[Y]

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Care should be taken not to resurrect old national rivalries in the name of Atlanticism. The United States should not choose a special partner among its European allies. Our attempt to woo the Federal Republic or to force our allies to choose between us and France--a tendency which, despite all disavowals, is real--must magnify the European nationalism which French policy has already done so much to foster.

Our concern thus returns to the somewhat out-of-scale figure of President de Gaulle. Irritation with de Gaulle's tactics does not change the fact that in his proposals of 1958 for a Directorate he put his finger on perhaps the key immediate problem of NATO. If the Atlantic Alliance is to retain any vitality, it requires a common foreign policy--or at least an agreed range of divergence. In its absence, the attempt to devise a common strategy is likely to prove futile. Lord Avon and Dean Acheson have come to the same conclusion. The time seems ripe to create a political body at the highest level--composed perhaps of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Federal Republic and Italy--for concerting the policies of the nations bordering the North

[Y]

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Atlantic. Such a body should discuss how to implement common Atlantic purposes and define the limits of autonomous action where interests diverge.

Such a body could give political guidance for the military arrangements described in the previous chapter. It could be charged with developing a common strategic doctrine. Within its framework, the European countries could, if they wished, form a closer association. Thus, the West European Union might well be revitalized by being given the task of working out the European contribution to joint NATO plans.

As Europe gains structure, conceivably this could end the sterile scholastic debate over the benefits of integration as against coordination. It might heal a rift which if continued is bound to hazard everything that has been painfully built up over fifteen years. Both the United States and France are able to thwart each other's purposes. Neither can create an alternative structure--France even less than we.

It has become fashionable in the West to compare its disagreements to the rifts in the Communist bloc. But this comparison does an injustice

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to the possibilities of the Atlantic area. In the Communist world, schisms
are inevitable and unbridgeable. Western societies have been more
fortunate. Their evolution has been richer; they have forged unity by
drawing strength from diversity. Free from the shackles of a doctrine
of historical inevitability, the nations of the West can render a great
service by demonstrating that if history has a meaning it is up to us
today to give it that meaning.