Concern about the future of the Atlantic alliance is hardly new. Since the early 1950s, opinions have been predicting its eventual, even imminent, demise. The questions raised at its 10th anniversary, at the end of the 1950s--in retrospect, its first and most successful decade--reveal that hardly a year has passed when its future has not been questioned.
If our fears today, on NATO's 40th anniversary, tend to be expressed more forcefully, it is perhaps because the alliance seems to be nearing a mid-life crisis. Confronted with the prospect of the most presentable Soviet leader the public can recall, an era seems to be passing and another beginning in which the alliance may be left leaderless and adrift in a changing world. As Soviet spokesman Georgy Arbatov commented last year, "to be deprived of an enemy" is, for any alliance, possibly the cruelest fate of all.
To be deprived of political leadership is more serious still. It is particularly serious because the "successor generation" in Europe lacks the sense of purpose and certainty that sustained Europe's leaders even during NATO's worst crises, such as the decision by France to withdraw from its integrated military command in 1966 and the battle that had to be fought to modernize theater nuclear weapons in 1983. As Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out in an interview some years ago, the older generation of NATO could afford to be so Atlanticist because it was "politically Americanized while culturally non-Americanized." Today's generation "tends to be culturally more Americanized, but politically more de-Americanized than before."
A generation is a difficult entity to describe. What made Konard Adenauer and Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Mendes-France and Francois Mitterrand, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher members of the same generation was a consciousness of having shared a unique historical experience, an experience that separated them from those who had not. Those who lived through the height of the Cold War in the 1950s shared two significant experiences, not one: a threat from the Soviet Union that appeared very real; and the economic support given by the United States, most prominently, but not exclusively, in the form of Marshall Plan aid.
An Equal Threat
Unfortunately, faith in the United States has diminished considerably since then. In Britain, Gallup polls show one in three citizens believe that both superpowers are an equal threat to world peace, while one in five believe the United States to be a greater threat still. The majority of the members of Parliament did not fight in World War II; those on the left of the Labor Party spent their adolescence protesting America's involvement in the war in Vietnam.
In Germany, there are today many political figures who think American policy is dangerous, moralists who think it immoral, radicals who think it "imperialistic," and economists who do not believe that Europe should be too closely tied to the U.S. economy.
The deployment of cruise missiles marked a historical watershed between the two generations. The older generation's language did not remove the doubts of the younger; it reinforced them. Its rhetoric was too self-conscious and unnecessarily contrived. At times, the only note it struck was a false
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