CSIS - NATO SPEECH

December 16, 1980

The other day I heard Harold McMillan at the Woodrow Wilson
and he began his remarks by saying, as Adam and Eve left Paradise,
Adam turned to Eve and said, we live in a state of transition.
And so we do at this particular moment, at a time about which
it has been said that the future is not what it used to be.
So I would like to raise a number of issues which I see before
the Alliance and see whether they can lead to some center of
discussion.

I think the fundamental problem we face in the NATO Alliance
is the fact that any institution after thirty years would be
in need of adaptation. The circumstances which created it have
fundamentally altered; the international environment has become
infinitely more complex; all our countries have undergone a
series of domestic changes. And all these trends have been
accentuated by one of the attributes of modern democracies, which
is that first, the problem of getting into office is so complex
that it sometimes overrides reflection about what you do when
you are in office, and secondly, when you are in office, many
of the incentives are to get through your term by submerging the
symptoms of the problem, therefore guaranteeing that somewhere
along the line a structural crisis will emerge. And I believe
we are now facing a structural crisis in the alliance, which
I would first like to discuss in a philosophical context and
then apply it to some concrete circumstances. Historically,
alliances had one of two purposes, or both purposes. They
have either been a defense against the common threat, or they

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have been an agreement to achieve a common objective. When they were a defense against the common threat, the assumption was that no one partner was capable of resisting by himself and that it took a joint effort of several nations to bring about an adequate defense. When it was an agreement to achieve a common objective, there was either some overriding need that had to be dealt with or it involved something in which what each partner was going to do anyway would be shared such as is involved in spheres of influence.

I will speak primarily about the first of these attributes, the defense against the common threat, which has been the original basis of the alliance. When NATO was formed, there was a perception of the Soviet threat which was seen in terms of the experience with Nazi Germany. There was the belief that the Soviet Union might launch itself into Western Europe with a massive attack by organized military units across recognized frontiers and that this could be resisted best by what? And there the first ambivalence of the alliance already began to appear. The theory was not that it could be resisted only by the joint strength of all the allies. But the theory was that it could be resisted best and only in fact by American nuclear protection. And American nuclear protection, under those circumstances, transformed the alliance in effect into a unilateral American guarantee. There was always an ambivalence about whether the alliance in fact added to the total physical strength and for most of its history, the alliance has been