Keeping It All Together

Moscow understands, says President Bush, that he will make no snap decisions on European defense and arms control and knows that he is not dragging his feet. But, as Secretary of State James A. Baker III learned on a dash through Europe that ended Friday, Moscow is not the whole problem.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has persuaded many, and perhaps most, Europeans that it is safer to share their continent with him and his people than it once was. So far--based on such evidence as the Soviets’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, piercing self-criticisms of their communist past and plans to cut Soviet troops along the East-West border--Europeans are right to think that. The same evidence should compel the United States to keep testing the promise of Soviet reforms while also making certain that, when progress is tangible, American defense and arms-control policies change with the times. Thus Europe is at least as much the problem as Moscow.

It also makes working out what Henry A. Kissinger calls “global rules of conduct” a high priority for the Bush Administration. The Soviets may wait patiently for the President to plan for dealing with both East and West with candor, making certain that everyone’s interests are understood and trying to reduce surprises to a minimum. It is not clear that America’s allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will.

Baker discovered in a matter of hours that in the future East-West relations in Europe will depend less on what America wants and more on what its allies think. On the question of better battlefield nuclear weapons in Germany, for example, Chancellor Helmut Kohl made it clear that West Germany is not so beholden to America for its help over the years that it will automatically fall into line with whatever Washington thinks it needs to defend Central Europe. When Washington does present its policy position, Kohl will factor it into what he thinks is best for West Germany.

Kohl’s problem is political, but so are most problems in foreign relations. He has not yet worked out a rationale for modernizing battlefield nuclear missiles that would let him survive his 1990 reelection campaign. He needs a rationale because his voters know as well as Kohl does that any battlefield missile fired to halt a Soviet invasion of Europe would explode in Germany.

In ticklish situations like that, it did not help to have Defense Secretary-designate John Tower in Bonn in January demanding modernization. Nor does it help that the Pentagon is busying itself with a program to modernize battlefield weapons as though the policy had been cleared with the allies. What Bush needs first--and soon--is a team sufficiently on top of things to tell him whether better battlefield missiles are important enough to risk splitting the European alliance.

The Soviet Union is the problem in all this only in the sense that it has no choice but to make drastic cuts in its armed forces, cuts that Europe finds so attractive. Forced to choose between reducing political and ideological tension and modernizing its armed forces, Moscow chose to try to talk away some of the tensions.

That Europe is beguiled by his moves may provide some comfort for Gorbachev, but that is about the only thing that is going the way he wants it to go, as he noted again in a speech last week protesting resistance to his reforms.

Bush, in turn, may take some comfort from Moscow’s troubles, but he still must move more vigorously to set in motion policies that will keep NATO together and stretch the current warming trend in superpower relations to its limit.