End of 'Atlantic Alliance'?
MEYER, KARL E.
PERSPECTIVES End of 'Atlantic Partnership' By Karl E. Meye BEGINNINGS and endings are notoriously untidy in history, and one must be cautious about terminal generalizations. Yet I suspect that...
...Fear was also the spur to European unity, and the doctrine of Atlantic partnership took root during a period of collaboration that found its noblest form in the Marshall Plan...
...Now the Soviet Union was unalterably evil, monolithic and expansionist...
...If the Atlantic doctrine was flawed by overeager simplification, the Western alliance is nevertheless economically inter-dependent and shares a common strategic problem in controlling nuclear weapons...
...making shambles of the Grand Design...
...But the doctrine evolved during a period of European dependence on Washington and a period when Eastern Europe seemed permanently sealed behind an Iron Curtain...
...Written by two heterodox former New Frontiersmen, Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin, After Twenty Years at-tacks the entire Atlantic Community doctrine, taking it apart root and limb, Barnet and Raskin argue that in concentrating too much on Europe, America has paid the price of ignoring her own needs and interests...
...By seeking less, he may eventually get more...
...Speaking in Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, Kennedy called for a new Declaration of Interdependence with Europe and asserted that the creation of a strong and united Europe "has been the basic object of our foreign policy for 17 years...
...Even though the UN fell short of the Rooseveltian dream, it is still sufficiently important to cause both Moscow and Washington to avert a collision on finances that could wreck the world organization...
...The UN, as Americans conceived it, was a triumph of innocent expectations...
...At the end of the year, an even more unsettling volume, After Twenty Years, was published...
...Nor is this to say that Gaullist nationalism represents a more valid approach to Alliance problems than Atlantica dogma...
...NATO and the arms race were fruits of the doctrine...
...hegemony, Rather, the flaw in the Atlantic theology is the facile assumption that a common culture and a common Russian adversary would lead to common economic, military and political institutions under American tutelage...
...The new tone was already evident in the Wilson visit, with its calculated downgrading of MLF, and in the NATO ministerial meeting at which Secretary Rusk went out of his way to avoid even the appearance of bulldozer tactics...
...In both instances, Americans seemed less than ever the impatient schoolmaster determined to teach unruly pupils the delights of discipline...
...In simplifying shorthand, it can be said that the wartime attitude was embodied in Franklin Roosevelt, while the cold war toughness was exemplified by Harry Truman...
...Reality has caught up with doctrine, and the U.S., under a supremely pragmatist President...
...In part, it is a problem of age...
...Paradoxical as it may seem, a President from supposedly brash Texas may evince more humility in dealing with Europe-and possibly even more adroitness than his urbane predecessor...
...The Atlantic ideal, however, found its fullest flowering in a speech by John F Kennedy in 1962 when, ironically, most of the premises on which the partnership doctrine rested were touched with decay...
...Whether this important premise was adequately examined or discussed with our European friends is another matter," It might be said of the American illusions that they have consistently underestimated the tenacity of human nature by imputing at one time too rigidly unchanging evil to Communism, and at another time too enduring a sense of gratitude, solidarity and submissiveness to European allies, One feels in Washington today a far greater sense of realism at the top, and of hard-boiled skepticism among a new generation of foreign affairs analysts...
...LIVINGSTON MERCHANT, a for-mer Under Secretary of State and apostle of Atlantica, has candidly confessed that "There was always an inarticulate premise to our support for European unity, Such unity was desirable from our point of view in the framework of an Atlantic community to which we belonged...
...Indeed, Gaullism seems a dialectical reaction to American supersalesmanship since the constant nudges from Washing-ton lent credence to the French thesis that the Atlantic partnership was premised on U.S...
...PERSPECTIVES End of 'Atlantic Partnership' By Karl E. Meye BEGINNINGS and endings are notoriously untidy in history, and one must be cautious about terminal generalizations...
...These range from tariff and trading disadvantages to neglect of domes-tic needs and to diplomatic paralysis in dealing with Moscow, out of deference to Europe...
...If American hopes proved vain, they were not ignoble nor were the obverse premises necessarily true...
...It was virtually heresy to suggest at the time that this was a fantasy that ignored the realities of power and the experience of history...
...Hindsight is the cheapest fabricator of realism...
...But as 1965 begins, it has aroused hopes for a long-deferred attack on national problems, and a new accent on national interest, while the Atlantic mirage recedes...
...Not content with saving Eu-rope, some Americans were deter-mined to reform Europe as well...
...is placing higher priority on problems at home than on chasing the Atlantic mirage...
...The doctrine is summed up in the phrase "Atlantic partnership"-a phrase that already seems slightly ironic and archaic...
...Johnson may find that in abandoning the portentous Atlantic community approach, far more specific and practical functional collaboration on economic and military matters is possible with Europe...
...Implicit in the doctrine has been the belief that some-how America was appointed by destiny to reshape the Western world...
...The response had to be to contain Russian power through a network of treaties and to deter aggression through overwhelming retaliatory power...
...But by that time Gaullisrn was already strong, and six months later the French President vetoed British entry into the Common Market...
...context, there are at least two other parallels for the present disenchantment...
...Yet I suspect that 1964 may be remembered as the year that saw the burial of one of the central doctrines of American postwar policy...
...Younger observers tend to be far more iconoclastic...
...The curators of the Atlantic doctrine tend to be middle-aged and middle-ranking officials who first absorbed their gospel during the Marshall Plan days, often from direct contact with the irresistibly persuasive Jean Monnet...
...To place the new outlook in KARL E. MEYER, editorial board member of the Washington Post, is a correspondent for the New States-man, where this article also appears...
...At the beginning of the year, a book was published entitled The End of Alliance by Ronald Steel, a former State Department official still in his thirties...
...We have it on Khrushchev's own testimony that Stalin was no stranger to paranoid ruthlessness, and Hungary and Berlin bear witness to the reality of the Soviet threat...
...The first was the wartime illusion that the Big Four could serve as disinterested policemen of the globe, acting through the United Nations...
...Americans have an incorrigible weakness for policies that contain lofty moral overtones, and the partnership policy blended strategic interest with a missionary cause...
...This feeling of change was quickened last month by the NATO ministerial meeting in Paris and by Prime Minister Wilson's visit to Washing-ton...
...That has been the essence of the Atlantic mirage...
...At least to some extent, President Johnson appears to concur, The new catch-phrase of the moment is the Great Society and not the Grand Design, Sooner or later, no doubt, the Great Society will also acquire an ironic and archaic ring...
...Stalin and the cold war followed, fostering in turn the new American doctrine which wholly reversed war-time illusions...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 2
