The Future of the Atlantic Alliance

HELMUT SCHMIDT

THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES

Delivered at
The University of Utah
April 4, 1984

HELMUT SCHMIDT, former Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, is a native of Hamburg, where he was educated in political and economic science and took a degree in economics in 1948. As a Social Democrat, he came to his chancellorship having studied the workings of German economic policy firsthand as Joint Minister of Economics and Finance and as Finance Minister in earlier governments. While in office, he pushed a treaty for the normalization of relations between West Germany and Czechoslovakia and the nullification of the Munich Pact of 1938, and the stabilization of international relations and détente continue to be his major concerns. Among Mr. Schmidt’s publications are Defense or Retaliation: A German View, and The Balance of Power: Germany’s Peace Policy and the Superpowers. In 1972 he received the U.S. Medal for Distinguished Service.

President Peterson, Professor Dick, Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much for your kind words of introduction and be assured that at the age of sixty-five I won’t blush about your pattering remarks.

I do intend tonight to speak first about the evolution of the grand strategy of our alliance over the last thirty-five years; second, I will look briefly at the economic deficiencies of our alliance; and third, I will make some remarks about the Soviet Union and our relationship with that country.

I would also like to say a few words about the Europeans and their difficulties at the present time. Within this context I will discuss some principles of military strategy and, finally, I would like to say a few more words about leadership within an alliance of sovereign states.

Regarding the evolution of the grand strategy of our alliance, it seems to me that so far we have witnessed three stages, and today we are in the middle of a discussion about the fourth stage. Henry Kissinger’s article in Time magazine in early March of 1984 was a contribution to that fourth stage. As of today we are still scrabbling and babbling and nobody really has a clear-cut view, but this is not uncommon. It sometimes has taken a couple of years for the Alliance jointly to come to new insights.

The first phase of our grand strategy was a rather short one. It was essentially defined by the United States alone, due to the situation of that time. I am talking about the years immediately after the war, when the United States presented to the Soviet Union the Baruch Plan, aimed at joint and total renunciation of nuclear weapons, and the Marshall Plan, which aimed at the joint reconstruction of the European countries devastated by the war.

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The Soviet Union rejected both offers, much to their disadvantage. They did not participate in the Marshall Plan, which was carried out anyway. The Baruch Plan could not enter into force without Soviet participation. Instead, Stalin consolidated Russian rule over the states and peoples of Eastern Europe. He threatened Berlin, the big city, the old German capital in the center of Europe, and he laid the foundations of Russian nuclear missile and satellite armaments. Thereby he did provoke and contribute to the beginning of the second phase of the Western grand strategy very soon after the war.

The second phase was characterized by the foundation of the Atlantic Alliance. It was characterized not so much by the then American foreign secretary’s terminology (I am referring to John Foster Dulles and his “roll back” strategy) but rather by George Kennan’s catchword “containment.” Containment was a concept that he developed, if I am not mistaken, as early as 1947 — at that time not under his own name but as the famous “Mr. X” in an article in Foreign Affairs in July of 1947.

Containment of the Russians was more or less the essence of the second phase of Western grand strategy. It was the goal of containment which induced John Foster Dulles to create his anti- Soviet system of alliances all over the globe. Some of the alliances created at that time have since been dissolved. This period also embraced a specific doctrine of military strategy, mainly the deterring threat of what was then called “massive (nuclear) retaliation,” or, so to speak, massive nuclear punishment if the Soviets ever undertook to trespass the boundaries. I won’t go into the details of that period. I would just like to say that President Kennedy’s management of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 appears, in retrospect, as the culminating point of that period as well as the end of the second phase of massive nuclear retaliation.

The third phase of the third stage of the grand strategy had started a bit earlier than 1962. I would like to recall the book of a great American army general, Maxwell D. Taylor, that was published in 1959 under the title The Uncertain Trumpet. Here a military man analyzed the situation, namely what will happen if we do let loose the big nuclear stick, and he was quite convinced that it was rather unlikely that Americans would ever do it.

In the beginning of the 1960s then, let us say more concretely in 1962, the United States drew two important conclusions from a debate in which Maxwell Taylor and others, including the Europeans and the British, had already been engaged for a couple of years. Number one, America abandoned the military strategy of massive nuclear retaliation in favour of a new military strategy of what later was called flexible response. Incidentally, this replacement of one military strategy with another for fifteen years, oneand-a-half decades, has been the only unilateral action of the United States within the Alliance. It was initiated by the then defense secretary Robert S. McNamara at a meeting of allied defense ministers in Athens in 1962, but it took the European allies five more years, until the end of 1967, to agree on the strategy of flexible response.

The second conclusion drawn by the U.S. from the nuclear strategic stalemate with the Russians was of much greater importance. It was a conclusion in the field of grand strategy of which military strategy is just one component (not necessarily the most important component in all circumstances), the consequence of which was an expansion of U.S. cooperation with the Soviet Union into new fields, with the full approval and active participation of America’s European and Canadian allies.

