Cowboy or missionary?

Timothy Garton Ash

'It is a noble land that God has given us; a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would inclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe, a greater England with a noble destiny . . . We cannot retreat from any soil where Providence has unfurled our banner; it is ours to save that soil for liberty and civilisation.'

Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, 'The March of the Flag', 1898.

Why are 375,000 United States servicemen still stationed in Western Europe 36 years after the end of World War II?

'During the Russian Revolution,' a former US Minister in Berlin obliquely replies, 'a sentry was found patrolling a remote and empty courtyard in the Winter Palace. The sentry had no idea why he was there. His superiors knew even less. There was nothing of value in the vicinity. The courtyard led nowhere. Eventually it was discovered that a little princess, long since grown up, had once played in this courtyard, and the guard had been placed for her protection.' The American forces in Western Europe, he implies, are like that sentry. They're here because they're here because they're here because they're here. It is startling how often one receives similar answers to the question. Inertia is, after all, not a very cogent reason for staying.

'Principle' is the next most frequent answer. The Americans are here to defend those common values for which we fought two world wars. The thinking of policy makers is still imbricated with the sense of an American Mission, even after the trauma of Vietnam. Indeed we have seen over the last five years something approaching a Moral Rearmament of the country's public language among Democrats and Republicans alike — rather as both Conservatives and Liberals reasserted the Historic Mission of the British Empire after the humiliating shlammassel of the Boer War. Jimmy Carter came to West Berlin in 1978 and declared it, with true biblical fervour, 'a city built on a hill'. His audience looked puzzled. The only hill in sight was the grassed over remains of Hitler's bunker. It is very flat, Berlin. Now Ronald Reagan in his turn talks of America like a city on a hill. In many ways the Reaganauts hark back to the old moral certainties of General Eisenhower, who entitled his account of World War II: Crusade in Europe. Yet, as Henry Kissinger found to his cost, it is hard to sell to the American people any policy which is not at least dressed up in a T-shirt of high principle.

Apart from principle, however, what vital American interests are served by their massive presence in Western Europe? Well, one is told, there are business interests to be protected. Further, if Western Europe were to become 'Finlandised' — or worse — then the United States would lose its 'critical advantage' over the Soviet Union, since European technology would be used to plug the gaping holes in the Soviet economy. The 'military balance' could swing decisively against the United States. And anyway the United States would inevitably be drawn back into an imperilled Europe eventually, as they have been twice already this century, so they might as well just stay here.

Now this, in crude summary, is probably a fair assessment of the United States' longterm vital national interest in the defence of Western Europe. But this does not mean that it will necessarily always look that way from Capitol Hill, let alone from the Midwest or California. The fact is that the nuclear disarmament demonstrations in the capitals of Western Europe have already provoked a powerful gut reaction in America. Elementary distinctions, such as that between anti-Americanism and neutralism, are just not made. Take a column on the influential 'op. ed.' page of the Washington Post for example. Here Mr Emmett Tyre11 of the American Spectator portrays Western Europe as feverish with the disease of anti-Americanism.

Tyre11's last paragraph is worth quoting as a sample of American reactions: 'Already ,' he writes, 'there is talk in America of letting the Europeans go it alone. One hears it among politicians, and one hears it from the heartland. As William Satire made manifest in a column last week, even cosmopolitan Americans are growing impatient with European perversity. Some are beginning to think Sen. Mike Mansfield was right: perhaps we have invested too much in Europe.'

My own impressions tend to reinforce that assessment. 'I don't see why we should go on paying out billions of dollars for their defence if they are going to turn round and spit in our faces', remarks a liberal and sophisticated editor. An important neoconservative intellectual, evanescent with the recent convert's zeal, fumes at 'treacherous' West Europeans. She casually describes the West Germans as 'traitors' to the Western Alliance. She seems to regard them almost as many Soviets must regard the Poles. Why, they have the unutterable impudence to interfere in their own internal affairs! They should snap back into line (wherever or whatever the line may be), or else . . . The implied threat is real. Isolationism has arguably as strong a potential appeal to the great American public as does the rhetoric of the world historical mission.

Is any of this translated into policy? 'What policy?' you may ask. Very often one hears it said that 'America hasn't got a foreign policy'. In truth the way foreign policy is made in Washington seems exotic to an European eye. It is rather like Washington itself. As you drive down the tree-lined avenues of stately mansions you suddenly pass a row of wooden-built tumbledown shops which look, at first glance, like the set for a Fifties Western. The city is half Paris, half Wild West frontier town. So it is with policy-making. Half the time you are listening to exceedingly sophisticated expositions of exceedingly subtle arguments of the kind which flourish in the refined, artificial atmosphere of administrative capitals, like hothouse plants. The other half you are watching a cowboys' shoot-out in which the part of the saloonbar is taken by the Washington Post and the weapons are leaks to its columnists. Yet when the dust has settled and 'Al' and 'Cap' and 'Dick' have shot their mouths off you find that not a great deal of substance has changed.

