How Sick Is NATO?

How sick is NATO? Last week at a three-day conference of the Institute of the Cleveland Council on World Affairs, the Atlantic Alliance was the patient and received a thoroughgoing examination by a team of international statesmen.

Most alarming in his diagnosis was the U.S.'s Henry Cabot Lodge, ex-Ambassador to the U.N. and Viet Nam, who pronounced the alliance "in real danger," pointedly denounced "unrealistic nationalism"--meaning Charles de Gaulle's France, which had declined to send a representative to the session. But all speakers agreed that the issues go deeper than De Gaulle.

Said Canada's External Affairs Minister Paul Martin: "The world of 1965 is not the world of 1949. There has been the resurgence of strength in Western Europe." The British Labor government's former Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, protested "high-pressure methods used to sell American arms in competition with us," called for "ways of cooperation rather than ruthless competition."

Martin put his finger on the main dilemma--how many fingers, and whose, should be on the West's nuclear triggers? He urged "a greater sharing in nuclear strategy without further proliferation of control." But U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk gave not the slightest hint that Washington is yet prepared to give up final say-so over its nuclear powerhouse. Instead, Rusk referred once more to U.S. suggestions for a multilateral nuclear fleet--over which Washington would have ultimate control.

For all the West's unresolved problems, there was an undercurrent of confidence. Britain's Gordon Walker pointed out that the divided Communists "are in much worse shape. The split is more fundamental." Lodge suggested that the other Atlantic partners, despite De Gaulle, set about creating a grander alliance, in the hope that France would come in later. "There is today no organized grouping, on a worldwide scale, of the free peoples," Lodge lamented. "The great tragedy of our age is the inability of free men to create one well-rounded and essentially spiritual view of life by harnessing toward common goals their talents. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, power and responsibility must meet." He endorsed suggestions for the creation of a blue-ribbon "com mittee" representing the U.S., the United Kingdom and the Common Market to lay the groundwork for "true free-world development."

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