The MBFR Mystery

...The other area in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact have been sharply at odds is verification: the Western side insists that any agreement be accompanied by "associated measures" that include arrangements for on-site inspection of Pact territory...

...MBFR was once a conservative cause, but at a time when conservatives were fighting a desperate holding action against the tides of American confusion and retreat...

...Now he is off to be America's ambassador to Indonesia, the Philippines' nearest neighbor...

...In particular, it will no doubt be politically out of the question to introduce additional American forces into West Germany unless large Soviet units actually begin to cross into Poland, regardless of the existence of an explicit non-circumvention clause...

...From the beginning, the Soviets saw the talks as a useful tool for sowing political trouble in the Western alliance as well as for acquiring what the Europeans like Carnes Lord is director of international studies at the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax Virginia...

...The commitment not to increase forces in the zone will make it much more difficult for NATO to reach a decision to mobilize in an acute crisis, particularly if Soviet actions are ambiguous (for example, if mobilization occurs in the western military districts of the Soviet Union under theguise of an exercise...

...ollary," the idea has even been incorporated by some into an extended version of the "Reagan Doctrine...

...troops in Europe, which were strongly pushed at the time by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield...

...As far as corruption is concerned, Indonesia's President Suharto is in the same league as Mar-cos...

...But there have also been recent killings by government-controlled "death squads...

...The problem with MBFR was always that any mutual withdrawal of U.S...

...The talks on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions in Europe (MBFR), which have been conducted in Vienna for the last twelve years by representatives of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, have achieved notoriety chiefly as the longest-running arms control negotiations in world history...

...Now, with the recent introduction by NATO of a new proposal, they are vying for the distinction of producing the first major arms control agreement of the post-detente era...

...an escape from a "narrow" concentration on anti-Communism...

...Under these circumstances, it is difficult to believe that the Soviets can long resist taking NATO's yes for an answer, though it can be anticipated that they will extract a last pound of flesh in the form of further Western concessions on verification...

...It would also be unrealistic to expect that some American enthusiasts for "third forces" will not, in any case, target some of the ASEAN countries for treatment...

...After all, let us not forget (to cite the most arresting example) that it was Jimmy Carter who let the Soviets know that any violation of any provision of the SALT II treaty would bring on nuclear war, while Thatcher, Kohl, and Reagan have done precisely nothing to remedy demonstrable Soviet violations of a variety of arms control agreements...

...and the Soviets are making toward an agreement on intermediate-range nuclear forces, arguing that the elimination of NATO's newly-deployed Pershing II's and ground-launched cruise missiles will be destabilizing unless the conventional balance improves in NATO's favor...

...These same West Germans have recently been voicing reservations about the apparent progress the U.S...

...policy toward the Philippines during the recent crisis...

...and its allies have thrown away a principle—prior agreement on data relevant to compliance with arms control treaties—which is essential for effective verification of any agreement with the Soviets, and which the Soviets had accepted as essential in the SALT II treaty and elsewhere...

...A three-year period in which neither side could increase forces would follow...

...In his new job, Ambassador Wolfowitz will have cause to consider very carefully the interaction of two facts...

...as a forum for intra-alliance dialogue and the formation of consensus on European security issues...

...But the issue of the reduction itself is trivial...

...All NATO is buying itself are Soviet promises for the future and an arms control regime that will create new and unwelcome political realities in the present...

...In the case of MBFR, the mystery is rather why no one noticed when a corpse that had been securely pronounced dead suddenly arose and started to dance...

...what was actually involved, however, was a reorganization of Soviet forces...

...Yet all of this is to say little more than that the bad is the enemy of the worst...

...It has neighbors, it belongs to a region...

...As just indicated, it is far from 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 ing on national forces...

...It should be an interesting experience...

...There is a great and unplumbed mystery in all this...

...While the Soviets continue to press for such ceilings, it is not clear that a concession in this area would cost them much...

...In terms of ruthlessness he is in altogether a higher one...

...As the "Philippines corOwen Harries is co-editor of the National Interest...

...It should be recalled that Leonid Brezhnev announced in 1979 a unilateral withdrawal of 20,000 Soviet troops and 1,000 tanks from East Germany...

...Other provisions include a non-circumvention clause that would permit each side to take appropriate steps should the other party engage in threatening military activities (such as mobilization outside the zone of reductions...

...In the Sherlock Holmes tale, it was, of course, a dog's failure to bark which supplied the key to understanding a murder...

...No reduction in overall troop levels ever occurred, although some units were withdrawn with great fanfare...

...It would be unrealistic to expect that what has happened in the Philippines will have no effect on these countries...

...The current MBFR initiative comes with the label Thatcher, Kohl, and Reagan...

...Hundreds of thousands—perhaps as many as a million—have perished violently in Indonesia since Suharto seized effective control in 1965...

...Or perhaps the lesson is simply that arms control talks acquire an institutional momentum that is difficult to reverse without paying a political price, and that conservatives are unwilling to pay the premium political price they know will be exacted from them by the current arbiters of Western political culture...

...Generally speaking, an agreement is likely to generate new political pressures against conventional force improvements of any kind in every NATO country in the reductions zone...

...To begin with, in the absence of any data agreement and with most verification measures not yet in place, it is not evident how NATO will be able to determine that reductions have actually taken place, or that reductions have not been offset through the reintroduction of forces...

...and Soviet ground force reductions and a commitment by all participants not to increase forces in central Europe...

...This is serious enough...

...It would be one thing if NATO had achieved its long-sought goal of major reductions in Soviet forces stationed in East Germany (even though questions might remain about the ability of the Soviets rapidly to reinforce any standing-start offensive...

