Europe's Eastern Alliance

...on the contrary, many condemned it...

...T h i s is just one example of t h e ways in which the Western Alliance--that group of nations which s h a r e s a commitment to individual liberty and economic progress-is in trouble...

...In those days, we and the West Europeans thought of ourselves as the leaders of the world: We intended to be the side that would prevail...

...In a 1956 document known as the "Three Wise Men's R e p o r t , " Edoardo Martino of Italy, Halyard Lange of Norway, and Lester Pearson of Canada asserted that the " d e t e r r e n t role of NATO, based on solidarity and strength, can be discharged only if the political and economic relations between its members are cooperative and close...

...But where and when were they many...

...Stiff letters are exchanged between national leaders...

...The doubts about the ability of the American d e t e r r e n t to s a f e g u a r d the prosperous welfare s t a t e s of Western Europe present a graver danger than the Alliance's internal enemies...

...Many Europeans grumbled about this, but they accepted it, devoting themselves instead to creating prosperous, liberal welfare s t a t e s . The s t a n d a r d of living of the average Western European has risen enormously in the last two decades, so that those who followed Bernstein instead of Lenin in order to achieve this are asking themselves--how can it surprise us?--whether it is worth losing it all in the fire carried by Soviet SS-20s...

...And this is w r i t t e n by a man who had lived through pre-war Stalin purges and the front lines of World War II, and who later survived five years of psychiatric hell...

...As things now stand, then, the Western Europeans have good reasons to weigh carefully the advantages and the risks of appeasing the Soviets...

...But divisions of this sort, like the challenges themselves, are not new...

...Last year Kissinger candidly warned that it would be unrealistic to expect the United States to risk the destruction of its civilization by initiating a s t r a t e g i c nuclear exchange in order to block a Warsaw Pact offensive across the Elbe, an offensive which, it is widely believed, NATO forces would not be able to defeat conventionally...

...For one thing, we encouraged European regionalism...

...006BDtO00Oo~00000~QDODD9m0~g00DQ0DO0B9so0D000Q0mb0O~0U0e0Q00Oi~DbOQOQOQOQg00OQb~0O0QQO0IggImDDmP9OIQQD0~ g000OB0OUg00Qo0iQbQ6oU0~QOoQIQQ0D~0DDOm0~0gQ 611" t seems clear," wrote the (West German) Handelsblatt on J u n e 11, " t h a t for the EC [European Community] countries, under pressure from France and Italy, the question of a recognition of the PLO is only a matter of time...

...This has only increased the incidence of European neutralist experiments...

...While Paul Seabury is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley...

...But what has happened is that, without becoming pro-Soviet, a great many West Europeans have become resigned to the possibility that they will have to live in a world where the major power is the Soviet Union, not the United States...

...Roger Kaplan is a program officer with the Smith Richardson Foundation and a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...

...Actually, it is not so certain that Franz-Josef Strauss, the opposition leader in the October elections, would change significantly the German way of practicing d&ente...

...Sure enough, the Germans are far more hooked on the thing than the Russians are, which is why they have been talking about a "divisible d&ente...

...This resignation is being demonstrated most vividly by the left-wing of the German SPD: Gunter Grass, who once wrote a moving book in praise of Lenin's great enemy, Kautsky, urges Helmut Schmidt to dissociate himself from the United States even though he knows the end of this must mean bending the knee to Lenin's heirs...

...Nevertheless, it is not at all clear that this idea is making any p r o g r e s s . The leading nuclear s t r a t e g y e x p e r t in the French foreign ministry, Jean-Louis Gergorin, at any rate, does not think so...

...As an editorialist for the Economist recently wrote: "The links with Russia, which were supposed to be a way of encouraging Russian good-neighborliness, are now in Mr...

...Schmidt's view a reason for not trying to discourage Russian bad-neighborliness...

...Really...

