Madrid's Delicate Dance

...The agreement is not as bad as U.S...

...the media crowed...

...Madrid's Delicate Dance BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Madrid A neat twirl on the heel, one pace back and a couple forward to the rhythm of clapping and finger-clicking-those are the basic steps of flamenco...

...He could not prevent the Right-of-center government of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo from taking Spain into NATO in May 1982, but he did make the decision and those responsible for it unpopular...

...Most important, the major naval installations in Rota, near Cadiz, remain firmly in American hands...

...In peacetime, Italy may prove a more convenient base for the F-16 fighter planes that operate in the Eastern Mediterranean, unless the Pentagon decides to fly them home in an attempt to jolt Europeans out of their insouciance...

...treaty with him...

...At least half the 13,500 or so Americans currently based in Spain will stay on...

...Onto that resentment is grafted a mistrust of the military, whether native or foreign...

...Subsequently demonstrations, opinion polls (a mere one in five Spaniards thinks America should keep facilities on their soil) and a sharpened instinct for survival have persuaded Gonzalez that the United States ought to pull out some planes and troops before pressure for a full withdrawal builds up...

...Last February 23 Defense Minister Narcis Serra gave the Spanish Congress details of how the Socialist government proposes to contribute to Western security...

...For Eisenhower it meant military bases in a country with wide open spaces to train in and no parliament to protest...

...Gonzalez' government has so far not succeeded in keeping its promise to exile to Estremadura the "Brunete" armored division that Franco stationed outside Madrid with its guns trained on the city center...

...Slowly Gonzalez began a U-turn in favor of keeping Spain in NATO, quietly encouraged by leaders of the European Economic Community (EEC), which expanded to include Spain in 1985...

...Despite the hug and the accompanying dollars, Franco's Catholic apologists continued to present America in schools and in the media as a corrupt, immoral country controlled by Protestants and Jews...

...Some may be reshuffled between the bases of Moron, near Seville, and Saragossa...

...Like people in France and elsewhere, some Spaniards gaze across the Atlantic with mixed feelings of envy, resentment and contempt that are the result of ignorant prejudice and of a cultural dependence they secretly enjoy yet publicly deplore...

...Janice Valls-Russell, who writes regularly for The New Leader on French and Spanish affairs, is also a contributor to the Economist and La Vanguardia...

...Thus anti-Americanism trickled underground, where over the years the belief spread that Eisenhower had helped to shore up Franco...

...Eisenhower's visit did not merely fail to win friends in Franco's entourage, it lost the U.S...

...Six years after joining NATO, Spain is trying to persuade its allies that it can be a useful and active partner, even if it insists on staying out of the alliance's integrated military structure and on having Spanish officers command Spanish troops: Although Spain's sailors and airmen are keen about international cooperation, nationalist Army men dislike the idea of taking orders from senior NATO officers...

...Comparable parochialism has distorted attitudes toward NATO...

...Four months later, Gonzalez was elected Prime Minister...

...For Franco-befriended until then only by similar regimes in the Arab world and Latin America-the treaty meant an end to the Western democracies' ostracism of his dictatorship...

...High-level Spanish reactions to the agreement were those of a child having armtwisted a dominating adult...

...After emerging from the 36-year rule of a dictator the Armed Forces helped to keep in power until his death in 1975, Spaniards have not quite shaken off their fear of uniforms and brass buttons...

...To further complicate matters, the same way the Reagan Administration appears to have sailed into the Gulf war with at best a vague chart of local religious and nationalist undercurrents, it underestimated past events that have colored Spanish attitudes toward the United States...

...It wants to help patrol and defend the Eastern Atlantic, the Western Mediterranean and the in-between Strait of Gibraltar-while refusing to work with the Rock area's British commander...

...Thenew treaty, now being drafted,is expected to allow American planes to use Torrejón in the event of a ??t?-related crisis only...

...This will simply confirm Spanish policy to date, for in the past 15 years successive governments have refused to let the United States use Spain as a stepping-stone for its operations in the Middle East, whether to help Israel, to carry out punitive raids over Libya, or to protect shipping in the Persian Gulf...

...In wartime, Spain would become NATO's behind-the-lines depot for munitions and men...

...In March 1986 he called a referendum to settle the NATO issue and won, albeit by a narrow plurality...

...Indeed, when you take into account all those people watching, Gonzalez' flamenco steps make some sense...

...others will continue to man communications centers dotted around the country...

...His aides have complained in private that Americans do not seem to realize this danger exists...

...The present one expires in two months, after having been renewed for five-year periods ever since its introduction in 1953...

...The world, of course, looks different from the pedestal of power...

...Washington's unhappiness is mainly due to fears of similar reactions from America's other lukewarm landlords, particularly Greece and the Philippines, and perhaps to a partly justifiable feeling that Europe may be more trouble than it is worth...

...Pulling his party into the EEC proved a hard haul for the Prime Minister...

...Most Spaniards were indifferently ignorant about the alliance before Gonzalez, backed by Socialists and Communists, whipped up campaigns against membership, using the issue as a springboard for approaching elections...

...His decisions are therefore understandable to Spaniards who are familiar with the gypsy dance of Andalusia, but their sequence tends to confound fellow treaty members...

...To this day, Spaniards do not like to admit that the dollars and the know-how accompanying the treaty blazed a foreign investment trail and helped to crank the economy into modern times...

...but they find it less risky to taunt American troops than Spanish ones...

...In Germany, Carlucci crashed stern hints of a United States withdrawal from Europe...

...diplomat called the Americans' "disillusionment...

...officials suggest, however...

...These ideas had been floating around Madrid and Brussels for some months, but the Spanish government felt it could not announce them until it had first asserted itself by taking on NATO's main prop, the United States...

...Satisfaction was all the smugger given what a U.S...

...Consequently, Ronald Reagan is paying for the tactlessness of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who crossed the Atlantic in 1953 to hug General Francisco Franco and to sign the first SpainU.S...

...On January 15, following more than 18 months of sticky talks, the Reagan Administration glumly agreed to move out of Spain the 72 F-16 fighter aircraft it keeps based at Torrejón, near the capital, and to negotiate a new eight-year Friendship and Cooperation Treaty...

...admirers among his democratic opponents...

...Others, again as elsewhere in Europe, feel admiration and attachment, but they have been confused of late by the U.S.' flightiness in the Persian Gulf, by its abruptly switching from secretly selling Iran arms to protecting the shipping of Iraq's ally Kuwait...

...He finally prevailed by threatening to resign, sacking his ThirdWorldist Foreign Minister, Fernando Morân, and promising to reduce America's military presence in the country...

...They also govern the foreign policy of Spain's Sevilleborn Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, especially where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United States are concerned...

...They point out that the Communists' old war cry, "Yankees go home,' is occasionally borrowed by Left-wingers in Gonzalez' own Socialist Party and even by Left-of-Center former Prime Minister Adolfo Suârez...

...Officials glowed...

...Gonzalez' stubborn insistence on a U.S...

...Incontrast, Torrejón has become a favorite weekend outing for noisy pacifist picnickers...

...force reduction was well received by the Spanish public, whose views of America are even more complex, and complex-ridden, than those of most Europeans...

...Incredibly, Spanish officers can refuse to be posted to a region that does not strike their fancy, hence the delay, and public protest has been a cautiously discreet murmur...

...During his February tour of Europe, Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci told journalists that he was "disappointed...