...More particularly, it is a member of an important andsuccessful regional organization: the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose other members are Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Brunei...

...the potential for arousing bipartisan support and for restoring a much-longed-for consensus in U.S...

...What hat is going on...

...Most were killed in massacres (which may or may not have been carried out spontaneously by anti-Communist villagers) following the abortive coup of that year, and in the process of imposing Indonesian rule over Timor, following the withdrawal of the Portuguese...

...Perhaps the problem with conservatives is that they don't take arms control seriously enough...

...First, recent events in Manila (and to a lesser extent Haiti) have aroused considerable enthusiasm in America, among conservatives as well as liberals, for aiding "third forces" against authoritarian regimes, as a general policy...

...In this offer, the West took a major step in the direction of yielding to long-standing Eastern demands...

...The Soviets have yet to respond affirmatively to the proposal, but if they do, what is the likely effect...

...The MBFR talks began in 1973, at the height of U.S.-Soviet good feeling following the successful conclusion of the original strategic arms agreements in the spring of 1972...

...He has a case...

...Paul Wolfowitz, until recently the State Department's assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, played a key role in making and implementing U.S...

...The truly significant question is to what extent an MBFR agreement will impose new political constraints on alliance policy and on alliance action in an East-West crisis...

...Both sides have now accepted the principle of a common ceiling of 700,000 ground and 900,000 combined air and ground personnel on each side...

...but the political constraints such an agreement would place on NATO in a crisis are potentially fatal...

...Second, though someone depending exclusively on American media coverage of recent events might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, the Philippines does not exist in a void, nor exclusively in terms of its relations with the United States...

...Carnes Lord THE MBFR MYSTERY If the Soviets accept NATO's latest offer, we're in big trouble...

...Dispute over the "data issue" has been the principal stumbling block in the way of an MBFR agreement...

...But it is a measure of the continuing disarray of Western security policy that this initiative not only serves no discernible conservative purpose, but makes little sense as arms control...

...In Malaysia there is serious economic discriminaTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 15...

...In December 1985, NATO put forth a new proposal in Vienna...

...According to the current proposal, reductions would be carried out over a period of a year, at the end of which there would be an exchange of data on NATO and Pact forces...

...and the promise that, as there is allegedly a global "democratic revolution" in progress, it will be in harmony with the times...

...But thereductions being proposed are a nullity in military terms...

...Conditions in the other ASEAN countries are not anything like as bad as they are in Indonesia, but, by the standards now being applied by many Americans, they are not very good either...

...NATO has always resisted any agreement that would impose a specific ceilThe Soviets and their allies originally sought equal reductions on each side, while the Western position called for reductions to an equal ceiling...

...6 / JUNE 1986...

...This would re-quire the withdrawal of some 90,000 NATO and 290,000 Warsaw Pact personnel...

...units removed from central Europe would have to be withdrawn thousands of miles across the Atlantic to the United States, while Soviet troops withdrawn to their homeland could remain less than 500 miles from the inner-German border...

...Owen Harries ASEAN NIGHTS There are limits to the Reagan Doctrine...

...MBFR succeeded admirably in its original purpose of holding off American troop withdrawals...

...What is more, the West dropped its demand that the data issue be resolved before reductions take place...

...At the same time, with the talks rapidly reaching a stalemate over issues that were relatively uncontroversial within NATO, the political damage deriving from MBFR proved minimal—indeed, in certain respects the talks were actively helpful to the U.S...

...But the Western impetus behind MBFR came not so much from the enthusiasts of arms control and detente as from a coalition of defense-minded Americans and Europeans concerned over the threat of unilateral reductions of U.S...

...foreign policy...

...It has several things going for it: the ideological and moral appeal of helping the good guys...

...Any U.S...

...The negotiations included the NATO allies of the United States (except France) and the Warsaw Pact allies of the Soviet Union either as direct participants or as observers...

...and Soviet forces from Europe would have grossly asymmetrical con-sequences...

...They maintain that the two sides have been and remain essentially at parity, and that the West has used fallacious assumptions in calculating numbers of combatants on each side...

...to call a droit de regard over NATO force levels...

...A particular Soviet aim was to constrain the size and capabilities of the West German Bundeswehr...

...That these arbiters have in the present in-stance failed to bark is perhaps the key to the mystery...

...to encounter severe political resistance within West Germany on the grounds that such an increase would undermine prospects for further progress in MBFR...

...The Western proposal of December 1985 reportedly represents a joint British-West German initiative...

...Indeed, they have already started to do so: A. M. Rosenthal, the executive editor of the New York Times, has recently urged that America should bring leverage and pressure to bear on, among others, Indonesia, in the interest of promoting political freedom...

...It was agreed that the focus of the talks would be the territory of the two Germanys, the Benelux countries, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the ground and air forces stationed in them...

...In the bargain, the U.S...

...It accepted theframework of the previous Warsaw Pact proposal of February 1985, which called for a first phase agreement involving token U.S...

...This asymmetry has grown increasingly severe during the lifetime of MBFR, as steady improvements in the quality and quantity of Soviet forces in Europe have increased Soviet chances of a quick victory and made more problematic the resupply and reinforcement of NATO's central front by the United States.clear that even this numerical disparity in NATO's favor would not result in a net benefit for the Soviet Union...

...There are large ironies here...

...In Thailand the military plays a dominant role...

...Even if the Bundeswehr is not legally restricted by MBFR, any attempt to in-crease its size in compensation for the withdrawal of American forces is likely...

...The problem is that the Soviets have never been prepared to admit that the War-saw Pact has some 200,000 more troops deployed in the reductions area than does NATO...