So in 1967, after some preparation the Alliance jointly agreed on the dual grand strategy and approach that retained its validity until the Carter Administration, namely, military deterrence through the capability of flexible military defense, on the one hand, and cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of arms control and arms limitation on the other. It was basically with full support of the allies, North American and European, that in accordance with this double-track grand strategy approach towards the Soviet Union, the test ban treaty was concluded with the Soviets. Then came the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons in the late sixties; the Salt I agreement between President Nixon and General Secretary Brezhnev; the German treaties with Moscow, Warsaw, East Berlin, and Prague; the Four-Power Agreement on Berlin; later in 1975 the Final Act of Helsinki; then shortly after that the German-Polish agreements; and last, Salt II under President Carter. It is indicative that Salt II was negotiated and agreed upon but never ratified in this country because of strong opposition within the United States. But the agreement is still being honored not just by one but by both sides.

This third phase of the grand strategy which started gradually in the mid-sixties and lasted until the beginning of the second half of the seventies, from my point of view — let me say from a general political point of view — has come to be the most fruitful so far. Rather than thinking in categories of punishment or retaliation we began thinking in terms of an equilibrium between the West and the East. We began to understand that the West and the East had to accept their responsibility to preserve stability in the interest of peace. This understanding was underlined in 1967, when the Alliance adopted the so-called Harmel Report, actually a report of all the fifteen nations, written under the chairmanship of Belgian Foreign Secretary Pierre Harmel. (By the way, this Harmel Report was the document through which the word détente was incorporated into official NATO language. For some in America it has since become a dirty word. I deplore this, but I understand that it is a fact of life that right now it is not advisable to use the word if you don’t wish to be disliked in this country more than necessary.)

During the thirty-five years since the beginning of the Alliance it has withstood a number of strategic crises in an astonishing way. There was the Cuban missile crisis. There was the crisis created by the abrupt departure of France from the NATO military integration (with France remaining a member of the Alliance, however).

There was the catharsis of the Vietnam war and the domestic post- Vietnam political crisis in your country, accentuated by Watergate — which did not have any major effect on the cohesion between North America and Europe or on the cohesion and overall strategy of the Alliance as a whole.

It is true that President Nixon struck the Europeans as morally dubious but at the same time as a completely acceptable strategic leader of the Alliance. And many of you may be astonished that his name is being used in political circles in Europe nowadays with some respect as regards his strategic performance. President Gerald Ford, who, in European eyes, was and still is considerably underestimated in his own country, did continue Nixon’s grand strategy .

By the way, Jerry Ford never tried to dictate unilateral American decisions to the European allies. As a leading representative of the Alliance, Ford was fully accepted in Europe. Let me tell you a little story about Jerry Ford. We met here last fall in Vail, Colorado. There was the landlord of course, and his wife, there was Henry Kissinger, there was former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, there was Jim Callaghan, former prime minister of Britain, and then there was myself. We had a nice discussion about world affairs. We were not totally satisfied about the situation, and at the end of the night Jerry Ford summed it all up by saying: “Well, gentlemen, I guess we all can agree that the world was much better off in our time.”

It was first in the Carter era that, through some rather drastic moves without previous consultation with other allies, the Alliance was strained. And it happened in two areas at the same time. Against European advice, the Americans threw overboard the Ford-Kissinger Salt II approach, and we Europeans were also emphatically called upon to increase our budgetary deficit spending in order to get the world’s economy going. We were asked to take inflationist measures. Both Paris and Bonn reacted sourly, of course. We didn’t do it. We wanted to maintain our one-digit inflation rates as President Peterson (of the University of Utah) hinted at earlier on, and we did not have the feeling that America could act as a leader in the economic field every time.

President Reagan inherited a delicate intra-Alliance situation. He tried to restore the American position of leadership by drastic unilateral action, not necessarily to the satisfaction of his allies. He could count on firm domestic political support, but he did not, in the first instance, find much agreement on the part of the allies.

So over the last seven years, the consensus on the common grand strategy has been lost. The European allies were dismayed and concerned about the two-year-long neglect of arms limitation negotiations and by the apparent striving for American military superiority rather than equilibrium.

