Alliance in danger
It is fortunate that Mr Heath should be the first European prime minister to visit Washington and discuss world affairs with President Nixon since the Inauguration and the ending of the American military involvement in Vietnam. President Nixon, in his second term, does not have to bother about the politics of getting himself re-elected. Instead,'he will be looking towards the establishment of his historic reputation. He is a man who has always inclined to
foreign rather than to domestic affairs, and his decision to create "a new federalism" with his Revenue Sharing Act, which effectively transfers the administration and the responsibility of welfare from Washington to the states of the union, clears his plate of what he would regard as the mess left on it by President Johnson's programme for a Great Society. There is reason to suppose that President Nixon will see his last term of office as the time during which to settle for a prolonged, indefinite period, the United States' continental arrangements with Europe and Asia. In particular, he will be seeking: the stabilisation of SovietAmerican relations based upon the realisation of each other's power and not upon the dramatisation of their ideological differences; the creation of a new relationship, at arm's length, with China and with South-East Asia, following his formal recognition that the United States has failed to impose its will through military means upon Vietnam; the ordering and pacification of the Middle East so that oil supplies will not be endangered by Arab-Israeli warfare or by an excessively pro-Israeli policy in Washington; a European Security Confei.ence and the formalisation of a peace-treaty with Germany; and a new system of more liberal trading arrangements between the rich countries of the world, based in part upon the stability of the dollar. This is an ambitious programme, and if President Nixon succeeds in substantially fulfilling it, his historic reputation will be secure. The programme demands for its success, however, that it be securely and firmly grounded upon the rock which has never looked more like crumbling than it does today, and which we call the Atlantic Alliance.
If the Prime Minister, during his Washington visit, works with the President to cement that crumbling rock, to make more solid that ground upon which any successful western diplomacy must be based, then Mr Heath and Mr Nixon will have worked well. Time, and not communiques, will tell. Their task is not at all easy, for there are two very real threats posed to the Atlantic Alliance by the enlarged European Economic COthmunity. The United States has hitherto supported British accession to the Treaty of Rome, partly because it is disposed to unions of states, partly because it has assumed that a British presence within Europe would tend to 'work to America's advantage, and partly because it has believed that a strong and united Europe would make a more effective bulwark against Soviet expansion than do the present NATO arrangements. Now, there are indications that men in Washington are having second thoughts and are reconsidering their earlier approbatory and optimistic interpretation of the European development. The first threat to the Atlantic Alliance flows from the most ignoble, but possibly most powerful, of the emotions that brought about the initial and now the enlarged EEC. This is the deep, chauvinist anti Americanism that exists in France, to a less extent in the United Kingdom, and which also breaks out from time to time in the rest of Europe. There is no doubt that many European propagandists and statemen see in the EEC an opportunity to break loose from the domination by the United States of their own particular nation-state. The French are most explicit; but Mr Heath, when talking with the French, has seemed to endorse their attitude. The notion that a united Europe could become a third force, able to treat equally with the Soviet Union and the United States, is fundamentally anti-American. The Prime Minister, in this Washington trip, almost certainly sees himself as a European emissary, seeking to secure for Britain pre-eminence in treating on behalf of Europe, and seeking at the same time for Europe some kind of equality of status in treating with America. There is no immediate danger in such understandable vanities. Nevertheless, there is a cloud no bigger than a man's hand now clearly visible above the horizon, and it could become very great and very black indeed. Should Europe start to consider itself as an equal, it may well start behaving as a rival, and in that event in no time at all Europe and America could find themselves opposed not merely on details of policy but on fundamental issues. The second threat is associated with the first, but is more imminent. It was described, with commendable force, by Herr Helmut Schmidt, the West German Finance Minister, in an important interview published last week in the Times in which he said," It must be clearly pointed out that Europe, due to its preference systems or other special trade regulations, cannot afford to allow itself to get involved in a trade war with the United States." This needed saying. If the EEC, with its expressed desire for monetary union and its Common External Tariff and Common Agricultural Policy directed against the outside world, agrees upon trade and monetary policies hostile to the United States, and thereby provoking trade war, the western world will be heading straight for a disaster, entirely avoidable and entirely of its own making.
The Atlantic Alliance is far, far more important than the European policy, and opponents as well as supporters of that policy ought to be able to agree on this. If the policies of the United States or of the EEC threaten the Alliance, those policies will have to change or the EEC will have to go. It is to be hoped that the British Prime Minister is able to re-assure the American President on this score, and that, come what may, the special relationship between this country and the United States is preserved, in order to resist a Trench-dominated Common Market from turning its back on the Atlantic ocean and thereby destroying the Atlantic Alliance.
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