...To take only one example, Alexandre Sanguinetti, a prominent Gaullist, sugg e s t e d last year t h a t the Germans be associated with the French nuclear deterrent...

...Of course, the Communists and t h e i r friends railed against American power as a tool of rapacious capitalists...

...The Big Lie seeks to persuade, r e c r u i t , convince, and control...

...In the first case, lying seeks to throw the opponent off balance or off guard...

...It appeared, indeed, that the Europeans were i n t e n t on continuing to distance themselves from I s r a e l , even if it meant undercutting the only foreign policy _9 Not all European commentators defended the ominous trend toward the abandonment of Israel...

...Is it possible that Carter may have had the following private thought when he reluctantly accepted the benign Soviet explanation...

...f e a r e d that our view of things, with the exception of our desire to p r o t e c t them, would bring much instability to the world...

...Unlike the Europeans, we believed that we and all the other ex-colonies were supposed to be on the same side...

...Amidst deep divisiveness, the French defeated their own proposal for a European army (EDC) in 1954, and although the Germans were told soon afterward to re-arm and join NATO, NATO was structured (and is structured today, especially with the French outside the integrated command) in a less "European" way than irwould have been with the EDC...

...But many conservatives distrusted American leadership, too, most notably Charles de Gaulle...

...I never endured a more terrible moment...

...Almost all the EC countries decided, one way or another, to send teams to the Moscow Olympics...

...Which brings us back to Henry Kissinger's memorandum to Nixon and the melancholic reminder that the longer difficult choices are deferred, the more likely it becomes that bad ones will have to be accepted...

...It was the most horrible experience of my life...

...Some years ago Leonid Brezhnev justified d&ente as a way to get by stealth what less cunning comrades would get by war...

...Such thinking is certainly not the basis for a proper European strategy on the "Central Front," nor is appeasing the PLO p r o p e r l y p a r t of a sound foreign policy in the Middle East...

...The Berliner Morgenpost, for instance, wrote: "Europe enhances an organization of murderers which uses massacre as a political instrument...

...In World War II, Winston Churchill's "Bodyguard of Lies" rose up to defend the truth...

...The question was: If Indian marauders break into your house with their tomahawks, demanding your children (whom you have carefully hidden), is it sinful to lie and deny that they are there...

...Alas, we should know by now t h a t the Europeans will always try very hard to have t h e i r cake and e a t it too until reminded by cruel reality that this cannot be...

...Last night I saw upon the stair A red brigade that wasn't there...

...Can it be that we helped to rebuild Europe and contributed to its defense for 35 years only to see our allies cut and run when circumstances get scary...

...Not surprisingly, tempers in such conditions are getting short...

...This was not the first time the Europeans had shown inclinations of this sort (in 1973, for instance, only Portugal allowed American supply planes to relay on its territory), but the Israel is did not receive the news any more quietly for that...

...A simple handful...

...There have always been many Western Europeans who disliked America and what it was doing to the i n t e r n a t i o n a l system...

...achievement of the Carter administration: the Camp David peace accords...

...The implications are obvious: Since the conventional balance has been deteriorating for at least nine years, it was unrealistic to depend on the American umbrella even before the Soviets deployed t h e i r medium-range missiles (carrying SS-20s...

...Well we, too, were very small...

...The so-called post-Viemam malaise we are now supposed to suffer from is but the resurgence of a traditional American isolationism that has played its part in the American foreign policy of the post-war era...

...The Truthfuls, oumumbered by the Liars, left their homes in a fit of outrage and established elsewhere a more p e r f e c t community...

...Not that foreign-affairs specialists were not perfectly aware of the decreasing deterrent value of NATO before this...

...M a t i l d a ' s sad end came when no one believed her at a time when she had a dire need to be believed...

...Is a customs union the best they can achieve in the way of political development, even in the face of a clear threat to their stability...

...But before we complain about this, it is worth remembering a thing or two about the Western Europeans, notably that there are a lot of them and that they have many different tastes in pastry...