And all this, and I am coming to my second subject rather soon, had a bearing also on the economic situation of the European countries. “Supply-side” economics is in fact a rebirth of Keynesian deficit spending, the one exception being that Keynes thought of printing the money and nowadays it is being borrowed. The enormous budgetary deficits in America have increased the economic difficulties of the European partners, and this deficit spending policy was totally unexpected in Europe. The high interest rates which result from the deficit are the highest real interest rates the world has seen since the birth of Christ. In the meantime they have let the world’s richest country, the richest society, the richest economy, become the world’s greatest net importer of credit and capital. The export of inflation from Europe to North America and the increase in real interest rates, really meaning the difference between nominal interest rates and inflationary rates, have occurred at the expense of real investment in productive capital all over the world and therefore at the expense of employment. And they also have occurred at the expense of the non-oil-exporting developing countries which find themselves in a position of being unable to cover the costs of their debts. They will never pay back the principle, this is assured, for they even have enormous difficulty in paying the interest because the rates have gone up and up and up for them over the last couple of years. On the other hand, this enormous capital influx into the United States has resulted in very high exchange rates for the dollar — quite nice for the Europeans because it’s easier to sell European-manufactured goods in the United States and other dollar areas, and not so nice for your industry because sometimes you can’t even compete with imported European and Japanese goods in your own markets, and sometimes you certainly cannot compete with Japanese and European goods in other markets due to the high exchange rate of the dollar.

So all this has led to tendencies toward protection, protectionism, and subsidization. Protectionist measures on this side of the Atlantic of course provoke protectionist measures on the other side of the Atlantic or the Pacific. I would say that international commerce has deteriorated to the point that less than one half of the world’s trade is free, the greater half suffering from the impact of either protective measures or subsidization. And this is true for products from steel to grain.

At the same time, we have seen an enormous weakening of the global monetary structure. The total effect plus the prospect for the future has shaken every government in Europe. No government in Europe has been able to maintain its position. All of them have been toppled due to the fact that the public normally hold their government responsible if the economy is not really doing well, and even Margaret Thatcher, shortly after her overwhelming election victory, has come under heavy domestic pressure; the British public opinion polls show that if there were a new election tomorrow she might lose. Of course, the United States is totally unconscious of the effects of the nation’s economic behaviour on the rest of the Alliance. And this innocent lack of awareness was reflected in the economic cover story of the same issue of Time magazine which printed the Kissinger article that I mentioned earlier on. The story was eight pages of analysis and prognosis of the bad effects of the United States’ super deficit, but there was not a single word concerning the effects in the Third World, in the developing world, in Europe, or elsewhere.

I will soon leave the economic area, but I would like to state before doing so that a grand strategy must finally include once more the global economic conduct of all its partners, as was the case during the seventies — or at least that we try as we did in seven or eight economic summits, one after the other starting in 1975, to coordinate our economic and financial monetary policies. By the way, a provision asking for economic cooperation existed from the beginning in the North-Atlantic Pact. It still stands. Grand strategy of course needs a foundation of not only military but also political and economic solidarity among allies, although we will also be competitors in the foreseeable future. But it also requires some limitation and some curbing of competition and self-interest among allies, although competition and self-interest remain unavoidable in principle.

Let me now come to the Soviet Union and our relationship with her. The new grand strategy which might evolve over the next few years must make it clear that the effort is not towards superiority over the Soviet Union but towards equilibrium with her. And to this goal armament policy and military posture have to be subordinate. But above all, the diplomacy of arms limitation has to serve the goal of balance. There have been some errors in arms limitation and détente in the past. For instance, there was a Western error regarding détente. When we accept an approximate military balance in Europe, we must know that thereby neither the Middle East nor Central America nor Africa nor Afghanistan nor Cambodia, and so on, is ensured against advancing Soviet influence. It was always clear, to me at least, that the SALT treaty could not rescue Vietnam or Cambodia or Afghanistan. And whoever makes détente or arms limitation policy responsible for these successes of Russian expansionism because arms control was limited to so-called strategic weapons, and détente was politically limited to Europe only — whoever makes arms control responsible for expansionist successes of the Soviet Union only shows that he had illusions when these treaties were concluded. The fact is, rather, that it remains essential for America to assume the role of global counterforce. It is primarily in this worldwide context and through this role that the qualitative difference between Europe and the United States of America remains inevitable and necessary. For at this level, the Europeans cannot successfully operate alone or autonomously, whereas the United States can.

Now, in turn, there are two Russian errors concerning détente. Moscow has fully observed all treaties with the West and still is holding to them. In the non-treaty regions, however, the Politburo has expanded its power without respect for the interests of other states and nations. That goes for the exorbitant arming with SS-20 rockets -n owadays each of the rockets has three warheads and all together they are nearing a thousand warheads — which the West did not try to prevent through negotiations concerning strategic arms limitation agreements, and which today threatens all of Europe, the Mediterranean Coasts, including parts of Africa, the entire Middle East, and almost all of Asia, including the People’s Republic of China and Japan. And this applies as well to the constant and persistent political and military extension of the Soviet spheres of influence on all the continents but Europe and Australia. This Russian expansionism, to be sure, was not forbidden by the ratified treaties that are mentioned earlier on, although, of course, it is a considerable infringement of international law and in many cases of the United Nations Charter. But the central point of my argument is that for years the Politburo assessed your reaction and the world’s reaction all wrong. The Soviet Union, uninvited, provoked a young and optimistic nation, provoked you, to a great new effort and did thereby touch off a new argument. Due to that argument race, the Russians and the other peoples of the Soviet Union and the Comecon now have to undergo economic suffering as part of the consequences of this new arms race.

