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Treacherous Signposts for the Alliance
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15268 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1989 |
3,167 Words |
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Franz M. Oppenheimer
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If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?
--Psalms 11:3
About a year and half ago I fell into conversation with a well-dressed, personable German in his 20s during a German-American ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House. As we waited for President Reagan to take off in his helicopter, the young man told me in excellent English that he was working in the Washington "governmental relations" office of a giant German corporation. His amiability went only when our talk turned to international relations. "Nobody can deny," the young German said, "that all initiatives for disarmament have come from Gorbachev and none from Reagan." When I replied that in fact the elimination of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe had first been proposed by President Reagan back in 1981, but was rejected out of hand by the Soviets, the young man told me that I was wrong; and when I volunteered to accompany him to the nearest library so we could check who was right, the young man turned his back on me abruptly and, without a further word, walked away.
In sad truth, his outlook of Germany's unconquered past represents that of the majority of his generation; indeed, that of about half of all Germans in the Federal Republic. The percentages recorded in public opinion polls may well mirror reality less than perfectly; but when different polls taken by different polling institutes at different times confirm the same orders of magnitude, we can ignore those polls only at our peril. And they do in fact mirror the views of the young German in the Rose Garden. Reading more or less at random in Soviet and American Policy in the Opinion of Germans in the Federal Republic, a 106-page study prepared in September 1988 for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the West German magazine Stern, we find that 84 percent of those polled had a favorable opinion of Gorbachev, but only 53 percent of Reagan. Of the 25- to 34-year-olds, 88 percent had a favorable opinion of Gorbachev, 34 percent of Reagan; and among those supposedly best educated, having completed at least the equivalent of junior college (Abitur), 92 percent of those polled in the study had a favorable opinion of Gorbachev and 35 percent of Reagan. Sixty-five percent of the same group and 66 percent of the 25- to 34-year-olds had an unfavorable opinion of Reagan. Thirty-seven percent would welcome the withdrawal of American troops from Europe, 38 percent would regret it--in 1984, only 17 percent would have welcomed a withdrawal, 22 percent in 1986--the trend is unmistakable. When it comes to confidence in the qualities of leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States does a little better--34 percent, as against 25 percent; yet more than half of those questioned have no confidence in either. Fifty-one percent have a favorable opinion of Soviet policy; 29 percent of U.S. policy; 59 percent believe that the Federal Republic is not militarily threatened by the Soviet Union.
The most benign interpretation one can give such polls is that a majority of Germans believe in the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. Among the 25- to, say, 45-year-olds, anti-Americanism is fashionable and often virulent, while the Soviet Union is looked upon as more sinned against than sinning.
Given that state of German public opinion, the apparent concentration of American policy-makers
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