...This may have been intended to dovetail with Strauss's revival of a division of NATO into North American and West European commands, or it may have been a coincidence that the two ideas came out (again, for they had been heard before) around the same time...

...The Suez affair of 1956 and de Gaulle's break with America's Vietnam policy in his speech at Phnom Penh in 1967 revealed how deeply divergent our views of the post-colonial world were...

...The Germans are acutely conscious of two geopolitical realities: If there is a frontal attack against the West--which is plausible even if it is not likely--they will be destroyed...

...Well, in general, there are enough," I answered evasively...

...Still, it is no exaggeration to say that NATO has been a success...

...But I am concerned here with political lying, which has objects in mind other than amusement...

...He smiled sadly and distrustfully...

...Of course, we bear a large burden of the responsibility for this...

...Take the Germans...

...N e v e r t h e l e s s , these last disagreements, even if they do not stand alone, lie at the heart of the Alliance's recent confusion, in large part because of the purely military situation in which NATO finds itself...

...An ambassador," wrote Sir Henry Wooton, "is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth...

...One old man from the Norwegian wartime resistance movement asked me once: "Tell me openly, indeed the numb e r of genuine d i s s i d e n t s is very small, true...

...The French P r e s i d e n t went to speak with the Soviet l e a d e r in Warsaw without discussing it with his allies beforehand...

...But then, these are not the only possibilities facing the Europeans...

...For we believed not only that the century was ours, but that most of the world wanted it to be...

...The second type of political lie, however, transcends mere deception and aims at real conversion...

...On this question, the town split into two doctrinal factions: the Truthful Baptists and the Lying Baptists...

...lying, and liars, meet with universal disapprobation in moral literature (as can be seen in any anthology of quotations and maxims), in hard cases the moral value of lying is not so clear-cut...

...insults are spoken within the hearing of journalists (the most shocking example being that of a close advisor of French President Giscard d'Estaing's, who called Jimmy C a r t e r an imbecile...

...For their part, the French have no intention of being a regional power, which may be why, in an interview with Patrick Wajsman not long ago, the French Foreign Minister, J e a n - F r a n c o i s Poncet, maintained that "d&ente has not enfeebled the West...

...The first, like Churchill's, aims to deceive your opponents about your intentions...

...Strong enough to attract millions of voters in the fifties and sixties, anti-American and pro-Soviet parties (especially the Italian and French Communist parties) now know that they will not come to power by way of the ballot...

...It wasn't there again today...

...Ordinary people have a simple opinion of lying...

...The current Soviet "training brigade" in Cuba is an updated version of the same deceit, inspiring self-deception in the White House...

...Hitler put it this way: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 13...

...And, perhaps, it is this special feeling which brings forth the hypnotic influence of the mass which concentrated all its attention on me...

...In one of Hilaire B e l l o c ' s s u p e r b Cautionary Verses, Matilda--an exemplary little fraud--was one such liar...

...Whether lying is wrong or right in circumstances such as these, in politics it rcgularly assumes two forms...

...Of course the most dangerous differences remained those concerning the search for a Middle East peace and for united Western response to the Soviet military build-up.t The almost unbelievable ineptitude of the Carter administration in m a t t e r s of foreign policy has underscored the challenges facing the Alliance and has led to divisions within the Alliance as to how best to meet those challenges...

...What the Right feared was the misuse of American power by Washington, not Wall Street...

...Between getting destroyed and reunification, what would you choose-even if moving from one possibility to the other meant being nice to the Soviets...

...he accepts the lie in order to save face...

...What is certain is that they are extremely important ideas...

...The characteristic rationalization was perhaps expressed best by the Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung: " I t is precisely because the EC states want to prevent a new holocaust that they are seizing the initiative...

...They scc it as a demeaning and cowardly vice, engaged in by those who intend to deceive...

