Losing ground in Europe; exit from NATO.

LOSING GROUND IN EUROPE

ABOUT 150 PEOPLE were gathered in the Harold R. Medina courtroom of Columbia University Law School, under the auspices of the East-West Roundtable, to hear a debate between Irving Kristol, co-editor of The Public Interest and professor of Social Thought at New York University, and Eugene Rostow, former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University. The motion before the house was: Resolved, that the United States should quit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The most important feature of the NATO treaty, signed in 1949, is a commitment to a "common defense' against the Soviet Union. Under the treaty, an armed attack on one signatory would be considered an attack on all.

"I shall be arguing,' Kristol said, "that NATO over the past ten years or so has become an organization with perverse or counterproductive tendencies. We and the Europeans would both be better off with an all-European NATO, which would then have friendly relations with the United States. I am not an isolationist. I am not anti-European.'

Kristol has been arguing for U.S. withdrawal from NATO at least since 1973. The main points he raised at Columbia were as follows: The U.S. presence in Western Europe, more than forty years after winning the war that brought us there, has created a dependent and demoralized set of allies. Just as welfare dependency corrupts inner-city dwellers, so military dependency has corrupted our European allies.

Europe today is economically healthy, indeed prosperous. Its combined GNP, its combined manpower, its technological resources, and its educational level exceed those of the Soviet Union by a wide margin. (Indeed, the combined GNP of the 19 Western European countries is not far short of the U.S. GNP, and Western Europe's population of nearly 400 million is considerably greater than ours.)

The Europeans could easily defend themselves. But, Kristol said, they don't want to. "And why should they, when in fact they can get away with funding social services which they believe, probably correctly, to be very popular?' They can get away with this because of our commitment to spend our money on their defense.

As the moderator, Morton Kondracke of The New Republic, said in his introduction: "The current total U.S. defense budget is approximately $300 billion annually. Experts usually agree that the cost of the U.S. contribution to NATO, which is to say the defense of the European front, is approximately half that figure, somewhere between $130 billion and $170 billion.' In his just published book, How NATO Weakens the West, Melvyn Krauss, a professor of economics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, writes that in 1984 "the U.S.-defense-spending share of total NATO defense spending was 64.73 per cent.'

Admittedly there is some room for adjustment in these figures. Some Western European countries have a military draft, which is cheaper than an all-volunteer army. So their defense spending seems to be lower than it really is. Still, there can be no doubt that the U.S. has, since World War II, played a major role in the defense of Western Europe, and has continued to do so despite the European recovery from that war.

Kristol and Krauss are drawing attention to a state of affairs well known to economists. It is usually called the free-rider problem. If a group of people work collectively and divide the fruits of the labor equally, toilers subsidize shirkers. When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Colony in 1620 they at first attempted collective farming, but gave it up by 1623. Their first governor, William Bradford, wrote: "The young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense.' When the land was privatized there was a dramatic improvement in the colony, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.'

National defense is a "public good,' meaning that everyone benefits from it within a country that provides it. For this reason its provision is appropriately a government function. A private-sector defense would encourage free riders (who would be protected even though they did not pay anything). But in a multinational or collective-alliance setting such as NATO, the free riders once again appear, and those (i.e., Western Europeans) who are loath to defend themselves remain shielded by those who pay the bill (U.S. taxpayers).

"In openly declaring that this country would "bear any burden and pay any price' for defense of the free world,' Krauss writes, "Kennedy made our allies an offer they couldn't refuse. The unintended result of Kennedy's carte blanche approach to containment has been that, too often, the marginal or incremental contribution of U.S. military aid to Western defense has been disappointing simply because this intervention has induced offsetting substitutions of [welfare programs for] defense efforts by our allies. U.S. military assistance in these cases does not increase Western deterrence. It merely redistributes the cost of financing a given amount of defense from our allies to ourselves.'

The United States garrisons about 340,000 troops in Western Europe, mostly in West Germany. Bruno Bettelheim, the psychologist, speculates that they act as a constant and humiliating reminder that West Germany today remains dependent on the same forces that defeated it in World Wars I and II. "On an emotional level,' Krauss writes, "the Germans see the U.S. troops as a continuing army of occupation that makes them into an inferior partner in the Atlantic Alliance.'

