Agenda in Yugoslavia
HOPKINS, MARK
NIXON-TITO TALKS Agenda in Yugoslavia BY MARK HOPKINS What troubles Yugoslavia is what troubles most small, bootstrap countries. Not enough money for development, especially hard currency. A...
...The immediate issue in this context is who will modernize the Yugoslav military...
...True, Tito supports Nasser in the Middle East and he has always opposed U.S...
...and an unpunctuated wariness of the Soviet Union...
...Yugoslavia is as yet unable to produce its own advanced weapons, save for light jet fighters...
...What it denies to the Soviet Union is extremely important to the West...
...The American-Yugoslav relationship also contains other anomalies...
...But to the Yugoslavs, an alternative to Soviet hegemony ranks among their major problems...
...In private contacts with Tito, Washington has tried to deflate these suspicions...
...That may be why, when Prime Minister Mitja Ribicic was in Moscow a few months ago, the Russians (according to reports reaching Western diplomats in Belgrade) attempted to convince him that the United States was selling out Yugoslavia at the salt talks, and that Yugoslavia should rejoin the Soviet coalition...
...Tito therefore provides a useful channel of private communications to Nasser...
...Tito, whose memories of his 1963 trip to Washington are not entirely favorable (there were demonstrations against him), has never been an admirer of America, and indeed has angered and frustrated U.S...
...Whenever the two get together, as in the case of the salt talks, Yugoslavs wonder if another deal is being manufactured...
...This sort of power politics approach to Yugoslavia, no different of course than the Soviet Union's, has some benefits for the small country of 20 million people...
...Along with that is the matter of defense...
...In diplomatic language, they have "a mutual interest...
...If you were commanding the Soviet Mediterranean fleet and looking for bases, you could only wish that Yugoslavia, with its long stretch of Adriatic coastline, were as servile as Bulgaria...
...If it can make a success of it, it can't fail to act as a lightning rod...
...Americans say the Yugoslavs asked about the supply of arms...
...Or, if your long range objective is to "liberalize" Eastern Europe, it would to encourage the Yugoslav alternative to the Soviet system...
...Yugoslavia already is becoming so enmeshed politically and culturally with Western Europe (and to some extent the United States) that logically it should go that way for armaments...
...There is nothing that two shrewd political leaders like better than one of those...
...The country's "self-management" system within a market socialism is developing to a degree that business relations with West European firms (and some American) are both natural and easy...
...Certainly, unless it is believed that the most deceptive politics are being engineered, Nixon's presence in Yugoslavia should persuade Tito and his advisers that the United States has a stake in a unified, stable Yugoslavia developing along present lines...
...unbending allegiance to the non-aligned bloc...
...A chronic suspicion, in Yugoslavia's case, that the Soviet Union would move in at the first good chance...
...Until Nixon, no American President has ever been in Yugoslavia, although it has received nearly $3 billion from the United States in economic and military aid...
...That is why over the past year Belgrade has scouted every European capital for hard information on whether, as Yugoslav officials suspect, the Americans and Russians have privately made grand designs for Europe's future, including Yugoslavia's partition once Tito is gone...
...His 1948 break with Stalin, his management of the country during hard years after that when Yugoslavia was under political siege, and his repudiation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia have made the Marshal's assertion of independence conventional wisdom...
...A costly army that wants newer and even costlier hardware...
...But other nato countries, such as Great Britain, are available conduits...
...There are two stories heard in Belgrade...
...Neither a nato nor Warsaw Pact member, Yugoslavia lies in a gray zone between American and Soviet spheres...
...policy in Vietnam...
...It is an important piece of real estate, offering rewards to Americans or Russians if they pay the price and recognize Tito's unqualified claim to independence...
...Neither wants very much of it there...
...Beyond this, and within a few days after the invasion of Prague, the question was: What would the United States do if the Soviets swept across Rumania into Yugoslavia...
...And, finally, uncertainty about internal stability during modernization...
...Tito's response was to purge the military high command and set up the machinery of another partisan army...
...Mark Hopkins of the Milwaukee Journal returned to the U.S...
...Recollecting the secret and aborted Yalta agreement to divide post-World War II Yugoslavia "5050," Yugoslavs retain a certain distrust of the United States and the Soviet Union...
...The country's armed forces are now equipped with a mixture of Soviet and American tanks, jet fighters, missiles and naval vessels...
...From the American vantage point, this seems an obvious time then to cultivate Yugoslavia anew...
...Partly because of this, and partly out of momentum, the cold war Soviet-American contest over the dissident Tito is still played...
...Politically, it probably would be difficult for Yugoslavia to buy American arms, since that would seem a provocation in Moscow...
...Most important, perhaps, Nixon and Tito, albeit for separate reasons, are both concerned about Soviet power in the Mediterranean...
...Moreover, he went on, "Yugoslavia is basing its entire future on a controlled form of liberty and a market economy...
...But Yugoslavia's survival outside the two European blocs has always rested on a tripod of policies: selective use of aid from the West...
...Anxiety over being sucked into someone else's war...
...The conflicting accounts reveal the doubt on both sides as to the bonds that bind them...
...Or, as Soviet defense minister, it would be less troublesome when you ordered airlifts of weapons to Egypt if you did not have to get Belgrade's permission to fly over Yugoslavia (as was the case after the last Arab-Israeli war...
...Italy and Germany are now its major trading partners...
...in fact, a partitioning of Yugoslavia (based on the historical division of the Slovenes and Croats, and the Serbs) would not be in the American interest...
...Yugoslavs say the Americans brought up the subject...
...In relations with the Soviet Union, Tito remains tough and self-reliant...
...This all may seem a low-level problem to Americans...
...Yugoslavia," one American diplomat in Belgrade suggested to me earlier this year, "is a land bridge from Europe to Asia, an important piece of real estate...
...Moscow's interests, however, seem otherwise in the opinion of some informed Yugoslavs...
...officials by his politics among nonaligned nations...
...These, then, rough out an agenda for President Josip Broz Tito, a Soviet-trained Marxist who will go down in Yugoslav history for his resistance to the Soviet Union, and President Richard M. Nixon, an anti-Communist fighter who declares now for an era of negotiation with Moscow and its allies...
...There are also legal barriers now to the United States aiding a Communist country...
...So now, and "after Tito" (who is 78), Yugoslavia wants a counterweight to the Soviet Union...
...As Yugoslav and Communist Chinese relations improve, too, Belgrade offers the U.S...
...Yugoslavia belongs to no formal military alliance that could really protect the country if it were attacked by superior forces...
...last month after a year in Yugoslavia...
...Nixon's visit fits into this overall objective, coming as it does at a time when Yugoslav leaders are concerned about "territorial integrity"--the code words since Czechoslovakia...
...This seemed a possibility when Soviet troops occupied Czechoslovakia...
...From the American viewpoint, it would be useful to incorporate Yugoslavia in that line of nations (Italy, Greece, Turkey and Iran) requiring the Soviet Union to "leapfrog" to the Middle East...
...Despite these differences, though, the United States and Yugoslavia have remained on good working terms that were strengthened by the events in Czechoslovakia...
...still another third party contact with Peking...
...A surviving sense of being a pawn that the big nuclear powers play with...
Vol. 53 • October 1970 • No. 19