Let me say a few words about the Russians: I’m always struck by the fact that in this country the knowledge of the Russians does not go very deep and does not go very far back into history. Mostly, you only go back some forty years to Stalin, who has been called “Uncle Joe” in this country. What an evolution of language, by the way, from “Uncle Joe” to the “Empire of evil.” But what you do not see is that before Stalin there were the tsars for more than four hundred years. And Stalin’s deeds did not differ very much from what the tsars did. Whether Catherine the Great or Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible or Ivan the Third or Ivan the First, they all were gatherers of Russian soil, as one of the titles the tsars bore indicates. What was really intended was to conquer other people’s soil and afterwards russify the inhabitants. And so they did. Time and again they tried to get to the West, and time and again they conquered and subdued Poland and the other Baltic nations, the Lithuanians, the Estonians, the Latvians, sometimes the Finns, and time and again they tried to possess everything from the Balkans to Istanbul, then Constantinople. They enlarged their empire to the south and to Central Asia.

This is not Russia’s first attempt to conquer Afghanistan; they tried to do it in the nineteenth century. They took away parts of what was then imperial China. They stretched out over the whole range of Siberia and russified it. You have four time zones in the United States; they have ten, it is such a large country. They even went over the Bering Strait to Alaska, which you bought from them just in time. Russia has always been an expansionist power.

And remember, it is the only imperialism, the only expansionism in history that never has been crushed. They have been defeated several times, but Russian expansionism never has been crushed. Spanish and Portuguese imperialism were worn out centuries ago. The French and British empires were given up after World War II. Japan’s and Hitler’s and Mussolini’s imperialism were crushed in World War II. The Russians are the only ones left, And this has nothing to do with Communism or Marxism. It’s

Russia, and it is a grave mistake to believe that all their behaviour is dictated by Marxism or Leninism. I would say their behaviour is three-fourths Russian and maybe 25 percent Communist.

One needs to understand Russian history in order to understand the motivations of the Russians. Except for a very small, thin upper rank of the nobility, they have never seen human rights. They have suffered for five centuries. They are great sufferers. Sometimes they even have a passion for suffering. You can understand this if you read their great novelists of the nineteenth century, the Pushkins and the Dostoevskis, the Tolstois, and the rest. They suffered under Stalin. They did not like Stalin, but nevertheless they fought for their country. They are great patriots; they have always been patriots despite all their suffering. Under Stalin they lost twenty million lives in the war against Hitler, and still they fought on and won the war in the end — together with you and your help as allies.

They will also suffer in the future, if necessary. If somebody on this side of the Atlantic dreamed of an arms race which would economically strangle the Russians, he or she would be wrong. They can be told by their Politburo that this is just another attempt at conquering them, at winning a victory over their country and that they must resist the attempt, and therefore they must tighten their belts even more, and they will, although grudgingly, do so, just do it, and the military might then get not only 12 or 13 percent of the GNP but maybe 15 or 16 percent. It’s a deep misunder-

standing of the Russian people to believe that you can strangle them economically or otherwise.

As an example, in my city of Hamburg, where I was born and raised, and which I have represented in Parliament for thirty-one years, my forbears were trading with the Russians in Novgorod 500 and maybe even 600 years ago. It was part of our life; they are so close by. We live by trading. And of course not only their literature — I mentioned some novelists of world importance — but also their music has become part of our culture: Tchaikowsky,

Prokofiev, and others. Look where Isaac Stern was born or where the parents of Leonard Bernstein came from. So in part they belong to Europe and in part they are a menace to Europe.

And we have always felt that one needs to contain them, which is necessary as a matter pertaining to military capabilities, not just diplomacy; but on the other hand, we also have felt that by geopolitical fate we are close to each other and that one should try and live in as good a neighbourhood as possible. And, of course, in the last thirty-five or forty years the European neighbourhood has been much, much closer to you, and this is understandable. We all have, I do not know how many, grandparents in common. It is one of the reasons why we understand each other so well, the Europeans and the Americans, the North Americans, and why we have the feeling of belonging to each other.

But, of course, we do also differ in many cases. The United States is such a big country and such a huge nation that you often are tempted to be satisfied to settle your own business within your own borders and not really look to the rest of the world. Also, you are a young and, therefore, an optimistic nation. Never in the two centuries of your history have you been defeated by foreign armies on your own soil. The Europeans, except the British, have been defeated by foreign armies time and again.

