For 40 years, the NATO allies have armed themselves against the day when a million Eastern Europeans would pour across the Iron Curtain in a mass invasion of West Germany.
One million East Germans did just that over the weekend, putting into doubt the whole future of NATO and its communist counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. Where the two alliances and their superpowers fit in the new European lineup is certain to be discussed at the Mediterranean summit next month between President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Manfred Woerner, NATO`s secretary general, has boasted that the East German events ”once again demonstrate the . . . power of the democratic ideals for which this alliance stands.” The North Atlantic Treaty
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Organization, he said, will have a big role to play ”in the active management of change” in Europe.
But in Britain, Conservative member of Parliament John Biffen said the upheavals in central Europe have upset the old East-West balance based on the two superpowers and made ”past commitments to NATO . . . seem unimaginative and dated.” Former Foreign Secretary David Owen predicted ”inevitable changes in NATO”: probably a pullback of U.S. troops from Germany and possible German withdrawal from NATO into a more European-centered alliance.
So far, it is all guesswork. But the two alliances were founded to keep the other side from invading. For four decades, they were the military guarantees of a divided Europe and the armed backing of the two blocs.
Virtually no one on either side of what used to be the Iron Curtain fears an invasion today. The Soviet bloc is visibly crumbling. So far, the Poles and Hungarians have reassured Moscow by saying they will stay in the Warsaw Pact. But even Soviet officials have hinted that it would be all right if Hungary, at least, went neutral. Once this disintegration begins, it would be ever harder to get the Western allies to commit the personnel and money it takes to keep NATO strong.
NATO may be a victim of its own success. It has always called for democracy in Eastern Europe, Soviet troop cuts and destruction of the Berlin Wall. Now that those things are happening, the alliance is scrambling for an encore.
At their last summit meeting in May, the NATO allies came up with a plan to give the alliance a more political and economic role. Most of this involved using NATO as the vehicle for more cooperation with the East in trade, training and the environment. Whether this would be enough to hold together a bloc created for the Cold War is not known.
NATO was formed in 1948 in response to the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. It now embraces 16 countries and has 2.2 million troops in Europe, plus 7,100 planes and helicopters and 22,000 tanks.
The Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955 after West Germany joined NATO. By NATO`s figures, the Warsaw Pact outguns and outmans NATO, with 3.1 million troops, 12,000 planes and helicopters and 51,500 tanks.
Talks are going on in Vienna between the two blocs on a U.S. proposal to reduce these forces and arms to parity at a lower level, meaning a
disproportionately larger Warsaw Pact cut. The Soviets have accepted this principle. If all goes on schedule, the cuts could be agreed to by mid-1990.
But peace in Europe will have a price. Both sides have military-industrial complexes, powerful lobbies for keeping the blocs intact. In the East, these complexes should be harder to dislodge than political leaderships, because of the jobs and money at their command.
NATO officials argue that one of the alliance`s purposes now is to coordinate the Western stance at arms talks.
This united stance will be increasingly difficult to hold. A U.S.-West German dispute over short-range Lance missiles was papered over at the last NATO summit but will certainly pop up again. The U.S. wants to modernize the Lances in the mid-1990s. Germany wants to get rid of them, leaving its soil nuclear-free, reasoning that the short-range missiles can only be used against an invasion that isn`t going to happen.
The U.S. argues that the Lances are the last nuclear umbrella over the U.S. troops based in Germany. But any reunification of the Germanys could lead, on Soviet insistence, to a changed relationship between West Germany and its allies. Britain`s Owen said a reunified Germany might pull out of NATO but stay in the Western European Union, a more informal defense group that now links nine European nations. British and French troops could stay in Germany, he said, while U.S. troops stayed in Britain and Italy. This would preserve the trans-Atlantic link, he argued, and would keep ”a united Germany firmly within . . . the European community, (giving it) a detached, though interlocking, relationship with NATO.”
One problem with all this is that the Soviet Union has never said it wants U.S. troops out of Germany. Gorbachev, asked about this last spring, said, ”I can`t imagine realistic policies by the Soviet leadership that would be intended to put the United States out.”
Gorbachev`s stand appeared to reflect the Soviet fear of German aggression and its belief that U.S. troops guarantee stability in central Europe. For the same reason, many Western officials want Soviet troops to stay in East Germany, although at lower levels.