A Call for an Act of Creativity

"The Atlantic nations must join in a fresh act of creation, equal to that undertaken by the postwar generation of leaders of Europe and A merica."

WITH that call for a renewal and redefinition of the Atlantic partnership, Henry Kissinger last week finally inaugurated the Nixon Administration's belated "Year of Europe." Like that celebrated phrase, the address that the President's foreign policy adviser delivered at the annual Associated Press luncheon in Manhattan was vague on content but vehement in its promise of a continued U.S. commitment. Though "the era that was shaped by decisions of a generation ago is ending," he said, the U.S.-European partnership could survive. By the time the President begins his European tour in the fall, Kissinger promised, "we will have worked out a new Atlantic Charter setting the goals for the future."

When Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill signed the original eight-point Atlantic Charter* aboard the U.S. cruiser Augusta off the Newfoundland coast in August 1941, Hitler's tanks had seized North Africa, and Japan was preparing its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Kissinger's new charter will be written--if it appears at all--in a less dangerous but infinitely more slippery time of prosperity and detente.

The challenges of war, reconstruction and containment of Soviet expansion united the U.S. and Europe through the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s, when the purposes and goals of the alliance are considerably less clear than they used to be, the challenge is to find "a solution for the management of their diversity." Europe, Kissinger urged, should accept the challenge "not as a test of strength but as a test of joint statesmanship."

Washington undoubtedly hoped that the address would help elevate the U.S.-European dialogue above the testy, truculent level to which it has fallen in recent months. Nixon had been invited to make the A.P. speech, but he turned the honor over to Kissinger. The President instructed him to make a formal statement that would spell out Washington's changed perceptions of the Atlantic Alliance and "explain to Europe what we are really about."

Kissinger pondered the address under the Acapulco sun last March. The main thing, he and Nixon agreed, would be to try to establish a broad, top-level political consensus on the U.S.-European issues. The unsatisfactory alternative, the President and Kissinger believe, would be to leave the future of the alliance to the varying interests of the technicians and experts who will actually conduct the forthcoming negotiations on trade, monetary reform and troop reductions.

Although Watergate has hardly enhanced the atmosphere, Nixon's effort at "joint statesmanship" has already begun. He discussed his notions of a redefined relationship with Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath in Washington last February, and with Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti two weeks ago. West German Chancellor Willy Brandt is due in the U.S. this week; France's President Georges Pompidou is also scheduled to meet Nixon before Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev arrives for his long-awaited U.S. tour in June.

Administration officials insist that Kissinger's appeal for "a joint effort of creativity" is genuine. "We still have no final blueprint ourselves," one high State Department official told TIME. "We want European ideas." The Administration has clearly taken the initiative, however, and its own ideas will appear in more detail this week, when the Kissinger-prepared annual White House report on foreign policy is released.

In his address, Kissinger was frank and even biting about the present state of U.S.-European relations. The result of Europe's "transformation from a recipient of our aid to a strong competitor" had too often and in too many fields been "turbulence and a sense of rivalry." The U.S. shoulders global responsibilities in trade and monetary matters, but the European community "has increasingly stressed its regional personality." Perhaps naively, the U.S. had long assumed that European economic unity would lead to a European political unity and a greater European willingness to "ease our burdens" in defense and other areas; unfortunately, "many of these expectations are not being fulfilled." The Nixon Administration has broken new diplomatic ground, Kissinger complained, but Washington "is now often taken to task for flexibility where we used to be criticized for rigidity."

Kissinger was purposefully imprecise on the possible substance of the new Atlantic Charter. He reiterated U.S. support of European unity. He also emphasized Nixon's determination to resist congressional pressure for a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe--and his determination to make NATO pay "a fair share" of the cost of maintaining those forces (West Germany will be asked to maintain its "offset payments," now $2 billion a year; Britain, Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands, which also have U.S. bases on their soil, will be asked to ante up $1 billion).

Kissinger also proposed that the U.S. and Europe, which together consume roughly 60% of the world's oil, should collaborate on a common energy program (see ENVIRONMENT). The latitude of the Atlantic dialogue, he added, ought to be expanded, ultimately, to include Japan.

Central Issue. The initial European reaction was generally predictable. Officials of Britain's Tory government, who share many of the Nixon-Kissinger attitudes about Europe's narrow "regional personality," were privately enthusiastic. The French were decidedly negative. Reflecting the somewhat automatic paranoia of its Gaullist audience, the Paris daily La Nation suggested that Kissinger had launched not a debate but "a diplomatic offensive which in appearance only is an "offensive de charme.' " West Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung raised what may prove to be the central issue. The U.S. had posed all the important questions, it said, "but which Europe will give it the answer? Pompidou's fading neo-Gaullism? Brandt, suspended between Atlantic loyalty and necessity and the temptation of the opening to the East? Italy, shaken by internal crises?" Herbert Wehner, the Social Democratic floor leader in the Bundestag and one of Brandt's closest advisers, was even more skeptical. "I don't think even Kissinger knows what he wants to achieve with the charter," he told newsmen in Sweden. "I don't believe that the proposal is realistic."

Perhaps it is unrealistic in the sense that Europe (like Japan) is still a long way from being able or willing to exercise full membership in an earlier American concept of a five-power world. In the past two years, the U.S. has lavished most of its attention on the Soviet and Chinese sides of that political pentangle. By switching the focus back to Europe, Nixon and Kissinger may hope to stimulate European unity and the growth of a still missing sense of global engagement. For the U.S., Kissinger's address meant a shift away from Viet Nam to more permanent priorities. For Europe, ready or not, it means that the Atlantic debate now has a larger framework.

* Among other things, the two leaders agreed that neither the U.S. nor Britain had any postwar territorial ambitions, and that the right of peoples to choose their own form of government would be respected. The charter also summarized Anglo-American commitments to expanded trade, to a general improvement in living standards, to "freedom from fear and want," to freedom of the seas, and to the eventual "abandonment of the use of force."

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