The Europeans have a long history, at least ten centuriesin the case of the Greeks and the Italians even twenty-five cen — turies — and we have also fought wars against each other time and again. Despite our belonging to the same European Christian culture, our languages have been differentiated from each other for much more than a thousand years — in some cases for 'a million years. Altogether, we Europeans are rather old nations and, therefore, we are much more sceptical than you Americans. The scepticism stems from long historical experience. Most Europeans look with some envy upon your great vitality. At least I do.

This is my sixtieth or sixty-first visit to the United States within the last thirty-four years, and this number shows, I hope, how im-

Russia, and it is a grave mistake to believe that all their behaviour is dictated by Marxism or Leninism. I would say their behaviour is three-fourths Russian and maybe 25 percent Communist.

One needs to understand Russian history in order to understand the motivations of the Russians, Except for a very small, thin upper rank of the nobility, they have never seen human rights. They have suffered for five centuries. They are great sufferers. Sometimes they even have a passion for suffering. You can understand this if you read their great novelists of the nineteenth century, the Pushkins and the Dostoevskis, the Tolstois, and the rest. They suffered under Stalin. They did not like Stalin, but nevertheless they fought for their country. They are great patriots; they have always been patriots despite all their suffering. Under Stalin they lost twenty million lives in the war against Hitler, and still they fought on and won the war in the end — together with you and your help as allies.

Prokofiev, and others. Look where Isaac Stern was born or where the parents of Leonard Bernstein came from. So in part they belong to Europe and in part they are a menace to Europe.

The Europeans have a long history, at least ten centuriesin the case of the Greeks and the Italians even twenty-five centuries — and we have also fought wars against each other time and again. Despite our belonging to the same European Christian culture, our languages have been differentiated from each other for much more than a thousand years — in some cases for a million years, Altogether, we Europeans are rather old nations and, therefore, we are much more sceptical than you Americans. The scepticism stems from long historical experience. Most Europeans look with some envy upon your great vitality. At least I do.

This is my sixtieth or sixty-first visit to the United States within the last thirty-four years, and this number shows, I hope, how important a European political leader evaluates America. But on the other hand, I have met quite a few of your countrymen who have made their first trip to the old continent only after receiving nomination as presidential candidates or even after having been elected President. So, what I am trying to say is that your political leaders tend to underestimate European interests as well as European historical experience. Let me give you just three examples:

We Europeans have come to understand that continuously maintaining an equilibrium of power vis a' vis the Soviet Union is necessary, although it is not in itself a sufficient precondition for maintaining peace. You Americans, on the other hand, tend to downplay such thinking as being pragmatic. Pragmatism is sometimes not so nice a word in America, one viewed as being close to immoral, whereas you idealistically believe in rather high goals for foreign policies.
As I said, we Europeans live close to the Russians. We know that their expansionism has not changed much since the communists came to rule if compared with the four prior centuries. But you do not really try to understand the Russians and, therefore, many of your strategic goals are not really to the point because your knowledge of the psychology of the other side — namely an enormous security complex plus an inferiority complex — is simply not good enough.
We Europeans try to stick to one and the same basic line of policy and grand strategy, whether we change our governments once a year like Italy, or whether we change our Presidents only once in seven years like France. DeGaulle, Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand have not really changed their political strategy. Or whether you have rather frequent, more frequent changes, as in Britain: Ted Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher. Or in Germany: Willy

Brandt, myself, Helmut Kohl right now. It would be very difficult for an American commentator or analyst to discover whether there are any important changes in the foreign policies of these European countries. Bipartisan foreign policies are not declared, but in fact are. (The Europeans, by the way, would be very happy if your great country would find its way back to a bipartisan policy; this would save us from the necessity of adapting ourselves to changing foreign policies every four years, sometimes even more often.)

Now the Europeans are in bad shape. The European economic community is politically sick because all its member countries are economically sick. The European allies as a group were not up to the dual challenge of, on the one hand, the economic turbulence since the second oil price explosion in 1979 to 80, plus, on the other hand, the abandonment of continuity in American foreign policy. European governments have turned out to be overburdened, so it is understandable to me that impatience and bitterness about Europe is proliferating in your country.

I totally agree with John Kennedy’s great vision of the two pillars on which the Atlantic community should rest, the North American pillar and the European Community. But France has only one foot in the Atlantic Alliance, and Great Britain has only one foot in the European Community. My country, of course, is fully within both of these international communities, but my country obviously suffers from the awareness that in a crush Germany would be reduced to the role of a battlefield and suffers as well from the partition, from the division of the German nation.

That, by the way, is one of the reasons why the Germans are shocked more than other Europeans by the definite worsening of the East-West climate.

The Germans had erroneously taken détente as a sure thing forever. And many of the French and quite a few Americans, today, misunderstand the German trauma as pacifism or as nationalism. The French, for instance, had taken for granted the role of the Federal Republic as a buffer, as a glacis or as an advance combat post. And so they have come to the illusion that the Germans are the only nation in Europe to have really given up their national identity. No, they have not.

