Russia Moves West
HERALD, GEORGE W.
THE VIEW FROM PARIS Russia Moves West BY GEORGE W. HERALD Paris France, under Charles de Gaulle, was the first to promote a policy of detente between East and West. The General sought a...
...The racial conflict, the drug scene, the urban crisis, the Sharon Tate murder, the Mafia's infiltration into New Jersey politics-all have received top play in European news media, giving rise to the feeling that there is no longer anything to be learned from America...
...They have no ulterior motives other than profit...
...The Federal Republic?1 years removed from the Berlin Airlift next May-while remaining loyal to the Atlantic alliance, believes its economic recovery entitles it to a more detached foreign policy...
...I asked...
...They cannot publicly complain about the results of a detente they were the first to advocate...
...Indeed, I myself noticed during a recent trip to six European capitals that there is widespread disenchantment with the United States, even among normally pro-American people in Holland, Germany and Scandinavia...
...Until then, many Gaullists still hoped that their carefully cultivated friendship with the Russians would protect them against a recurrence of such events...
...The Russians don't want to destroy Western Europe, they want to dominate and exploit it...
...Now that the barriers are to be lifted, it will become harder than ever for the French to match West German competition in places where they were accustomed to certain prerogatives...
...This does not mean the French regard West German Chancellor Willy Brandt as a gullible statesman...
...Taking advantage of this mood, Russia is skillfully trying to draw Bonn into its economic orbit and forge bonds of material interdependence that cannot be easily undone...
...Today it is the Russians who contain us-In Czechoslovakia-and who try to roll us back everywhere else...
...It remains our ultimate protection...
...It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the French are deeply disturbed by the ease with which the Soviets have switched their attention from Paris to Bonn...
...It fails to see that the Soviets, by setting Paris against Bonn, are simply trying to apply the old Roman formula: Divide et Impera...
...Defense Minister Michel Debre recently sent his chief of staff, General Michel Fourquet, on a secret mission to Washington to work out new bilateral military accords, notably in the field of nuclear defense, and last month the French Navy staged common maneuvers with the U.S...
...Who's next?' " 'Let's try Brandt,' said Gromyko...
...By keeping your distance from dictators...
...By reasserting those ideals which for decades inspired all men in search of freedom...
...As soon as the Oder-Neisse border question is settled, Warsaw expects West Germany to invest some $800 million in various Polish development projects...
...The General sought a privileged relationship with Moscow, mainly to annoy the United States and keep West Germany in its place...
...They think they can achieve their goals through intrigue and cajolery...
...First doubts about the effectiveness of de Gaulle's open arms policy were triggered by the Soviet invasion of Prague, and reinforced by the latent social unrest in Italy...
...Due to its preoccupation with Vietnam, it has neglected its political mission on the Continent for years...
...For reasons of self-interest, they must continue to pay lip service to the notion of detente...
...The Pompidou government gives the impression these days of feeling shortchanged...
...55 of them asked for asylum in Sweden...
...Significantly, the number of young West Europeans wishing to emigrate to the U.S...
...Simply by employing their old chess-playing tricks...
...I asked...
...He lamented: "All this wouldn't have gone so far if America had continued to play its proper role...
...It provides for natural gas supplies to Italy over a period of 20 years, making the country heavily dependent upon Soviet resources...
...By stopping domestic violence in the United States...
...A majority of Europeans argue that such a step, designed to strengthen nato, would in reality weaken it...
...The only difference is that they no longer feel they need a war to do so...
...nato's defenses have no relevance to it...
...By reminding the world that America means more than the moon and money...
...nevertheless, they feel like the magician's apprentice who cannot get rid of the ghosts he conjured...
...In Europe, it has allowed the Soviets to move into a political and emotional vacuum...
...Rollback was buried in Budapest in 1956...
...The Russians want to take over our lives...
...Furthermore, in the rare cases where Washington does bother to take a stand on matters affecting Europe these days, it usually manages to rub Continental leaders the wrong way...
...military support," declared the French diplomat I interviewed...
...Twenty-five years after World War II, most of us in Europe think we can dispense with certain forms of U.S...
...Western Europe is ill equipped to resist that type of inroad...
...As long as these things do not change, we prefer to remain cautious...
...Stung to the quick, both Pompidou and Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas sharply rebuked Seguy, whose thinly veiled threat was generally interpreted as a signal that the honeymoon between Moscow and Paris was over...
...And it is not inspired by Vietnam alone...
...The French official I spoke with took pains to explain: "Please, don't get us wrong...
...The other camp, which enjoys strong support in the Elysee and the Army, has reacted to the new Soviet challenge in more traditional fashion...
...And how could the image be restored...
...Whatever the case, France appears once again to be out of tune with its neighbors...
...By speeding the end of the Vietnam war...
...The salt talks, for instance, are widely regarded as an attempt by the Big Two to settle their armament problems without sufficient regard for European security, while America's ambition to establish the inflation-ridden paper dollar as the supreme monetary standard in place of gold is considered an exercise in megalomania doomed to failure...
...The satirical weekly Le Canard Enehaine, not known to be unduly reactionary, imagined the following exchange at the Kremlin between Party chief Leonid Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko: " 'With de Gaulle gone, we've lost our favorite fall guy in Western Europe...