The White House is very firmly in charge of the actual conduct of policy. The smoke signals thrown up by the bosses of the State and Defence Departments and the National Security Council in their jockeying for position may mightily alarm manY Europeans. But in a sense they are smoke without fire. For Ronald Reagan, far from being the gung-ho, trigger-happy cowboy as which he is weekly portrayed in magazines like Der Spiegel, seems in fact not to be terribly interested in making a dramatic impact on world affairs. He is primarily interested in being a successful domestic president, which means engineering economic recovery. It is to this goal that the greater part of his time, and that of the White House triumvirs, Meese, Baker, and Deaver, has been devoted over the last nine months. As they are not succeeding in the way which the high priests of supply-side economics prophesied, as indeed America seems to be slipping into a deep recession, they will spend more rather than less of their energy on domestic problems.

Churchill once remarked of Neville Chamberlain that he looked at world affairs through the wrong end of a municipal draul pipe. One might say that Reagan and Meese look at world affairs through the wrong end of a Californian ballot-box. Reagan's formative political experience was fighting American communists in the Hollywood actors' union in the late Forties and early Fifties. Insofar as they have a world view it is probably closest to that peddled by the neo-conservatives. In this Manichean vieW there are essentially only two adversaries o.n the world stage: the forces of Evil, that is the Soviet Union, and the forces of Good, that is the United States.

The Soviet Union, at once monolithic and conspiratorial, is seen behind almost every rent in the fabric of American power over the the last decade. Even the Wall Street Journal did not hesitate to write in a leading article of the 'Soviet-Cuban conquest of Central America'.

The gentlemen of the State Department, although they realise that the world is a rather more complicated place than these terribles simplificateurs imagine (and than it actually was thirty years ago), nonetheless manage to present a more differentiated version of the Reagan 'posture', with only the faintest of blushes. In this presentation the Soviet Union is a flawed great power which is really good at one thing only: making weapons. Over the last decade it has taken advantage of its increasing military superiority, and 'American weakness' (read: Kissinger's 'discredited' detente and linkage policies) to expand its informal and even its formal empire. The roll of indict ment reads: Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Central America. The venerable Senator Jackson once compared the Soviet Union to a hotel burglar. The burglar walks down the corridor trying every door. When the door is securely locked he moves on; when it is open he moves in. This striking picture is much in favour in Washington at the moment. So is the argument, recently endorsed by Mr Weinberger, that Soviet leaders may increasingly feel expansion abroad to be necessary for the survival of their system at home.

How can it best be combatted? There is general agreement within the administration that the United States must dramatically increase its armaments. Hence the neutron warheads decision. Hence the decision to deploy the MX missiles, previously lauded to the skies for their mobility, in (very stationary) silos. That is about all on which there is general agreement. Whether these MX missiles are primarily intended as a mega bargaining counter in the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (in which case it might even not be necessary to deploy them) or as an alternative to them — on this one still hears widely differing views from Within the administration. And there is even less agreement on how best to close the Other hotel doors. The foreign policy of the Reagan administration is often described as 'incoherent'. It might be more precisely described as inchoate.

Yet what is clear is the administration's Order of priorities. It is salutary for a European to find how far down the list Europe comes: miles below the domestic economy, and, in foreign policy, below Central America and the Middle East for a start. TNF (Theatre Nuclear Forces) and the West European peace movements are thus far still a sideshow. The Americans feel that they certainly did not force the Cruise and Pershing II missiles on us. Indeed it was Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who asked for the bloody things in the first place (in a Speech in London in 1977). One of our own most distinguished military historians would argue that the road to the NATO 'double track' decision of December 1979 was a Comedy of Transatlantic Misperceptions, rather as the run-up to the MLF (Multi-Lateral Force) was in the early 1960's. The object, then as now, was to strengthen the Western Alliance. Thel-esult has been to weaken it. It is because President Reagan did not attach great political significance to these questions(if he had, one can be sure that his highly effective White House machine would have prepared an excellent brief, and he would have mastered it), and because Mr Haig succumbed to the saloon-bar side of Washington politics, while anyway inclining to approach every question with an open mouth, that the two of them said the shocking things they did about the possibility of nuclear war in Europe — to whit (pardon me) the truth.

