TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032690/0326004.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.5 KB | 77 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 47

AMERICA ABROAD

NATO uber Alles


By Strobe Talbott


    Ever since the breach of the Berlin Wall last November, the
world has been pondering a new version of an old question: Can
the interests of all Europeans be reconciled with the desire
of 78 million Germans to live within a single state? This
week's elections in East Germany are a reminder that the
Germans will decide on their own when to unify. But the rest
of the world still has a say in how unification affects NATO,
European integration and Soviet reform. George Bush's position
is simple and bold. He wants to keep NATO in Europe, a unified
Germany in NATO, U.S. troops in Germany, a reformer in the
Kremlin and a conservative in the German chancellorship.

    By what he does and says in the months to come, Bush hopes
to help Mikhail Gorbachev fend off the charge that he "lost
Germany." At the same time, the U.S. President is doing
everything he can to bolster Helmut Kohl for the West German
elections in December. Kohl's coalition is committed to staying
in NATO. Some of his Social Democratic opponents have talked
about saying thanks and goodbye to foreign troops and perhaps
even embracing neutrality. The Bush Administration believes a
NATO without Germany would quickly lead to a Europe without
NATO, and then . . . well, anything could happen.

    Like what? A neo-Stalinist backlash in the U.S.S.R. restarts
the cold war and threatens a hot one? Or a secessionist warlord
in Belorussia grabs some nuclear weapons from Soviet stockpiles
and brandishes them? Or Hungary presses revanchist claims to
Transylvania? Astonishing developments might not always be as
welcome as they were last year. The Administration's warning
is deliberately vague. It invites listeners to fill in the
blank with their own worst fears. The American manifesto for
the '90s is that a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of

that Bush used, standing beside Kohl at Camp David last month,
to identify the enemy that has taken the place of Soviet
expansionism.

    Bush and his top aides have been telling virtually every
Central European visitor to Washington -- German, Pole, Czech
-- that NATO should remain intact and G.I.s should stay in West
Germany, so that the postwar order does not give way to
post-postwar disorder. Bush has been making essentially the
same case to Gorbachev in their correspondence and telephone
conversations, and he will do so in person at their summit in
the U.S. this June.

    Gorbachev and his comrades may yet buy the argument. But if
they do, it will be because for them unpredictability is a code
word for the dangers they see in a larger Germany with a larger
role in the economic and political life of Europe, perhaps
eventually with its own nuclear arsenal. The same anxiety
motivates Czechoslovakia's playwright-President Vaclav Havel,
Poland's Solidarity Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and many
politicians in Western Europe. If they accept Bush's idea of
NATO uber alles, it will be as a hedge against the resurgence
of a malevolent Deutschland. But will the government and
citizens of a unified Germany accept that idea? Will they want
to be forever, or even for long, members of an alliance whose
purpose, unstated but unmistakable, is not to protect them
from others but to protect others from them? If that is the
German Question for the '90s, there is reason to wonder what
the eventual German answer will be.