...The man who spoke these words is one of the officials most likely to accompany Georges Pompidou on his state visit to Washington next month...
...We also would gladly forgo various types of American economic involvement on the Continent...
...They jump in wherever they see an opening, and they are very good at spotting them...
...Unfortunately, the Berlin Wall still stands, and the Czechs seem to have started building a new one...
...They find his efforts to reduce tensions in Central Europe perfectly legitimate, and know from personal contacts with him that he harbors fewer illusions about Soviet intentions than de Gaulle...
...But now that everyone else is getting into the act, the French are becoming wary...
...We are still in favor of detente, but it can only work if the moves are mutual...
...But it hurts their egos-and perhaps they are a George W. Herald reports frequently in these pages from Paris...
...In all fields except the military, American influence in Europe is on the wane...
...The government has also undertaken secret talks with Libya in an effort to keep abandoned Allied military bases there from falling into Russian hands, and has put a damper on cultural exchanges with Moscow...
...In the final analysis, the French official I talked to observed, the United States is the only power capable of providing a counterweight against excessive Soviet gambits in Europe...
...What about America's military presence on the Continent...
...They will use political, economic or cultural weapons, whichever is most suitable to the occasion...
...After flattering themselves for years that of all the Western powers, their country alone enjoyed a kind of monopoly on Russian friendliness, they are dismayed to see the Soviet leaders suddenly smiling at others as well...
...America has ceased to be an envied model for Europe, except in the fields of space and technology...
...For French experts fear that unless America soon reassumes its constructive political role on the Continent, in the course of the next decade Europe will gradually become a mere subcontinent of the Soviet Union-without a shot being fired...
...Sixth Fleet in the western Mediterranean...
...First, in December 1969 Moscow placed an order for 1.2 million tons of steel pipe with West German factories, the biggest order the Federal Republic's steel manufacturers have ever received...
...has decreased almost 50 per cent in the past five years...
...Finally, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary are preparing their own bilateral negotiations with Bonn...
...Sometimes we wonder whether Vietnam is not simply a Soviet plot designed to fix-or rather, weld-america's attention to a single spot while Russia extends its spheres of influence elsewhere...
...Between January 1968 and July 1969, for instance, France exported $1.2 billion worth of goods to the East...
...The French cite three specific moves in that direction...
...One camp, advocating an all-out effort to win a larger part of the East European markets away from the Germans, is prepared to do Russia's bidding...
...Prague has just locked the border for all Czech tourists...
...But it has no bearing on what we are talking about...
...Aren't you exaggerating...
...We have been duped often enough...
...Where are the times when your John Foster Dulles could afford to vacillate between the policies of rollback and containment...
...Here, of course, lies the hidden source of resentment among the Gaullists...
...The last plane out landed in Stockholm on Christmas day with 84 Czech passengers...
...Further disillusionment was generated last month when Georges Seguy, the Communist head of the Confederation Generate du Travail (cgt), France's largest labor syndicate, intimated in a public speech that President Pompidou's seven-year term might be "curtailed" by a new "democratic" uprising a la May 1968...
...And how do they go about that...
...Moscow's new Rapallo-like venture for closer industrial cooperation with West Germany, the French feel, is a typical example of Soviet tactics...
...The French are worried that this sudden trade activity will spoil their own commercial relations with Eastern Europe...
...Almost everywhere else in Europe, people are so eager to open a new era of peaceful and profitable exchange between East and West that they no longer clearly see the perils of precipitate action...
...When the Bolshoi theater came to Paris for a number of year-end performances, it was greeted with a minimum of ado...
...We don't underestimate it...
...Similarly, the December session of the Council of Europe has clearly shown that Washington will have to reckon with a new wave of anti-American feeling on the Continent if it goes through with plans to supply the Greek colonels' regime with additional arms...
...They tend to forget that it will still be a long time before the emergence of a united Europe strong enough to hold its own in dealings with the Russian giant...
...Second, a new $3 billion contract has been concluded between Moscow and Enternazionale Idrocarburi (eni), Italy's hydrocarbon monopoly...
...The Americans come to Europe to do business with us, period...
...By rejecting everything that makes America look merely like the reverse of the Russian coin...
...The French however, are in no position to move effectively against this tide...
...They still want to overthrow the regimes of Western Europe...
...During the same period, Bonn's exports to the Communist countries totaled almost $2 billion-even though most of them did not even have diplomatic relations with West Germany...
...little naive-that all those Russian professions of special amity toward France now turn out to have been made in bad faith...
...Caught in this awkward situation, they are torn between two tendencies...
...The deal will be financed by the Deutsche Bank, which is about to grant the Soviets a $300-400 million loan, and through Russian natural gas deliveries to Wurttemberg and Bavaria...
...We wish Washington would try to regain that influence and restore Uncle Sam's badly battered image in the Old World...
...But with the Russians practically next door, we are missing the balancing political influence the United States used to maintain here during the '40s and '50s...
...The French President can be expected to express himself in a similar vein in his talks with President Nixon...
...I inquired...
...Isn't that what you used to say about the Americans...
...One highly placed policy-maker told me recent-ly: "It is evident that Soviet appetites are as big as ever...
Vol. 53 • January 1970 • No. 2