...At their meeting just prior to the Venice summit, the EC members did not recognize the PLO, but a statement was put out that called for including it in the peace negotiations...

...Perhaps altogether only several thousand among the quarter billion people in the Soviet Union...

...But our political objectives have splintered over the past 20 years so that, unable to agree on a common political purpose, we cannot seem to organize a common defense...

...we intended to set the terms for the continued progress of humanity...

...Poor devils such as she, who practice their foul art even knowing that no one believes them, are the subjects of this essay...

...I spoke, nothing and no one was in view...

...Not only is NATO inferior to the Warsaw Pact conventionally, but it now seems t h a t , thanks to arms control theory and the domestic politics of all the NATO countries, the American nuclear umbrella has lost much of its credibility...

...And it is important to understand that its success has been due to the economic and political, as well as the military, n a t u r e of the Alliance...

...As the Venice summit approached, the Stuttgarter Zeitung complained that the Israelis were being too demanding: " I t is a presumptuous idea to demand from nine mature states not to be concerned an iota about what is happening before their door and--naturally--in the neighborhood of their most i m p o r t a n t d e l i v e r e r s of energy...

...But read on...

...Moreover, as any European Atlanticist will remind you, support for the Alliance was less than overwhelming in America, too...

...Veritatem dicam, pereat mundus...

...As I walked up to the rostrum, I concentrated only on the coming up...

...To those, like Wajsman, who permit themselves a bit of skepticism on the matter, who fear that d&ente may be giving us something else, called Finlandization, the Minister had this to say: "Finlandization" is an expression without general significance . . . . It is neither a menace nor a possibility if d6tente is properly understood [to be] the opposite of surrender, a dialogue of equal and independent partners, 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 founded on equilibrium and reciprocal independence...

...Their point is that the best insurance a g a i n s t the conditions that have led to appeasement is a true independence ("founded on equilibrium") that would r e q u i r e an i n t e g r a t e d West European " f i n g e r " on a West European "button...

...But they also recognized that if t h e r e was a revolutionary power in the world it was the United States, and they tAlthough a decision was made last December by the NATO countries to meet the nuclear side of the build-up--notably the Soviets' mediumrange SS-20 rockets--as the Venice summit came and went in June it was still not clear whether the decision would actually be put into practice...

...In the days when the strategic umbrella was not leaking, its physical credibility, however real it may have been (and, after all, it passed the t e s t during the Cuban missile crisis), was less important than the political conviction that lay behind it...

...Why, for nine years, was nothing done to rework NATO strategy...

...The West Europeans, many of them at any r a t e , fault the Americans for i r r e s o l u t e leade r s h i p ; in turn, the Americans complain that their allies are maneuvering, opportunistically and cynically, for shortterm advantages, in particular with respect to their Arab oil suppliers and the totalitarian colossus in the East...

...We thought this and it was so...

...Here, the victim is by no means deceived...

...Yes, then, such people, who are prepared for one word of...

...It promises to go away...

...It is worth remembering that the "consensus" this small group created was, and has always been, a fragile thing at best...

...When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, there were millions of people in Western Europe who did not want the United States to help them resist the Soviet threat as it then presented itself...

...Foreign Minister Gromyko's stodgy lying to President Kennedy in the 1962 missile crisis was of that 3ort: His orders were to deceive the Americans until the nuclear bases were faits accomplis...

...We know how to deal with these developing countries and bring them into the camp of freedom (well, we do have Egypt, for the moment...

...The nations of the Alliance have spoken with several voices, indeed, more voices than nations...

...We alone would be world leaders, we told the Europeans...

...It is understandable t h a t Americans should feel e m b i t t e r e d by this s t a t e of affairs...

...But even in such an instance, to accept the lie ("what else can we do...

...On the contrary, it has given [it] better weapons in the real fight of our times: economic, technical, and human progress...

