The Cure That May Kill: Unintended Consequences of the INF Treaty.

NOW, IN THE final quarter of the year 1988, we begin to be able to discern the military and political impact of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987. In The Cure That May Kill. Unintended Consequences of the INF Treaty (The Institute for European Defense & Strategic Studies, 13/14 Golden Square, London, England, WIR 3AG; $8), Angelo Codevilia, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues that it is shaping up pretty much as many of its opponents warned it would.

In The Arms-Control Delusion, published last year and reviewed in this space (December 18, 1987), Mr. Codevilla (writing with Senator Malcolm Wallop) described tbe arms-control process as following inexorably from a fixed and faulty logic; now, in the treaty's aftermath, he finds no reason to moderate his earlier judgment. Codevilla, who is also the author of the recently published While Others Build: The Commonsense Approach to the Strategic Defense Initiative (Free Press), and the forthcoming War (written with Paul Seabury, to be published by Basic Books in 1989), argues in the present instance that, contrary to claims made by advocates of the treaty that it would increase stability and allay fears within the NATO Alliance, the effect has been quite the opposite. INF, he believes, has been yet another unnecessary measure weakening NATO militarily, as well as an added blow to its morale-especially in West Germany, where an increasing number of people apparently have concluded that, absent land-based NATO systems capable of striking within territory defended by the Warsaw Pact, battlefield weapons ought to be negotiated away as a source of vulnerability rather than of strength. "The decision to withdraw the U.S. missiles," Codevilla writes "is part of a chain of military and political events which logically leads nowhere else. Unfortunately . . . the INF Treaty is not the beginning of that chain-a 'dangerous precedent' which could lead to unwanted things in the far-off future if it became established. Rather, it is nearer to the end; and it may well prove to be the point at which the flow of events has become irreversible."

Although the American arms-control establishment has for years insisted that arms-control negotiations are what our Allies want, Codevilla reminds us that, in context, "Europeans" means a narrowly particularized segment of opinion that just happens to be identical with the European Far Left. Until the events of 1956 in Hungary and Suez, NATO was clearly committed to a defense of Western values and territories that included (theoretically, at least) the eventuality of "rollback." In that year the United States, by refusing to support the Hungarians and by interfering directly against the Western colonial powers, effectively switched sides in the war between East and West, with the result that many Europeans who had, in Codevilla's words, "placed their life bets on the United States took the first small steps toward hedging them again." Five years later the inaction of the U.S. during the building of the Berlin Wall forced the realization that the United States could not be relied upon, in the event, to protect European interests. As the Allies read the situation, the choice was between the hard-line stance against the Warsaw Pact nations urged by de Gaulle and Adenauer, and an Ostpolitik as it was eventually formulated by Egon Bahr and Willy Brandt. Codevilla wryly observes: "It is important to remember just how hard the United States fought to dissuade the Europeans from supporting the de Gaulle-Adenauer conception, and how much it did to foster that of . . . Bahr and . . . Brandt." Under Kennedy and Johnson, there was "bridge-building"; under Nixon, "detente." The result was that Western politicians were no longer certain if their enemies were really enemies any more, or merely potential partners in a peace into which they could be bribed. It was in this climate that the passion for "arms control" arose. The further result of all this is now obvious: militarily and diplomatically, NATO is in the most utter disarray, scarcely more than the proverbial paper tiger; while the specter of a pax Sovietica in Western Europe takes on increasingly the lineaments of a future reality.

While Codevilla agrees that the reversal of these possibly calamitous policies would require, for starters, admitting that the West's most respected leaders have for thirty years served their countries badly, he urges that the Alliance strive for such a reversal anyway. "The development of effective ground-based anti-missile defenses in Europe would accomplish what the INF Treaty purports to have accomplished but does not-namely, the removal, in large part, of the Damocles' Sword of Soviet ballistic missiles, which hangs over Europe's already outmatched ground forces." The Pershing II should be redeployed-this time by the Europeans themselves, and in numbers "at least equal" to those thousands of Soviet missiles capable of striking Europe. And, last but not least: "Europe needs a strong United States . . . possess[ing] a good antimissile defense which would have both the incentive and the credibility which it needs to play an effective deterrent role in safeguarding the peace of Europe." Reagan's shortsightedness in 1987 has made his farsightedness in respect of SDI invaluable.