Kristol pointed out at Columbia that these troops "are not there to repel Soviet aggression. They are not needed for that. They are there as hostages. Those American troops in Western Europe are there as hostages to affirm that if Western Europe is unable, as it is at the moment, to resist Soviet aggression, the United States stands ready to raise the conflict to the nuclear level. Otherwise a President will have to stand passively by and watch 200,000 or 300,000 American troops killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.' Thus, Kristol said, "We have made a very peculiar commitment to NATO.' In response to the Europeans' reluctance to defend themselves, we promise to commit suicide on their behalf. For this reason Kristol, as he did not mention at Columbia, supports a U.S. pledge of "no first use' of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Only such a pledge, he believes, will galvanize the Europeans into self-defense.

Europe can and should defend itself, but it will not do so in response to pleas and badgering. Such exhortation only creates anti-Americanism. Prodigal sons whose fathers pay their credit-card bills will not mend their ways in response to entreaties. In fact, such pleas tell the sons better than anything that dad really wants to go on paying. As Krauss says, "Dogs that bark do not bite.' Only actual policy changes will alter European incentives.

Collectivizing defense is not necessarily good for the free riders either. Kristol argues that our military aid demoralizes Western Europe: "These governments undermine a spirit of self-reliance among their own people by bringing in the United States as the protector of Western Europe: a task that they are thoroughly competent to perform. They persuade their own people that they need not make the necessary sacrifices to assert their own national independence and affirm their own national identity.

"Soldiers don't fight and die for acronyms . . . for something called NATO or SEATO or any other O. Soldiers fight and die for their country. The present structure of NATO is such that Germans or French, British, Dutch, Italians are not fighting for their country. Indeed many of them are by now convinced that they are fighting for the United States. This is what I refer to as the demoralization that is taking place among the European population. Because the U.S. is in NATO--has its fingers on all the triggers--the European people begin to wonder: Who is serving whom? Who is being used by whom? An awful lot of Europeans have become convinced in the last 15 years that NATO exists to serve the purpose of the United States. And they are not entirely wrong. Obviously we would much prefer to see a war fought in Europe, rather than on the continental United States.'

The all-important point here is that much of Western Europe has become demoralized and anti-American not because it is a civilization in decline or because the Soviets are too frightening to contemplate, but as a direct result of the collective structure of NATO itself. Make each country accept responsibility for its own defense--ask for "separate checks'--and the problem will disappear, Kristol and his supporters believe.

At his apartment near New York University, Melvyn Krauss elaborated on the "demoralization' point. It does no good, he argued, merely to tell the Europeans, "Come to your senses,' while raising defense spending. "The fact is they have come to their senses,' Krauss said. "They have been able to keep the welfare state, keep U.S. support, and feel safe from the Soviets. When we gave Europe the nuclear guarantee, in the 1950s, the Soviets couldn't hit us back. As soon as they could, in the 1960s, the credibility of our promise declined. What adjustment did the Europeans make? They could have increased their conventional defense. But that would have been costly. So they went for detente--basically, bribing the Soviets not to invade them. Not only do they subsidize the Soviet economy, they also engage in political detente--Obstructing anti-Communism in the Third World, supporting the Sandinistas, and so on. And they justify their own free riding by pooh-poohing the Soviet threat as a figment of the imagination of American hawks.'

"The menage a trois is what they are striving for,' concurred Harvard professor Richard Pipes, former director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs in the National Security Council. In a telephone interview, he explained: "The Europeans live in a make-believe world whereby they are married to the U.S. but carry on a continuous affair with the other side. I find this simply fantastic. Recently the West German Social Democratic Party had its convention, and they said they would like to have a security arrangement with the Soviet Union!'

Given its potential strength, Europe's pusillanimity can only be explained by its demoralization. Pipes argues that the situation in NATO is now "far worse than most people realize. I have never seen a situation where a group of countries is economically of the first rank and politically and militarily of the third rank.' He believes that either the U.S. should "ease its commitment to the defense of Europe,' or Europe should increase its defense commitments elsewhere. Obviously, however, only the former is a realistic possibility.

Jed Snyder, who was with the State Department during Reagan's first term and today is deputy director of national-security studies in the Washington office of the Hudson Institute, told me the latest gallows humor about NATO: The way it is going, Western Europe will end up as a nuclear-free zone.

