Posted on December 4th 1987
Removal of Pershings Threatens NATO Cohesion
By Alex Linder
[ The following is from a forum thread posting. ]
[opinion published in Pomona College's The Student Life, Friday, December 4, 1987]
Removal of Pershings Threatens NATO Cohesion
By Alex Linder
A couple weeks ago, ex-head NATO commander Bernard Rogers spoke on disarmament and the balance of power. He talked about why he is against the INF treaty as now constituted.
One of Rogers' points that merits thought concerns the free and voluntary association that is NATO. The constituents joined of their own accord. They can withdraw if they so choose.
The Pershing II missiles that will be removed under the INF treaty (assuming, as does Rogers, that the treaty will be signed and ratified) were placed in Europe only after a long, concerted effort. We can all remember the freeze effort and the heated demonstrations of the early eighties.
Regardless of whether the INF treaty is "good" for the U.S., it ought to be clear that there is an inherent danger in removing the missiles. The Soviets are free to move their missiles around at will. If they were to decide to redeploy their missiles and break the treaty (as they broke the ABM treaty) they could do so with scarcely a murmur from the strictly controlled publics of the Warsaw Pact nations.
But it's not so in the West. To those of us here in America this might not seem particularly salient. After all, one might think, it might take us a bit longer to redeploy, but there wouldn't be any major problems. As an American who is reasonably familiar with European thinking (West Germany in particular), I disagree. There are several reasons why the removal of our Pershing IIs might be dangerous. They spring from the current social and political culture of West Germany, the key European member of NATO.
First, it is difficult for the average American to realize the extent to which West Germany is militarized. When a German gets up in the morning he can be sure that sometime durign the day he's going to hear the scream of the fighter planes racing down the valley. When he walks by the train tracks, chances are good that he'll see tanks and other military equipment being shipped to various installations. Finally, when he goes to a Kneipe (bar) at night, it's likely he'll run into a bunch of rambunctious American G.I.s.
West Germany is also highly politicized. Unlike America, the grafitti in Europe is almost exclusively political. From "Ami raus" to anti-nukes to Marxist themes, the grafitti makes it clear that West Germany is a country on the edge -- ostensibly stable, but with a definite underlying Angst.
Germany has essentially no history of democracy. Before WWII it had an ill-fated Weimar government, but Hitler marked the return to the traditional authoritarianism. And (although this is certainly debatable) the same spirit exists today.
In one class I had there was an interesting poster. On the poster was a quotation from Harry Truman to the effect that there is one thing Americans prize above all else: freedom. There was no further commentary. This quotation was meant to stand alone as an indictment of America. It takes a while for an American abroad to realize that to Germans, America is the conqueror. They never wanted freedom; we simply forced it on them. And, certainly, forty years later, the roots of freedom have grown into the soil of the populace. Nevertheless, one may be excused for wondering just how much it would take to deracinate them.
Dominating the campus at many German universities are various left-wing, extremist and Marxist groups. Jean Francois Revel once wrote that "democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles," and it is indeed sobering, not to say frightening, to see these groups almost literally wallpaper the towns with their political posters and flood them with their "newspapers" and propaganda, knowing that the instant they were ever able to take power they would crush freedom of expression which along with their money from Moscow is the primary reason they exist. In other words, there is a strong anti-democratic, leftist element in West Germany, the depth of whose commitment is not to be underestimated.
The implications for the INF treaty are clear. West Germany is looking for strong leadership from America. As Hitler said, (if I recall correctly), the masses, like a woman, prefer a dominator to a suppliant. If America displays strong leadership, as it has under Reagan, Europe will follow. They'll whine, but they'll follow. But if we yank out the Pershing IIs, the weapons the Soviets find most threatening (according to Rogers), without concomitant reductions in Soviet conventional forces, we're playing a very dangerous game. Let's hope President Reagan is able to recognize this at the summit.//