Now I neither pretend nor have the faintest desire to be well versed in the horrid amoral theology of Nuclear Strategy. But I am sure that the most important questions, both moral and political, cannot be answered within its terms of reference. Take one of the questions central to the TNF debate for example: 'is a limited nuclear war in Europe possible?' Herr Rudolf Augstein of Der Spiegel, and much of the West German peace movement with him, is convinced that it is — and that the deployment of the Cruise and Pershing missiles would make it more likely. Indeed they appear to think that this is President Reagan's intention (although the NATO double-track decision was actually taken under President Carter). They are visibly moved when the peace-loving Leonid Brezhnev (himself visibly moved), in an artfully concocted interview for Der Spiegel, declares such a limited nuclear war to be unthinkable. People who appear to be thinking the unthinkable in a couple of .muddled phrases in live interviews (Brezhnev gave only written answers) are of course self-evidently far more dangerous, indeed 'warmongering', than people who order their troops to invade a neighbouring country. Did Herr Augstein ask Mr Brezhnev about Afghanistan? No, explains Augstein, he did not — to ask Mr Brezhnev why his troops invaded Afghanistan would be like asking the Pope if he still believes in the virgin birth.

President Reagan has a written answer on this score too: . . . we regard any military threat to Europe as a threat to the United States itself,' he declared in an official White House statement designed to salvage his verbal 'gaffe'. 'Three hundred seventy-five thousand United States servicemen provide the living guarantee of this unshakeable United States commitment to the peace and security of Europe'. (Note that 'Europe' in the official parlance of the West has come to mean exclusively Western Europe. What about a military threat to Poland?) Now if this commitment really is so unconditional then a limited nuclear war is indeed impossible — in which case it is hard to see the point of the TNF modernisation. If they remain American missiles, and if the United States is prepared to fire its missiles at Soviet territory in the defence of Western Europe, then they might as well be based on submarines or in Putney, Ohio, for all the difference their location would make to the final outcome.

That is not what the President said. In fact nothing that he or Mr Haig said was anything more than a clumsy restatement of the American inspired NATO policy of 'flexible response'. And so far as the layman can understand, the policy of 'flexible response' means, precisely, that in the event of Soviet aggression, NATO would attempt to limit the scale of the conflict, and Europe would be the first battlefield. However, since the Soviets have a clear superiority in conventional and, which is worse, in chemical, weaponry we would be forced into the position of being the first to use nuclear weapons.

Now would the Americans necessarily, unconditionally, push the button knowing that the Soviet leadership have said all along, with unbending consistency, that they regard the launching of a single missile by NATO against Soviet territory as a declaration of war by the United States? Why should they, when it comes to the crunch, court self-destruction for the sake of our freedom? And can one not conceive of other paths to creeping Soviet domination which the United States would be even less ready or able to resist?

At the moment, then, the buck stops here. West European nations have several alternatives. One is unilateral disarmament. There is a chance that eventually even the Soviet Union would follow suit. On present form, that chance is as large as a snowball's in hell. If the Russians don't follow suit, unilateral disarmers must accept the overwhelming probability of a Soviet domination of Western Europe which might be far more offensive than mere Finlandisation. And then, would a Soviet-dominated Western Europe increase or decrease the chances of a nuclear conflict with the United States?

Fundamentalist unilateralist disarmers are honest enough to concede both these points while still maintaining that these weapons are so terrible that we should not in any circumstances even contemplate using them ourselves. Their position is at least consistent and morally clear. It should be respected. Those Americans who denounce them as 'traitors' are behaving like Soviets. What does the United States stand for if not for freedom of speech, the right to demonstrate, and national self-determination? One of the most heartening sights in Washington is the daily display of private protest placards before the railings of the White House. Two of them begin with a quotation from Lincoln: 'To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men'.

Alternatively, we can work towards the most credible possible deterrent. Arguably the deterrent would be more credible if Western Europe set up its own conventional forces. Arguably the nuclear deterrent would be more credible if there was a greater measure of independent European control (we would be more likely to push the button to protect ourselves). The opinion poll published in last week's Observer suggests that this is the alternative many British electors prefer. It is certainly what the French prefer. And I wonder if the massive West German protest is not as much about sovereignty (i.e. the West German lack of it) as about peace. Certainly most West European governments are more immediately concerned than the Reagan administration about arms control. But their pressure, combined with tightening domestic constraints, may bring the United States round to a common position sooner rather than later. It is a difference of priorities not of principles.

Either way, it is not enough simply to pass the buck to Al, Cap, Dick and Co. The little princess of the Winter Palace grew up and went away (she is probably still living in Geneva). West Germany has grown up and is still there. West Germany, above all, must decide if it still wants the American sentry. Or if it wants its own sentry, or if it wants no sentries at all.