He mentioned this in connection with the Spanish referendum on NATO membership earlier this year. Spain agreed to stay in NATO, but only on condition that no nuclear weapons be kept in Spain. (Reportedly, another condition is that U.S. planes carrying nuclear weapons will not fly over Spain.) Moreover, Spanish forces would not be integrated into NATO, meaning that they would not be required to defend NATO territory--only Spanish. In effect, Spain would receive assurances of our protection without incurring military obligations outside Spain.

What was so appalling about this, Snyder said, was the absence of any NATO reaction to these conditions of membership. There was instead a celebration at NATO headquarters in Brussels, with the unreassuring British Secretary General of NATO, Lord Carrington, proposing a toast: Jolly good show, chaps! Here we have finally brought reluctant Spain into the arsenal of democracy. (Let's not worry about such details as force integration until we've got it safely into the NATO fold.) A bad precedent, as Snyder said: "It's my view that the Greek government will seek to adopt the Spanish model.'

And what happens to NATO if Britain's Labour Party or West Germany's SPD returns to power? (Labour would dismantle Britain's independent nuclear deterrent and require the removal of all U.S. nuclear weapons based in Britain.) As Kristol said at Columbia, either we do something, politely, about out role in Western Europe, or sooner or later they will do something, rudely, to us. If the latter, it would probably be not "separate checks,' but an angry departure from the dinner table.

Heavyweight support for Kristol comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. "If Europe is to emerge politically, it must assume a more direct role in its own defense,' Brzezinski wrote in Foreign Affairs (Winter 1984-85). "To move Europe in this direction, the United States will have to take the first steps, even perhaps unilaterally, through a ten-year program of annual cuts in the level of U.S. ground forces in Europe.'

Noting the increasing disarray of NATO, Kissinger wrote in Time in 1984 that when military "dependence no longer results from wartime destruction but from a policy of choice, made under conditions of relative prosperity, it can breed guilt, self-hatred, and a compulsion to display independence of the U.S. wherever doing so is safe.' He suggested that by 1990 "Europe should assume the major responsibility for [its] conventional ground defense.'

In his response at Columbia, Eugene Rostow seemed to misconstrue Kristol's argument. He took Kristol's unilateralism to be isolationism. (Writing in The New Republic, Charles Krauthammer has made the same mistake.) Rostow took a proposal to strengthen the resolve of friends as a proposal to cease being friends; a proposal to end a system of common defense as one intended to abandon that defense--as though Governor Bradford's proposal to divide up the land tilled by the Plymouth Colony were a proposal to break up the colony; as though a proposal to dine out with separate checks were a proposal to stop eating at the same table.

Rostow went on at some length about the "balance of power,' commending the British for having preserved it for four hundred years. This they had done "by organizing coalitions of allies which together prevented the predator states who appear occasionally in the course of European history from achieving mastery.'

Rostow's argument here actually undermined the case for NATO's present structure, because Britain certainly did not maintain the balance of power by paying for the defense of countries with which it happened to be allied. In fact, these alliances, whether protracted or shifting, were possible precisely because Britain was not subsidizing the exchequers of its friends. Rostow never explained why the subsidy of country B (Britain, say) by country A (America) is a necessary precondition for the military alliance of B and A.

Rostow seemed to be thinking automatically in the collective- or socialized-security terms so widespread among those whose formative political experience was World War II. For disguised by the anti-Communist purpose of NATO is a collectivist principle, embodied in a collectivized organization. NATO should be thought of as a product of the times that produced not so much Senator McCarthy as the World Federalists, the United Nations, UNESCO, and Americans for Democratic Action.

In another respect, Rostow was still fighting the last war. "It's hard for me to imagine any reason why it's in the American national interest to have a Europe so independent and so nuclear, on its own as a third force,' he said. "That, it seems to me, is a risk we should never have to contemplate. We fought two wars to prevent Europe from being unified under German control.' (Those whose real reason for opposing change in NATO's structure is fear that West Germany is potentially more dangerous than the Soviet Union should make their case forthrightly. Then it could be explained to them that wars between democracies are implausible events today.)

An additional argument Kristol makes for loosening our ties to NATO is that "Allied unity' is constantly advocated by those who would like to see the Alliance proceed, like a convoy, at the speed of the slowest ship. The invocation of "the Allies' almost always is a disguised appeal for the strongest to capitulate to the weakest.

"There are those in the State Department who prefer Danish policy to American policy,' Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle told me. "There are those who prefer the policy of the Norwegian socialists to the policy of Ronald Reagan, and who therefore are the great proponents of Alliance unity.'