The Europeans are a group you Americans would like to regard as a single ally. Even Henry Kissinger talks of “the Europeans” in his quoted article.

One rather often hears in your country, “why don’t you Europeans just form a United States of Europe, as we have done in America?” Some of the reasons we do not have something to do with the fact of more than a thousand years’ history of controversy and antagonism, and you tend mostly to overlook the several thousand years of speech barriers in Europe. You must also not overlook the differing categories of political status. There are nuclear states like France and Britain and non-nuclear states like the rest. Some have veto powers as United Nations members, like France and Britain again, and the rest are normal United Nations members. With regard to Berlin, there are guarantee powers and receivers of guarantees and so on. I think that most Americans are not aware of these differentiations in Europe, and this is why you tend toward an understandable impatience with, and in some cases even contempt for, Europe. But be sure that, the other way around, people in Europe tend to a non-understanding rejection of America’s blowing both hot and cold.

To end this discussion before getting on to military strategy, let me mention that the Kissinger article I have cited also says that if one country dominates the alliance in all essential matters, as you do, being big and powerful, then there remains for the dependent members hardly a stimulus for serious efforts at political coordination. Well, I let this stand as it stands, but I would like to add that dependency does corrupt — a nd it corrupts not only the dependent partners but also the oversized partner who is making decisions almost single-handedly. Now we ought on both sides of the Atlantic to make an effort to get back to joint decision-making in order not to let ourselves be corrupted because of being too dependent or because of being too big.

Now a word on military strategy. I think it is a fact that most of the European governments rely too much on American nuclear weapons and that the conventional defenses are, to some degree, being neglected by some European countries. And I think it is also a fact that both the United States and the Europeans at present are placing an unsuitably high value on nuclear deterrence. The so-called flexible response which I mentioned earlier on is no longer really flexible. In case of a defense operation it would be flexible only for a very short period, days rather than weeks. It has in fact become a military strategy of inflexible response because, due to the lack of conventional forces, the situation would very soon escalate into the nuclear field, and that means the destruction of Central Europe. That is why within the framework of a newly formulated grand strategy of the Alliance a reform of the military component is also necessary. I am not arguing for abstention from nuclear weapons, but I am arguing in favour of a better conventional balance. It is not necessary to be able to place one West German soldier in the field for every Soviet soldier. The defender can make do with certain numerical inferiority, but an improved military equilibrium does require improved military outfitting of the manpower reserves and requires secondarily the creation of reserves of British military personnel. And it requires in the third place a strengthening of the conventionally committable German air force and more conventional ammunition for the German army.

Let me tackle a few principles of military strategy. I have devoted part of my time to that over the last twenty-five years and to grand strategy as well. I have written books and I have been the defense secretary of my country, which under the German constitution also means the Supreme Commander.

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Let me outline a few principles of military strategy from experience, I believe that the instruments and methods of implementation of one’s military strategy must vary due to circumstances, due to technological progress or the state of the art, and so on. But the principles, I guess, remain the same. And a short-hand description, very superficially articulated, would contain six principles:

The principle of deterrence. To deter any possible or potential adversary from aggression by showing him that you are able to inflict damage upon him is not an invention of the last twenty-five years. The principle of deterrence has existed throughout history, which, at the same time, means that it hasn’t always worked well.
Make the potential adversary understand, that we will in fact have the means and the goods to execute what we threaten to do. Never threaten something which we are not prepared to do in the event. That is the worst thing one can do. So I call this second point the principle of credibility.
You have to reckon with the possibility that deterrence could fail, and then you would actually have to defend your territory against violations whether they are on land or at sea or from the air or from space. You need the means to do so. This I call the principle of adequacy of defense.
And this then very quickly leads to the fourth principle, namely the principle of continuous reevaluation of what is adequate.
In the first place, of course, not only in the diplomatic but also in the military field, one has to put oneself in the shoes of the adversary, to try to understand the situation from his point of view, from his point of interest. Try to understand his interest, his posture, his plans, and to evaluate them. Do not threaten him into irrational behaviour; don’t scare

him, that is, into an irrational arms race, but try to convince him that he can also feel secure. Without going into any further detail I would call this the principle of equilibrium or balance of power.

By the way, as a German living just some twenty miles from the iron curtain, it would take me just three quarters of an hour to meet the first Russian tank division. It would take them thirty-five minutes to get to my place. Well, it’s easy to laugh about this if you live in Salt Lake City. In our situation we have long since understood that there is no such thing as total security for one side only. It is a utopian concept between two so powerful adversaries as are the Soviet Union and their alliance on the one side and our alliance on the other. It should be understood that ultimate security for one side would mean ultimate insecurity for the other, and to some degree they ought to understand their roles as being partners in security. This is some of the reasoning in depth behind the principle of equilibrium and balance of power.

