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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, FEBRUARY 3, 1984
PAGE 9
told the assembled delegates that Europeans could no longer count on the
United States to guarantee their security.
NATO's strategic security
philosophy, he said, was based on an out-of-date American nuclear doctrine
--to which he had contributed while in office--and which was no longer
valid because of growing Soviet power.
The bedrock of NATO's collective security, of course, has been based on the
premise that the United States would treat an attack on Europe as an attack
on the United States. However, in 1962 Charles de Gaulle showed his doubts
concerning this premise. He decided the U.S. would never risk losing New
York to save Paris and that France would go its own way in defense. The
other allies, especially West Germany, which was proscribed from acquiring
nuclear weapons, continued to ask the United States for reassurance on that
point and received it.
At that 1979 meeting, Kissinger urged a rapid overhaul of U.S. doctrine,
substituting a "counter-force" strategy that would concentrate on strategic
Soviet military targets. At the same time, there should be development of a
new system of "Eurostrategic" nuclear weapons in Western Europe, which
would be integrated into such a strategy. These would counterbalance the
monstrous SS-20s the Soviets had begun to target on major European cities.
This is what led to then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt calling for the new
"Euromissiles" ( the Pershing !Is and cruise), which policy was adopted
unanimously by NATO in December, 1979.
Former Chancellor Schmidt was also highly eritical of what he felt--and
still feels, as he showed in the latest Brussels meeting--was the unpre
dictable nature of U.s. foreign policy.
While he was particularly out
spoken then about the weaknesses and indecisiveness of the Carter Admin
istration, Mr. Schmidt hardly seems more satisfied today with the far more
resolute Reagan policy.
On the way home from Stockholm, I had the opportunity to speak with Mr.
Johan J0rgen Holst, the director of the Norsk Utenrikspolitisk Institutt-
The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Mr. Holst, too, had been
to the January Brussels get-together. He boiled European criticisms of the
United States down to one specific point. There are, he said, "doubts about
the American
system
which tends to work against professionalism."
By
this
he referred to the fact that since 1960, the United States has had "a string
of one-term presidencies."
This has often produced "erratic policies"
because of the changeover in administrations every four years, or less.
And in the U.S. "you change administrations, not just governments," meaning
that the changes are felt down deep into, say, the State Department,
producing more fundamental shifts in foreign policy than in Britain, in
which the functioning of the Foreign Service seems to go forward less
hampered by governmental changeovers.
In Oslo I happened to pick up the January 21, 1984 issue of THE ECONOMIST.
Its cover article was entitled, "The Useless European.
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The editors of
Britain's leading weekly magazine set about the task of explaining to Euro
peans "why a lot of people in America do not understand Europe's way of
looking at the world" (see cover picture next page). Here are key excerpts
(beginning with a brief summation of recent erratic U.S. foreign policy):
The pendulum, set swinging by Vietnam, first lurched into Mr.
Jimmy Carter's implausible nonchalance (his "inordinate fear of