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Working With the New Europe
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17403 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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1 / 1990 |
2,157 Words |
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Robert F. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.
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Central to U.S. foreign policy has been the premise that subjugation of Europe by one state, or by a combination of hostile powers, would form an unacceptable threat to national security. Global security interests have called for sustained American policies designed to prevent the regions extending from Europe to Northeast Asia from the hegemony of a dominant power. In this century, the United States became the holder of a European balance that the states of Europe could not restore or maintain alone. By U.S. actions in two world wars, in which we expended vast resources to assure such an outcome, the United States demonstrated an abiding, if not always explicitly stated, commitment to such an order of affairs in Europe as well as the Asian-Pacific area. In the years following World War II, the United States provided, in the Marshall Plan, an essential basis for the creation of a strong European counterpoise to Soviet hegemony. The success of such endeavors resulted in emergence of the independent, prosperous, peaceful, and increasingly unified Western Europe embodied in the European Community (EC) and the Atlantic Alliance.
At the threshold of the 1990s, there can be little doubt that this framework represents for the United States and its transatlantic allies a remarkable achievement of major historical proportions. It is equally apparent that we are entering an uncertain period. In such circumstances we are unsure how to provide the essential guidelines for forming a framework that will adequately meet our future policy needs. Our interests are easily definable: To maintain an independent political-military equilibrium in Europe and to encourage the development of voluntary associations such as the EC, providing as fully as possible for political freedom, prosperity, and economic growth. Since its formation, NATO has furnished the guaranteed security framework within which our transatlantic allies have been able to achieve unprecedented levels of growth and prosperity. Hence, both the EC and the Atlantic Alliance represented organizational frameworks in keeping with the basic security interests of the United States.
The political-military and economic arrangements developed by the United States and its allies in the years following World War II were defined by the East-West political division of Europe imposed by the war's out-come. The territories that Soviet armies occupied came under Moscow's domination. As Stalin himself stated, "Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach." However appropriate a descriptive of the years following World War II, present trends belie Stalin's assertion as political pressures burst forth, dismantling the hated communist systems in Eastern Europe. Clearly the era now unfolding features change in East European states that in retrospect can be seen as the fulfillment of the objectives inherent in the Western strategy of containment: to deny the Soviet Union the opportunity to expand politically or militarily its influence into Western Europe. This, in turn, compels Moscow to confront the dilemmas and contradictions of its own communist system as well as those socialist regimes imposed on Eastern Europe.
As we enter this new decade, we have before us abundant and mounting evidence of the political and economic bankruptcy of communism, a situation that has led Mikhail Gorbachev not only to proclaim glasnost and perestroika as imperatives for the survival of the Soviet Union but also to press such reforms upon the Eastern
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