...It is commonly supposed that Germany's enthusiasm for d&ente is due to internal political p r e s s u r e s , namely, p r e s s u r e s from the left-wing of the SPD (Social Democratic Party...

...Thus, the Alliance had not the strongest of foundations, if confidence has anything to do with it...

...That the French, t o g e t h e r with many other Europeans, are thinking of the Soviets as an "equal and independent" partner shows just how far the Western Alliance has moved from its original purpose and resolve...

...The British government was, vocally, strong in its support for the United States, but failed to convince Parliament to impose the kinds of economic sanctions on Iran that we wanted...

...But then, after the victory it turned out that all had been members of the Resistance...

...During Kentucky's frontier days, on a dark and bloody ground, moral controversy once agitated a community of devout Baptist settlers...

...It is in trouble from without, for its enemies are more powerful now than ever b e f o r e , and it is in trouble from within, for the contradictions within the member s t a t e s themselves and the tensions between them are e n e r v a t i n g and confusing them...

...It was not then, any more than it is now, a simple m a t t e r of choosing between the " b l o c s . " In fact, n e u t r a l i s t s of various sorts often had a major effect on policy, as in the debate of the early 1950s over the linked questions of integrated European defense and German re-armament...

...Raymond Aron put his finger on the essence of the problem: If the Europeans accept the idea of a divisible d&ente, in other words, if they fail to take an interest in the Soviet offensive in areas vital to them, they will confirm Henry Kissinger's judgment: the ex-big powers of Europe have become regiofial powers...

...Henry K i s s i n g e r reports in White House Years that early in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 11 Nixon's first administration he advised the President that Unless we and our Allies rework our NATO strategy and forces so that they can provide this capability [to meet Soviet aggression], we will soon experience the gradual "neutralization" of Western Europe...

...Had it not been for an inspired and brilliant group of "Atlantic i s t s " in politics, business, and labor, there would have never been an Alliance at all...

...It remained for Raymond Aron to tell them t h a t Europe was not taking upon i t s e l f any concrete responsibility for Israel's defense...

...It is this political division which the Soviets now exploit, which is why we hear more today than even in the late 1960s about independent foreign policies and failures of nerve and leadership...

...Even if the internationalist minority here--and it has always been a minority-appears to be regaining ascendancy now (because its arguments are s t r o n g e r ) , American international resolve is not to be taken for granted: If nothing else, the 1970s demonstrated that Americans, no less than Europeans, may be of many minds about the sort of international system they want to be a part of...

...This observation remains as true today as in 1956: Insufficient economic cooperation, in monetary and energy policy especially, has strained the Alliance no less than disagreements about the best way to respond to the Soviet military offensive...

...Lying of this sort can occur at low or high levels, sometimes with good intentions...

...there is no intention to capture his mind or heart...

...It has been especially difficult to determine who wants to do what in Europe since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan l a s t December, because, to tell the truth, there 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 has been no unanimity of opinion...

...and if there is any kind of long-term European peace, it may well include the reunification of Germany...

...This opprobrium seems not to apply to pathological liars who, in Hazlitt's words, "invent falsehoods not to gain any end, or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves...

...In particular, they feared that our idealism-which led us to urge them to withdraw from their colonial empires--would put strains on us that would be, in the end, self-defeating...

...She _9 . . told such Dreadful Lies, It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes...

...Early on, conservative Europeans realized that the Soviet Union was a dangerous power and they welcomed NATO...

...In politics, as is well known, some people lie in order to gain, keep, and use power...

...Stay out of Suez, we said...

...tnath to sacrifice their freedom and work, their social position, their security and peace and the security of their family--such people are, o f course, not many...

...the second is more ambitious, aiming to gull and win over the minds and hearts of the credulous to your cause...

...In any case, it was terrible...

...hardly involves being converted to the adversary's cause...

...It is quite possible to imagine that Sanguinetti and Strauss floated their ideas mainly for political reasons...