NATO: Dangers of Detente

When the 15-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed 18 years ago, there was no question about its need or its purpose. That was to stop an expanding Communist empire from taking over Western Europe. As NATO inaugurated its new $8,000,000 headquarters in Brussels last week, the situation was entirely different. “Today,” said Belgian Diplomat Jean-Paul van Bellinghen, “our only enemies are among us—those who are not ready to sacrifice a part of their independence to cooperate in a common work.”

No one had to be told that Van Bellinghen was referring to France’s Charles de Gaulle. When De Gaulle served NATO headquarters with an eviction notice 19 months ago and withdrew from the military side of the alliance, NATO defenses were visibly weakened—if only by the loss of France’s 72,000-man contingent, based in Germany. Yet NATO still remains strong enough to meet any challenge. To counteract the 1,300,000 Soviet-bloc troops deployed through Eastern Europe. NATO maintains an army of 2,500,000 men, organized into ground and air divisions based at NATO installations extending in a crescent from the northern tip of Norway down through Britain and Italy and over to Greece and Turkey.

In the end, France’s eviction notice even had a salutary effect. It gave NATO an excuse to reorganize and consolidate its sprawling headquarters operation under a single roof. With its 1,320 offices and 15 conference rooms, the new headquarters building in Brussels provides enough space for both the 15-man NATO Council—the political arm of the alliance, to which De Gaulle still belongs—and the 390-man Military Committee, which handles defense and used to be based in Washington. Another Paris problem was solved with the construction of a lavish new communications center that permits continuous contact with NATO capitals and major NATO commands.

A Fragile Flirtation. As NATO heads towards its 20th anniversary, its biggest danger, ironically, comes from the current European détente. The new state of East-West relations, says U.S. NATO Ambassador Harlan Cleveland, is still a “fragile flirtation, with the West pitching most of the woo.” But NATO nations are acting as if the cold war were over and could never be renewed. They are losing, says Belgium’s Paul-Henri Spaak, NATO’s Secretary-General from 1957-1961, “the cement of fear that bound them together.” They tend to squabble over everything from their respective troop commitments to control of U.S. nuclear weapons.

The value of the military alliance tends to get lost in argument, and in an effort to achieve the harmony it needs, the NATO Council voted last December to authorize a study of the impact of world politics on NATO since 1949. The need for the study is all too obvious. In the current climate of bickering, many European nations that cannot agree among themselves still have trouble accepting continued American domination of NATO. The talk runs more and more to a fifty-fifty U.S.European partnership. Such an arrangement would be eminently satisfactory says Spaak. “But it is difficult to bring off The trouble is, a political Europe does not exist, and this is not the fault of the Americans, but of the Europeans.”