Europe's Decoupling Anxiety

...it is a huge, ungainly, unpredictable force off there in the East...

...HAUNTED BY HISTORY Europe's Decoupling Anxiety BY NORMAN GELB London When President Thomas Jefferson declined to run for a third term in 1809— thereby beginning the two-term Presidency tradition—Tsar Alexander I expressed profound regret...

...The London Evening Standard recently suggested that, at the political level, the U.S...

...Unlike many Americans, Europeans are graced (or cursed) with a sense of history that colors their judgment...

...The United States has sharp current differences with Moscow about Afghanistan, for instance, but the British and Russians were competing to dominate that region of Asia long before the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd...

...When the Bolsheviks seized power in the midst of World War I, Lenin and Trotsky pulled the Russian Army out of the struggle against the Central Powers, permitting Germany to shift troops from the Eastern Front and inflict heavy additional pressure on the Allies...

...What if Gorbachev hangs on to power but is forced into drastic policy reversals by the souring of his domestic initiatives...

...Plausible scenarios have been thought out in great detail in European capitals during the past weeks...

...and the USSR may be in the process of exchanging images...

...Although here-and-now considerations are foremost in the European mind, anxiety over Soviet intentions also springs from more remote sources...

...Once, the newspaper pointed out, it would have been the Soviets rather than the Americans who had a leader so old that he avoids public meetings and is rumored to have succumbed to senile dementia...

...His problem is his panicky European allies...

...And what if a new Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, say, decides to pursue a course that Moscow considers inimical to its own security interests, and the Soviets respond with crushing military might, as they have done in the past in that country, as well as in Hungary and East Germany...

...Gorbachev may offer a tempting array of prizes—elimination of the nuclear threat, the opportunity to divert funds from the military to more popular projects, commercial rewards, enhanced goodwill among nations— yet the sirens of Moscow have so far been unable to dispel fear and distrust among average Europeans...

...This is only partly a symptom of the inertia afflicting officialdom everywhere that is secure in established ways...

...Given the possibility of a revived détente with the East proving to be short-lived, they worry that the Soviet-promoted denuclearization could lead to the enfeeblement of NATO and, in concert with Congressional trimming of the defense budget, to the decoupling of the United States from Europe...

...Russia, for its part, was invaded and ravaged twice by Germany in this century, and once by France in the last...

...In the Crimean War a century ago, France and Britain clashed with Russia to prevent its gaining control of the Balkans and exerting influence in the Middle East...

...Nevertheless, it is the Soviets, not the Americans, who are the sinister ones in the minds of most Europeans, as witness the horror with which their heads of state have reacted to the prospect of Reagan agreeing to Gorbachev's "zerooption...

...Faced with the prospect of a dramatic change whose consequences are difficult to foretell, Europe seems to be following Hilaire Belloc's classic advice: "Always keep ahold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse...

...They know that Russian attempts at reform, whether initiated by enlightened tsars or Party chiefs, do not always go according to script...

...A poll in France indicates that more than 60 per cent of the adult population believe their country should retain its nuclear weapons, even if the United States and the Soviet Union decide to withdraw theirs from Europe...

...This is perhaps why many of the same people who insist that Kremlin proposals not be dismissed out of hand are also, like London Independent columnist Peter Jenkins, raising the "alarming specter" of a Europe undefended by American troops...

...The Soviet leader is attempting a small revolution in his country, and Europeans are not convinced he can pull it off...

...In addition, there is the question of whether it is prudent to narrow the margin of safety when weighing these imponderables in order not to miss the peace pipe apparently being proffered...

...All the ups and downs in EastWest relations serve to underscore the uneasiness in London, Paris and Bonn as they attempt to assess the long-term implications of the latest Soviet disarmament proposals...

...In this case, the "something worse" is whatever Gorbachev's heady peace campaign—the foreign policy correlate of his radical domestic program—finally turns out to be...

...The enduring wonders of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, the Bolshoi Ballet, and traveling icon art shows are sometimes contrasted to the flashy ephemera that fashion unceasingly wafts this way from the United States...

...Such reckoning is complicated by uncertainty over precisely how superior the Soviet conventional forces are, in view of the West's lead in weapons technology...

...Of course, there have also been times when the Russians and the West have had a harmony of interests, notably during the drive to defeat Nazi Germany...

...Norman Gelb writes regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Calculations have been made of the minimum NATO nuclear strength required, after agreed missile cutbacks, to maintain the present "flexible response" strategy—which, because of the Soviet conventional military superiority, has never really been flexible...

...But through correspondence they had established a warm relationship based on mutual admiration...

...Their list of "what if s" is formidable: What if Gorbachev's reign proves brief, a possibility raised by reports of resistance to his reforming zeal from some wellentrenched Soviet elements...

...The then widely publicized albeit today largely forgotten Russian desertion of the battle in 1917, while American doughboys were dying on the trenchscarred fields of France, did as much as anything to lay the foundations of America's hatred of Soviet Communism...

...once it would have been the USSR that said nyet when its superpower rival presented broad-ranging proposals for scaling down the chances of a nuclear confrontation...

...The hard evidence suggests otherwise...

...Periodic mass demonstrations by "peace movement" activists, especially since they tend to receive heavy print and electronic media coverage, create the impression that Europe is anxious to get out from under the nuclear umbrella...

...But the Soviet Union became part of the anti-Fascist alliance only after its convenient nonaggression pact with the Nazis was shattered by Hitler's invasion of Russia...

...Jefferson, the revolutionary democrat, and Alexander, the absolute tyrant, had never met...

...Margaret Thatcher was the first prominent political figure to question the benefits of Gorbachev's nuclear disarmament proposals, and as a result her chances of being re-elected prime minister of Britain were actually much enhanced...

...An action of that kind would obliterate all trust in disarmament agreements and cause a denuclearized Western Europe to feel exposed, vulnerable and frightened—with good reason...

...The Germans looked upon Slavic peoples to the east as a fearsome nemesis even before Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse) subjugated the Slavs in eastern Germany in the eighth century...

...Beyond the technical issues lie doubts about Washington's capacity to negotiate ably and wisely with Moscow, engendered by the fact that Gorbachev has played the international scene so much more skillfully than Reagan...

...once it would have been in the Soviet Union that a senior government official was suddenly taken ill and had to be removed from the scene when due to answer embarrassing questions...

...When Churchill called Russia "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," he was looking deep into the past as well as at his own historical moment...

...Moreover, the abortive British and French intercession in Russia during its civil war was unabashedly hostile to the aims of the new Bolshevik regime...

...For while the Soviet leader cannot know what to expect from the next White House occupant, it certainly appears that Reagan, in his determination to stake out an honorable place in the history books, would be willing to go a long way toward denuclearizing the East-West confrontation...

...For most Europeans, the Soviet Union is not an evil Communist empire...

...The Americans, who were there too, played a lesser role...

...Ironically, it is conceivable that Mikhail S. Gorbachev will similarly feel sorry when Ronald Reagan leaves office...

...The governments of the major Westem European nations, though outwardly welcoming prospects for a broad easing of international tensions, have been badly shaken by the speed and direction of recent events...