The sixth principle has come more into the open only in the last couple of years, and that is the principle of acceptability of one’s own strategy. Let me deal with that. Of course, the first five principles do raise questions, such as what is credible, what will be credible tomorrow, what is adequate today, what will it be tomorrow, where do we have equilibrium, and how do we stabilize it. But, obviously, the credibility of some of our former postures and plans suffers nowadays from growing deficits in our own public opinion. In all our parliaments, in the United States Senate, in all our churches and universities, whether in North America or Europe, in many, many places throughout the Western community, there are growing deficits regarding the acceptance of our own strategy.

I will mention a few examples that can make this deficit clear. For instance, the various freeze proposals coming out of America: it’s an American invention, the no-early-first-use proposal regarding nuclear weapons, or the more radical or fundamental no-firstuse proposal, or the various concepts invoked during the ongoing debate on rapid deployment forces or the missiles; or the debate going on about the Pershing-2 in Europe and the ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe. Obviously, we are to a much higher degree than ever before in some trouble with our credibility at home over the acceptability of our military postures and plans. And if we are not successful in convincing our public, then public opinion might lead to a situation wherein parliaments might not give us adequate laws and adequate means.

Look, for example, to what religious leaders in your country have had to say about all these questions. I have read it with great interest. Those in my country and in others have taken up the issue as well. Political leaders are being seriously questioned about our morality, that is, in connection with our military plans. Well, I think in general for a democratic society this is a necessary debate, and at least it is an unavoidable debate. It is a serious task to provide the answers to that debate and to provide the answers in due course of time and not only from hindsight.

If one fails to provide the answers, our credibility also as far as deterrence is concerned vis-a-vis the adversary will suffer dangerously. This is a very important insight. If we do fail to convince our own public, our own parliaments, how can we hope to convince the Soviet Union? If our credibility suffers in the eyes of our own public, then the credibility or strategy of course will also suffer, as will the evaluations of those twelve or thirteen leaders in the Kremlin.

So, obviously, the principle of acceptability of our military strategy is of growing importance. One cannot impose a military strategy on one’s own forces in an open society that has not been accepted at least by the majority of one’s society. Those times when rulers could do so are over, and no strategy will be accepted tomorrow and the day after which projects the probability of destroying what one wishes to defend.

It’s easy to say this in an academic forum; it’s easy to say this in America, but it has a much deeper meaning in Germany. It has the meaning that no strategy will in the long run — and the long run is not that long — be accepted in my country that threatens to destroy my country. We wish to defend our countries. I have said that Germany is about the size of Utah, in terms of territory, but there are sixty million people, six or seven armies, and on top of those armies we have five thousand nuclear weapons on our soil already. And the people living in the neighbourhood of these weapons think, very naively, but very correctly, that they are nice little targets for Russian nuclear rockets. They are targets, and a few more are being stationed right now and will be stationed during the next two years.

Think of all this happening on the soil of Utah, and you will understand why there is a peace movement in my country. I am not a member of it, I have been fighting it, but I wish you to have some understanding for the concern and anxiety of some of my people and countrymen. It’s a densely populated area, very close to the Russians, with a dense population of nuclear weapons as well. I dare to prophesy that the idea of first use of nuclear weapons by ourselves against merely conventional violations from their side will in the course of the later eighties be evaluated more and more as being inadequate and more and more as being unacceptable. I think this is foreseeable. We had better prepare for a change in our military posture.

I was talking about manpower and manpower reserves. I was Secretary of Defense at the time when the United States abandoned the draft in national service in order to calm down campus unrest in the very early seventies. We decided to maintain it. It was not easy to explain to the German public that the Americans thought they could defend themselves without the draft while we couldn’t, while we needed to maintain it. I am still sticking to that decision, as do the French and others on continental Europe, because I still believe that in order to defend one’s country what one needs in the first place is men in uniform, soldiers. That is the first priority. And secondly one needs motivation in these men and thirdly one needs education in military skill and military training and personal capabilities in one’s soldiers, and only in the fourth place, I guess, does one need money or a defense budget to buy planes and tanks and guns, and what have you. This is my order of priorities.

You will not win a war against somebody or deter the Soviet Union from doing something, something evil, just by presenting them with a calculation of how many dollars or deutschmarks we have spent for our defenses. We will deter them by showing them that we actually can defend ourselves, and this is being done by men and not by invoices.

At the risk of the Soviets’ clapping their hands right now, I will add a rather disappointing remark, because obviously the consequence of what I have just said leads to the reintroduction of the draft in the United States. I think it’s a matter for you to decide, not for us, but I can assure you that it would impress the Soviets deeply if you did. It would impress your European allies. You need not make so many speeches and gestures; just do this and it would possibly have moral advantages as well. This, now, I say as a European, and I know that the English and the Americans have different traditions in that field: But I am not so sure about the morality of letting regular soldiers defend one’s country and just comforting oneself by telling oneself that one has paid so and so many dollars for defense to the internal revenue.

