Nato: Alliance a la Carte?

By Frederick Painton

Even as Moscow pursued a conciliatory tack in foreign and military policy, NATO was facing new internal challenges to its cohesion. In Denmark last week, conservative Prime Minister Poul Schluter led his coalition government into what he called a "very decisive election" that focused on the country's future role within the 16-nation Western Alliance. He had called the vote after the opposition passed a motion strengthening a 31-year-old ban, never enforced, against nuclear-armed naval vessels' visiting Danish ports. Strict observation of that prohibition would severely hamper the operations of NATO warships in Denmark's waters. Implicitly, the Prime Minister was raising a key question: How far can a small country go in assuming lesser risks and obligations than its partners in a military alliance?

Last week 3.9 million voters gave a characteristically vague answer. Though Schluter's center-right four-party minority coalition emerged with an unchanged bloc of 70 seats in the 179-member Folketing, he resigned as Prime Minister. Social Democrat Svend Jakobsen, the Speaker of Parliament, was entrusted by Queen Margrethe with the task of finding a government alignment that could win majority support. Schluter was confident that Jakobsen would fail and he would be reappointed.

Even if Schluter and his allies eventually win the latest skirmish, Danish ambivalence toward NATO is unlikely to fade. Defense spending has dwindled to 2.1% of the country's gross domestic product, one of the lowest rates in the < alliance. (Norway, by contrast, spends 3.1%.) Since 1965 the armed forces have been roughly halved, to 29,000 personnel.

Some U.S. military planners saw the Denmark imbroglio as an example of the oft-heard U.S. charge that several prosperous alliance members are "getting a free ride" on defense. As in Denmark, opposition parties elsewhere have threatened to overturn longstanding defense arrangements if they are voted into power. The British Labor Party and the West German Social Democrats, for example, oppose U.S. nuclear weapons on their territory.

Nor is this a la carte approach to alliance membership confined to nuclear- deployment issues. France began the trend in 1966 when Charles de Gaulle closed down NATO bases and pulled his country out of the alliance's integrated command structure. Spain followed a similar tack in 1982: it joined NATO but kept its forces out of the chain of joint European command based outside Brussels. Last January, Madrid went a step further by ordering the U.S. to withdraw its 72 F-16 jet fighters from Torrejon air base. Greece has raised questions about U.S. bases on its soil. Such actions, says a senior U.S. commander, "make our job of deterrence more difficult and make Congress less willing to vote funds."

On May 26 NATO defense ministers are scheduled to meet in Brussels to ponder those issues and look at what Western Europe might do to stop the grumbling in the U.S. One answer: greater spending by the West Europeans. With a combined gross domestic product of $4.3 trillion, they are as strong economically as the U.S., and their total population of 374 million is one-third larger than that of the U.S. The likelihood that defense outlays will increase is dim, however, since European economic growth rates are slowing. Another inhibiting factor, a senior U.S. official notes, is that "arms talks are making progress and detente is in the air." And just as crises tend to pull NATO together, any easing of East-West tensions tends to magnify the forces pulling the alliance apart.

With reporting by Julian Isherwood/Copenhagen and Christopher Redman/Paris