Sophisticated defenders of NATO are aware of this trap and argue that we should lead NATO, not leave it. This is the position of National Interest editor Owen Harries, Perle himself, and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, among others.

"If you believe that there is only one possible Alliance diplomacy and it's the one we have been practicing, then you are driven to despair,' said Perle. "Because it's an acquiescent diplomacy. I don't think that's inevitable. We can and should lead the Alliance . . . You see, Irving Kristol's criticism--he doesn't realize it but his real criticism is with the Department of State and not the Danish socialists.'

Melvyn Krauss responds that "to lead the Alliance is to leave it.' That is, as long as the perverse incentive structure remains in place, independent action will tend to enrage allies, not reform them. When they still have the incentive to let us pay the bill, our independent action merely draws attention to their pusillanimity. As Richard Pipes said, friends get "very angry' when you do this.

After the Libyan raid this April, polls showed that while the British and West German publics generally criticized the U.S. action, Frenchmen supported it. As Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post pointed out, "Anti-American sentiment tends to be strongest in countries, such as Britain or West Germany, whose foreign policy is perceived as tied to Washington. It is weakest in a country such as France, which has a highly developed sense of its own independent interest.'

The French, Krauss writes, "can thank Charles de Gaulle for this.' In the 1960s he withdrew France from NATO's military structure. Are we as a result not friends with France, not "allied' against the Soviet Union? On the contrary, some polls show France to be our most reliable ally. And as Flora Lewis has commented: "The pacifist movement in France, though it is growing, remains marginal because the French government retains full and exclusive control of its defense.'

Norman Podhoretz remains one of the most influential holdouts against the idea that something must be done about NATO. Unlike some of his co-supporters of the status quo, he understands the difference between isolationism and unilateralism. He knows about the incentivist case against NATO, too, but he rejects it completely.

"My explanation for the problem in Europe is the influence of ideas, not money,' he said recently. "If you want to be succinct about it, I believe that ideas rule the world.' He characterized these ideas, which have been at large in the world at least since the late 1960s, as follows: Loss of confidence in the values of civilization, self-doubt, "best summarized as anti-Western.' This explanation, he said, "applies to the United States as well as to Europe, although less so.'

As a result, Podhoretz is convinced that "we are stuck with the Europeans and that we will have to sink or swim with them. In this I disagree with Irving Kristol and some of my other friends.'

What about the argument that prodigal sons won't reform as long as dad goes on paying their bills?

"Economism!' he said, with some distaste. "Reductionism!' Podhoretz wants you to know that, in the struggle for influence in the world, he takes the side of values against incentives--a preference he shares with the State Department and the British Foreign Office.

How about Mel Krauss's line, "Dogs that bark don't bite'?

"Philistine!' cried Podhoretz. "We're talking about people, not dogs.' He remained unmoved by the reminder that James Buchanan just won the Nobel Prize in economics for arguing that governments, like people, respond to incentives.

On this issue Norman Podhoretz seems to revert to the Brooklyn kid who "made it' to tea parties on Cambridge University lawns with F. R. Leavis, literary critic and editor of the "terrifying' Scrutiny. Podhoretz reacts to the economists' excursion into foreign policy much as one imagines Leavis would have responded had a Cambridge "scout' blundered out onto the lawn from the bursar's office with some old bills and a puzzled frown: "Go back into your counting house, my man; do your sums and don't disturb us here!'

Podhoretz is opposed even to a test of the anti-collectivist thesis, such as a small U.S. troop withdrawal from Europe. He argues that such policy shifts "can develop a momentum of their own,' so that things could unexpectedly slide out of hand. In the view of the "economists,' he thereby reassures Europeans (prodigal sons) that we will go on subsidizing them no matter how badly they behave. (Such a troop withdrawal from Western Europe was proposed by Senator Sam Nunn in 1984. It was defeated by a vote of 55 to 41, with most conservative senators-- Armstrong, Denton, East, Garn, Goldwater, Hatch, Hecht, Helms, Thurmond, Wallop--voting against it.)

What European action would change Podhoretz's mind? "Outright subsidy of the Soviet Union,' he suggested. But this is already happening, through the EEC Common Agricultural Policy. Europe's taxpayer-subsidized farmers produce surpluses that are sold far below cost to the Soviets. Any tourist to the Soviet Union today knows that although the food is poor, the butter is plentiful. It is paid for by Europeans, hoping to spike Russian guns. Likewise, subsidized European loans enabled the Soviets to build the pipeline that delivers the gas Europeans buy above market price.