Now a last word about leadership. Of course, in all these fields leadership is needed. Men like George Marshall or Ernest Bevin, Jean Monnet, Charles DeGaulle — frequently it has come from the United States, from Kennedy, from Nixon, from Ford, from Kissinger, just to mention a few people — were leaders in the real sense of the word. On the other hand, I know that many Americans find it a burden to have to carry responsibility for the whole world, and certainly it is a burden. And from time to time, some Americans are tempted to pursue isolationist ideas, and from time to time other Americans are tempted to play the big boss. Both these attitudes don’t have much to do with leadership. Many Europeans, I must confess, find it disagreeable to accommodate to American leadership. On the other hand, they feel that leadership among free and sovereign nations cannot consist of instructions and orders, press releases, television interviews, either in the political or in the military or in the economic field; it must be based on discussion, on questions and answers, new questions, new answers. Finally, consensus must be based on the principle of give and take.

It’s your economic strength as well as your military and political power which at this present moment of history does predestine the United States to lead. This is how we in Europe see it, although we don’t like to admit it. We even may say publicly that we don’t like it, but we understand it as a necessity. This is how the Japanese see it, although they don’t like it either — even if they don’t say so publicly.

On the other hand, the vitality of your nation, your very young nation, makes it easier for you to take the lead, and beyond that you have to know that if America fails in leadership of the group of industrialized democracies — which is not just the member states of the North Atlantic Alliance, but would also have to comprise Japan — there will be nobody else to take it up. So leadership is a precious thing. You mustn’t throw it away; you mustn’t let leadership be dissipated by loose talk or by inaction. One can lose leadership easily. But right now in this moment of history there is nobody who would be able to take it up.

But in order to execute your leadership you are not exempt from advice. Leadership has to do with discussion and consensus by discussion. And this is exactly the point where your task comes into focus. In an open and democratic society no leader can make a decision alone. No leader is exempt from criticism. A leader needs to convince and carry his own people; it’s our peoples who are choosing and influencing their leaders, and so will you be doing. And the same is true in a group of fifteen sovereign nations. Please see to it that you are well prepared to analyze and judge, and then make your influence felt. A leading nation has to know and to understand the world outside its borders. Please make sure that you sincerely try to understand the world outside the American borders and never forget that leadership in a group of sovereign nations can only be exercised if it includes advice and consent, to use the phrase of your constitution.

Now, I don’t know if it’s necessary in the end, to prevent a misreading of my talk, ladies and gentlemen, but just in order to assure you, you have been listening to a man who never has suffered from any inferiority complex, not vis-a'-vis you Americans, but also not vis-à-vis the Russian military machine nor vis-a'-vis the ideological impact that communism could make — no complex, for a couple of reasons, one of them being that I am a citizen of a state that is allied to the United States of America, allied to other friends in Western Europe, the French in particular, a state that is a member of a great alliance that has served all of us well for over thirty-five years — t he most successful alliance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries together in preserving peace for its members. And because I know that my own people and my own territory will be defended not only by our soldiers but also by the Alliance, at least I say this within brackets, as long as my own people provide their fair share toward that effort.

Now I hope I have given enough substance for argument, for doubt, for contradiction, for questions. I would like in the end to quote my friend Lord Carrington, who will soon become General Secretary of the North Atlantic Alliance. He said recently in an article: “We are now in a position of considerable strength. But of course, confidence should not shade into complacency. It is perhaps a good moment to reflect coolly on the strength of the West as well as on our weaknesses and compare them with those of Russia.” And he talks of worrying about the situation where, he says, “solid simple facts seem to be in danger of erosion by a potent combination of passionate political advocacy and technocratic obscurity.” And he says that it seems to him extraordinary and against the dictates of common sense and against the evidence of our own eyes for anyone to claim that in military terms the Western alliance is in danger of sinking to its knees. He underlines the necessity of sobriety and common resolution and says that the West would make a major mistake if it were to reduce East- West diplomacy to nothing but nuclear accountancy. And he ends by saying that the public are understandably concerned if their own nerve of nuclear competition is overexposed. We must take a broad view that dehumanization of the East-West relationship would be the quickest road to catastrophy. Sound common sense is being called for. So far Peter Carrington.

I agree with all that my friend says here. I am aware that tonight I have spoken to posterity, because all of you students will have to work for a world to come, a world the shape of which may just be emerging from the upheavals of the presently dangerous situation of our global society and our global economy. Let it be a world of peace. Let it be a world of mutual understanding, a world of freedom and humanity. In all dangers, there is always also a chance. And there is a chance if we really and sincerely try to learn lessons from history.