The big message emanating from NATO's gala 40th birthday jamboree was: Changing times demand changing policies on our part.
The callow Bush administration team--with many holes in its lineup due to torturous delays in getting top appointees into office--did remarkably well. President Bush arrived in Brussels looking languid, yet left looking liberated. He had freed himself from his foreign-policy review swamp, which had become the means to snuff out rather than spark ideas. Indeed, bureaucrats can talk any new idea to death.
Shortly before Brussels, the president became fed up with the shapeless policy pudding. He then ordered a bolder approach to conventional arms control, which he unveiled dramatically at NATO headquarters. Sure, some allied leaders grumbled--the French about nuclear-capable aircraft, the British about the lack of sufficient consultation--but all were delighted to have something, at least, to grumble about.
They were delighted that the Bush administration, at long last, was doing something on Western security matters and vis-à-vis Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That was Brussels' best news: After waxing the hood, checking the oil, and tuning the engine, Bush was finally starting the motor.
The issue of differing U.S., West German, and British positions over the future of short-range nuclear weapons was laid to rest at Brussels. No one would admit it, but it was virtually resolved. We and the British had wanted modernization but no negotiations; the Germans and Russians had wanted negotiations but no modernization; the outcome will be neither modernization. (This was a mismanaged issue, if ever there was one. It finally became smoothed over in the summit communiqué, where obscurity commonly triumphs over profundity.)
The upshot was nearly inevitable. The only country that could conduct such negotiations, the United States, didn't want them. And the only country that could deploy such modernized systems, West Germany, didn't want them. So neither will have either.
The controversy arose largely because West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl found himself in a political free-fall, which led him to speedily embrace the policies of his coalition opponent, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Besides, German sentiment stood all but unanimously against further nuclear deployments on their territory. They did not want Germany bearing the burden of being the only possible nuclear battlefield in Europe.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration squared off with the right policy but the wrong framing of the issue. This is important since the way an issue is framed often determines how it is resolved.
The administration allowed Germany to pose the choice as one between negotiations and no negotiations; in such a case, negotiations win hands down. Instead, the United States should have posed the choice as between reductions and no reductions, where nuclear reductions would win in a cake-walk.
In Germany we could reduce our nuclear arms by more than 1,000, if only the Germans would agree to modernize 100 or
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