Between Two Chairs

When West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer rose to address a Catholic congress in Brussels last week, his audience expected to hear nothing more than an innocuous tribute to the ideal of European unity. What it got was something stronger. Said Adenauer: "In the long run, the European countries cannot fully develop their great energies ... if they continue to find their salvation and security exclusively through the patronage of the United States . . . What are vital necessities for the European countries do not always have to be vital necessities for the U.S., and vice versa; from this fact may result differences of political opinion which may lead to independent political action."

In Washington, Adenauer's speech caused scarcely a ripple. As U.S. official dom saw it, the Chancellor had simply restated some harmless truisms about U.S.-European relations. Some European diplomats, however, were bewildered by the speech, felt that Adenauer was altering his own stout stand against a foreign policy of neutralism, a policy he had so long disdained with the comment: "One cannot sit between two chairs."

Change in Emphasis. In the last three months testy, old (80) Konrad Adenauer has been making a reappraisal--one that might be called "agonizing"--of U.S. foreign policy. Adenauer's disillusion with the U.S. began when he learned (through press reports) that Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tentatively proposed that the U.S. take advantage of increased nuclear firepower by lopping 800,000 men off its armed forces in the next four years. To Adenauer, who had just pushed a highly unpopular conscription bill through the Bundestag in response to U.S. pressure for West German rearmament, it was particularly galling that his old friend John Foster Dulles had not given him advance warning of the Radford plan (TIME, Sept. 3). U.S. assurances failed to calm him. The more he pondered, the more Adenauer became convinced that the U.S. was on the verge of withdrawing to "Fortress America." Under such circumstances, he decided, West Germany had no choice but to abandon unquestioning loyalty to U.S. policy and start looking after its own interests in its own way.

No sooner had Adenauer publicly enunciated this principle in Brussels than he proceeded to put it into practice. For months the Chancellor had stoutly argued that West German conscripts must be required to serve for 18 months. Last week, two days after the Brussels speech, Adenauer and his Cabinet approved a bill that would oblige draftees to serve only a year. Announcing the Cabinet's decision, the West German government's information office bluntly declared that it was all the fault of the U.S. Said the communique: "When news appeared in American papers of a plan to reduce greatly the manpower of U.S. forces, the Chancellor . . . was convinced that in the light of the new situation the Bundestag would no longer be prepared to vote for an 18 months' service period."

Frozen Fingers. Domestically, Adenauer's decision to limit the conscription period to twelve months had one great advantage: it would help to counteract the public hostility incurred by his Christian Democratic Party in passing conscription in the first place. (By last week the mayors of 135 German communities had refused to draw up lists of citizens eligible for the draft.) Internationally, however, it seemed likely to get West Germany into hot water. Even before the week was out the North Atlantic Council, meeting in an emergency session, publicly questioned the wisdom of the Chancellor's action and formally notified Bonn that military experts were doubtful that a twelve-month conscription period would allow West Germany to fulfill her promise to NATO to raise 500,000 troops by 1960. The difference between the U.S. Radford plan and Adenauer's plan for West Germany is a crucial one--West Germany, treaty-bound not to manufacture atomic weapons, has no nuclear firepower to substitute for manpower. As if belatedly noticing this big gap in his new line. Chancellor Adenauer last week also began suggesting that it was time for West Germany to have atomic arms. First the Chancellor startled Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak by asking his help in winning West Germany permission from the Western European Union to arm the Bundeswehr with tactical atomic weapons. A few days later, during a twelve-hour session to settle the terms for the return of the rich Saarland to West Germany next year, Adenauer broached his atomic-weapons scheme to French Premier Guy Mollet. Mollet. obviously forewarned. sidestepped. But the question was still there to be answered: Shall renascent West Germany be allowed to have nuclear arms? Spaak politely refused.

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