It is often said that those who advocate leaving NATO are themselves proposing to do the Soviets' bidding. But it is difficult to believe that the Soviets seek a stronger Europe. If it is possible that someone as alertly focused on defense policy as Norman Podhoretz can be mistaken, is it not just as possible that the Soviets can miscalculate, too? Certainly the Soviets, who made a hash of their own economy by embracing the collectivist fallacy, can hardly be expected to recognize the error when their opponents construct their defense policy upon analogous collective lines.

Or perhaps they do recognize our error. Soviet propaganda after all is not so much aimed at getting the U.S. out of NATO as at ensuring that the Alliance remains weak. According to Senator Malcolm Wallop (who has changed his position since the 1984 Nunn Amendment vote and now supports the Kristol position): "The Soviets are not so simpleminded as to believe that the Alliance must necessarily be bad for them. Indeed, for two decades their instructions to Communist parties in Europe have been not to demand a divorce between the U.S. and Europe but to work within the Alliance to "empty it of its aggressive content,'' the latter being a quotation from Leonid Brezhnev.

It is striking that the Soviets have never agitated for the withdrawal of U.S. tropps from Europe. According to Adam Ulam, director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University: "Although the Soviets want to encourage tensions between Western Europe and the United States, they may not want to see the United States withdraw or greatly reduce its land forces in Europe. Such a shock might make West European leaders decide they have no choice but to unite politically.'

Those who argue for a withdrawal from NATO--and obviously we are talking about a phased withdrawal over several years--believe that in the withdrawal period those voices in Western Europe that favor increased defense spending would tend to become more prominent, while the voices of detente would become less audible. At the margin, beneficial change would occur, spines would stiffen, national pride would recover along with self-reliance. Anti-Americanism would come to seem an odd quirk of the past.

There was mild, admittedly tenuous, confirmation of this several days after what Podhoretz referred to as "the Reykjavik comedy.' At that peculiar event, one that no doubt spells an end to the arms-control charade, President Reagan disconcerted our allies by proposing to trade away our intermediate-range missiles in Europe, thus threatening to disconnect (partially) the U.S. from the defense of Europe. Within a week, the European Wall Street Journal was delighted to note, it was the "Euro-hawks' whose voices were being heard, not the Euro-doves. And in the New York Times James M. Markham wrote: "The virtual abolition of a whole category of nuclear weapons is a tempting goal for Mr. Reagan . . . But for NATO it could mean renewed demands for increased spending on conventional defense when most governments are feeling strapped.'

The British response to the Argentine seizure of the Falkland Islands--a long-range, high-risk naval engagement that might have seemed daring to Horatio Nelson and Francis Drake--does not suggest a demoralized nation. It showed what Britain could still do--outside the NATO collective. And it contrasted strikingly with the Greenham Common protestors, demonstrating against cruise missiles on British soil.

Are the British really sinking beneath the waves? Or are they fed up with being on the American dole? (Just because you know something is bad for you does not mean you find it easy to give it up.) Perhaps the Germans are likewise fed up with being reminded who won World War II, and who can't be trusted with nuclear weapons because they're still considered potentially wicked.

The case against NATO is an extension to foreign policy of the argument that inner-city welfare recipients are not innately corrupt but have been corrupted by misguided government programs intended to help them. An important welfare corollary also applies to NATO. Ghetto dwellers may only seem to have been demoralized by the perverse incentives of welfare, rewarding idleness, sexual irresponsibility, and so on; but morality is so rooted in habit that if people are left on welfare for long enough they really will become debased; meaning that if the welfare is removed they wll find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to reform.

Likewise, it is no doubt true that if Western Europe stays on U.S. welfare for much longer, the loss of morale that Norman Podhoretz sees as somehow embedded in the cultural genes really will become embedded; so that removing the subsidy at that point really would have the dire consequences that he now foresees. It follows that a change in NATO's structure is not merely necessary but urgent.

Jeffrey Record, a senior fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Washington, recently wrote in the Baltimore Sun that "neither the Truman nor Eisenhower Administrations regarded a large U.S. troop presence in Europe as a permanent fixture within NATO . . . In a letter to a friend in 1951 General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then NATO's supreme commander, wrote that: "If in ten years all American troops stationed in Europe . . . have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.''

Thirty-five years later, our troops are still there, and the natives are getting restless.