not new. It has existed ever since World War II. But military dependence on another nation has a cumulative impact. When dependence no longer results from wartime destruction but from a policy choice, made under conditions of relative prosperity, it can breed guilt, self-hatred and a compulsion to display independence of the U.S. wherever doing so is safe, especially with regard to some Third World issues and certain aspects of East-West relations.
The problem has become even more acute because the generation of leaders that built NATO has virtually disappeared. Those who governed Europe during the early postwar years were still psychologically of the era when Europe bestrode the world. Global thinking came naturally. European leaders assumed responsibility for their own security policies and gave it up only reluctantly because of special circumstances. But nearly 40 years have passed since the end of World War II. The new leaders were reared in an era when the U.S. was preeminent; they find it politically convenient to delegate Europe's military defense to us. Too many seek to position themselves somewhere between the superpowers—the first step toward psychological neutralism. Thus Europe's schizophrenia: a fear that the U.S. might not be prepared to risk its own population on a nuclear defense of Europe, coupled with the anxiety that America might drag Europe into an unwanted conflict by clumsy handling of Third World issues or East-West relations.
The rush to condemn our actions in Grenada by so many of our European allies is a case in point. What could have been in the minds of their leaders? Even making allowance—especially in the case of Britain—for totally inadequate consultation, they could hardly have wanted us to fail. That would surely have affected our willingness to run risks in defense of other areas, ultimately including even Europe. Rather, they must have assumed that their actions were irrelevant and costless: that we would not be deterred, that we would exact no penalty and that therefore it was safe to use the incident to score points with "progressives" at home and with Third World radicals abroad.
The change in the nature of European leadership has been paralleled in the U.S. Our new elites do not reject NATO any more than do their European counterparts. But for them, too, the alliance is more a practical than an emotional necessity, more a military arrangement than a set of common political purposes.
On both sides of the Atlantic, we find ourselves threatened by the dominance of domestic politics over global political strategy. In Europe this leads in too many countries to a faintly disguised neutralism. In the U.S.