Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005130283
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: R.W. APPLE JR. THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
To catch up, he has had to keep altering his ideas on the future of that continent, and the role the United States can play there in the decades to come.
Yet little by little, in reacting to changes sweeping the continent in hopes of shaping them, the president is developing a plan for Europe - dare one call it a vision? - that would have been unthinkable for an American president of any partisan or ideological persuasion only a year or two ago.
Last week, he called upon the leaders of the other 15 North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations to meet him in London this summer to rethink strategy.
If Bush has his way, the new Europe will have two salient features: a unified Germany with full membership in a transformed NATO that is as much political as military - something that will require revolutionary thinking about the alliance - and a continuing American presence, rooted in a significant residue of American military forces and nuclear weapons.
After dragging his heels for months, the president agreed that there might soon be no land-based nuclear weapons left, but he clings to the idea that there must be airborne nuclear missiles in the new Europe, with some of them based in Germany.
"There are few lessons so clear in history as this," Bush said in a commencement address at Oklahoma State University. "Only the combination of conventional forces and nuclear forces have insured this long peace in Europe."
"Everything depends on keeping NATO," said the ambassador of a major Western European country. "You can change it, make it more political, do what you like. But it has to have Germany in it, and it has to have the United States in it. We can't afford to let either one slip into isolation."
To achieve what they want, the administration and its allies have already made some concessions and will probably have to make more - to Congress, to the Soviet Union and to Germany.
By abandoning a new short-range nuclear missile to replace the aging, land-based Lance, Bush removed a major source of dissent in NATO, and he is said to be ready to negotiate the elimination of the Lance itself as well as nuclear artillery shells from Germany.
Bonn has agreed that no NATO forces will be deployed on what is now East German territory.
But even such major decisions as those have not been sufficient to resolve the central question, the security arrangements for a united Germany, which provided the focus for the first session of the "two plus four" negotiations in Bonn on Saturday, involving Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union and the two Germanys.
The most obvious problem is the Soviet Union, which originally wanted a neutral Germany and now insists upon a Germany that belongs both to NATO and to the rapidly disintegrating Warsaw Pact, pending the creation of a pan-European security system to replace the two alliances.
There are a few signs of yet another softening in the Soviet position, including an article by a Soviet general in an East German newspaper arguing the case for Germany within NATO.
But President Mikhail Gorbachev is being asked to institutionalize a vast erosion of Soviet power in central Europe, and the NATO allies are working on ways to make it easier for him.
The West Germans, for example, are suggesting a number of economic sweeteners, like helping to pay for Soviet troops remaining in East Germany.
They and the French also favor a much-enlarged role for the 35-member Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to which the Soviet Union belongs, and a slightly reduced role for NATO.
Washington and London are less enthusiastic about CSCE, seeing in it a way for France, which is not a full participant in NATO, and for Germany, which could eventually choose not to be, to coax the old alliance toward oblivion.
For similar reasons, the Americans and the British are determined to introduce into Germany new, small tactical nuclear weapons carried by aircraft - so that, in the words of a ranking U.S. official, "the front-line country in NATO, which is Germany, continues to be involved in nuclear deterrence after the land-based missiles have all been pulled out."
It also would please Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to see some of the missiles at a French air base.
Even if all or most of this works - and there have been ample indications lately, for those seeking them, that Gorbachev's flexibility may be coming to an end - it appears certain that the United States will have to find a whole new basis for its role in Europe as the continent moves toward closer economic and political integration.
Although Bush has set a floor of 225,000 for American troops there, reductions in short-range weapons, as well as congressional pressures, will inevitably drive that figure lower soon.
With the Eastern European countries transformed almost overnight from adversaries into friends, and the Soviet Union no longer nearly as menacing, in terms of either armaments or intent, as it was for four decades, much of the rationale for the strategy of the United States and NATO is withering.
But there is not, as yet, any very clear delineation of what a new NATO, focused increasingly on political and even economic questions, might look like.
For many reasons, the United States is fearful of losing influence in Europe, and Bush has been saying almost since he took office that the United States intended to remain a European power.
He does not want to see American products and services blocked out of European markets by a strengthened European Community, he does not want to leave a heavily armed and still autocratic Soviet Union without a sufficient counterweight in Europe, at least in the short term, and he does not want to abandon the American role in guaranteeing that a reunited Germany will remain trustworthy.
The last item is not mentioned much publicly, either in Washington or in other European capitals, because of a reluctance to offend the Germans.
But it counts for a lot; a French official said not long ago that it would be "a catastrophe not to have the United States here to balance the Germans."
In a sense, then, NATO is being asked to do three things at once: provide a continuing deterrent or response to any attack from a weakened Soviet Union, whether under Gorbachev or someone else; prevent Germany from rebounding for the third time this century from defeat into renewed militarism; and begin transforming itself into a different sort of entity that could provide the political and economic linkage between the new Europe and the United States.
It is a large order, and the United States may have to fight to keep NATO stronger than the European Community or some new version of CSCE that might be thought to offer a safeguard against a resurgent Soviet Union by bringing it and the newly democratic Eastern European states into Europe instead of holding them at a distance for a while more.
Many European experts, and more than a few American skeptics, suspect that NATO will not be able to adapt successfully.
Even if it does, they argue, it will be rendered irrelevant or redundant within a few years as the military threat recedes further and other organizations deal with non-security questions.
by CNB