Yankee, Don't Go Home

The crisis over American missile deployment to counter the Soviet theater nuclear threat in Western Europe is only the latest symptom of a deep and recurring anxiety: How can Europeans be sure that the U.S. will be at its partners' side if Moscow launches an attack? Europeans continue to worry about that, even though the U.S. made the pledge at the beginning of the most successful defensive alliance in modern European history, the 15-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

When Secretary of State Dean Acheson signed the NATO treaty on April 4, 1949, as Vice President Alben Barkley and President Harry Truman watched, Western Europe was on the brink of economic collapse and its hastily demobilized armies were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the Soviets, 210 divisions to 14.

From the beginning, U.S. power was the shield for the other NATO partners.* The critical provision of the NATO treaty, Article 5, declared, "The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or in North America shall be considered an attack against them all." The U.S. had the responsibility, a key NATO document declared, for "strategic bombing, including the prompt delivery of any and all weapons," a euphemism for atomic bombs.

NATO's European partners have always wanted American troops stationed on the Continent, where they would be hit by any Soviet attack and thus ensure that Washington would go to war. To support this "trip wire" theory, the U.S. vowed in 1955 that it would keep 250,000 troops on the other side of the Atlantic "as long as necessary" to guarantee European security.

As the Soviet missile arsenal grew, Europeans became concerned that the U.S. would not use nuclear weapons to defend the Continent because of a fear that Moscow would respond by attacking American cities. For some of the allies, the uncertainty grew stronger after Washington's 1963 decision to withdraw 90 intermediate-range Jupiter and Thor missiles from Europe on grounds that the weapons were obsolete. Doubts like these led Charles de Gaulle in 1966 to pull France out of NATO's military organization (although not the alliance) and organize its own nuclear retaliatory force, la force defrappe.

By that time, the U.S. had adopted the doctrine of "flexible response," with the aim of first meeting a Soviet attack with conventional weapons and escalating to tactical and then strategic nuclear weaponry if necessary. The Germans, still worried about U.S. resolve, prevailed upon Washington to accept the doctrine of "seamless deterrence." This obligated the U.S. to move on quickly and smoothly to the use of nuclear weapons if need be. In 1974 the U.S. again tried to satisfy European insecurities by promising that it would keep 300,000 troops and 7,000 nuclear weapons on the Continent.

But Europe continued to fear that the U.S. might leave it in the lurch. The worry even has a term in the NATO strategic lexicon: decoupling. Europe's anxieties grew in 1977 when the Carter Administration began the SALT II negotiations with Moscow. The resulting pact did not cover the SS-20 missiles. To counter these weapons, President Carter proposed stationing a new generation of U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Europe, while proceeding with arms limitation talks. The offer was readily accepted by the Europeans, including West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. That acceptance has come home to roost: it led to the present campaign to remove the very weapons that Europe wanted to help guarantee its safety--and to establish even more firmly the U.S. commitment to fight in Europe.

* The original group: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Greece and Turkey joined the alliance in 1952, West Germany in 1955.

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