Revisionism Up-to-Date
The Alliance.
by Richard J. Barnet.
Simon & Schuster. 511 pp. $19.95.
Richard J. Barnet is a founder and corrector of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.; a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the New Yorker; and the author of nine books, including The Economy of Death (about the “militarization” of America), The Roots of War (illuminatingly subtitled “The Men and Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy”), Global Reach (about the power of multinational corporations), The Giants (about the United States and the Soviet Union), and Real Security (about the uselessness of military power). His new book, The Alliance, is a history of America’s relations with Western Europe and Japan since 1945.
The Alliance begins with an account of the rebuilding of Germany in the aftermath of World War II, and ends with an account of the rising tide of fear in Germany and the rest of Western Europe that the United States is about to start (a nuclear) World War III. In between, Barnet describes the creation of the Atlantic alliance and its slow disintegration over the last thirty years.
The alliance was in disarray, according to Barnet, from the day the NATO treaty was signed. NATO’s declared purpose was to prevent a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Yet at the time, he argues, no one in authority actually believed such an attack was likely. NATO’s real purposes were, rather, political: to stimulate the recovery of Western Europe; to encourage European integration; to provide an adequate defense against internal subversion; to force the Soviets to negotiate the reunification of a free and capitalist Germany. But in order to drum up domestic support for the alliance, Western politicians found it necessary to create a war scare and a mythical Soviet threat.
For the United States, the alliance served as the main expression of what Barnet calls American “hegemony” over the Western capitalist democracies. The perpetuation of the alliance thus quickly became an end in itself—so much so that in 1952 the United States refused Stalin’s offer to negotiate the reunification of a neutral and democratic Germany. According to Bar-net, the United States was afraid that such a deal would encourage neutralism, dilute American influence in Europe, and imperil the unity of the West.
In fact, writes Barnet, the bonds of unity were already weakening. Despite their professed interest in resisting the spread of Communism, the allies were unable to mount a concerted military effort to save French Indochina in 1954. Similarly, when two years later Britain and France (and Israel) invaded Egypt after Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal, the United States humiliated them by forcing their withdrawal.
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While the partners were finding that their alliance counted for little beyond the boundaries of Europe, they were also having trouble devising a plausible military strategy. In the 1950’s, reliance on American nuclear weapons for the defense of Western Europe had become politically necessary: the cost of “maintaining conventional forces big enough to be a credible deterrent to the Soviet attack no one quite believed was coming” was too high. But by the late 1950’s, the Soviet Union had acquired intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Since a nuclear exchange would thus have meant the annihilation of Western Europe, NATO’s military strategy was hopeless almost from the start.
The danger of nuclear war was made frighteningly real by the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Although the outcome of the crisis was considered a great triumph for the West, in fact, according to Bar-net, America’s handling of the crisis backfired. By humiliating the Soviet Union, the Kennedy administration pushed it into a massive nuclear-weapons build-up to challenge American superiority. And by dramatizing how much European security depended upon the United States, the administration inspired the French to build up their own nuclear deterrent and to begin the process that would lead, several years later, to their withdrawal from the formal structure of NATO.
The United States proved equally short-sighted with its deepening involvement in the war in Vietnam. The Johnson administration tried to enlist allied support for the war effort, but France had denounced American involvement from the beginning, and as the war dragged on, becoming increasingly unpopular in Western Europe, the United States could hardly restrain the other allies from following suit. By the late 1960’s, when Vietnam had spawned a worldwide student protest movement against the entire system of liberal, capitalist, democratic values the alliance had been founded to defend, association with the United States—the protest movement’s primary target—had become a political liability for the governments of Western Europe.
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Yet while relations between the United States and Western Europe grew increasingly strained, relations between the allies and the Soviet Union were steadily improving. Between the two superpowers, says Barnet, a de-facto détente had been in existence since the Cuban missile crisis; it was officially inaugurated in 1972 with a flurry of agreements including, most notably, the SALT I accord. But the new relationship soon began to crumble when Congress insisted on making most-favored-nation status and the extension of credit contingent upon freer emigration for Soviet Jews. The Nixon administration had also made the mistake of selling détente domestically by arguing that it would cause the Soviet Union to modify its strategy and behavior. The Russians, however, according to Barnet, had never pretended that this would be the outcome of détente; they continued to arm revolutionary Marxist movements and to build up their nuclear arsenal. American hardliners soon seized on these Soviet activities as evidence that détente had failed. So successful were they in fomenting a political backlash that in 1980 President Jimmy Carter (who had once decried America’s “inordinate fear of Communism”) felt compelled for domestic political reasons to impose sanctions on the Soviet Union in response to its invasion of Afghanistan.
Having suspended nearly all major aspects of détente, the United States urged its allies to do the same. For them, however, and especially for Germany, détente had been a success. It had put an end to the unnatural isolation of Western Europe from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And improved relations with the Eastern bloc, in addition to bringing economic benefits, had given the allies a cherished new political independence from the United States. They had no intention of sacrificing détente to help the Carter administration outflank its right-wing critics.
If the allies thought the Carter administration’s reaction to Afghanistan was reckless, they have found the Reagan administration’s attitude toward the Soviet Union far worse. Reagan himself had long echoed the “primitive nationalism and bloodcurdling militarism” of “the extreme right-wing in America,” and the men he brought with him into office “all had a taste for confrontation and some seemed to want a war.” They began by issuing a “call to do battle with the ‘Russian threat’ by killing peasants in El Salvador.” The request appalled the allies, who favored a political settlement “with the very forces whose extermination the United States was now underwriting.” Even more alarming was the American decision to embark on a massive build-up of nuclear weapons and delay arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union. From Reagan’s rhetoric and policies, only one conclusion, for millions of Europeans, can be drawn: the real threat to the safety of Western Europe comes from the United States.
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As for the Soviet Union, in Barnet’s view it has always been a “defensive” power vis-à-vis the Western democracies. Thus, he suggests, the coup it staged in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was a defensive reaction to the political success of the Marshall Plan; the Berlin blockade was a defensive reaction to America’s plan to build and arm West Germany; postwar threats to invade Western Europe were always meant to deter a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by the United States; and, more recently, the invasion of Afghanistan was a defensive step taken to shore up a faltering Communist ally, and posed no danger to Western interests in the Persian Gulf.
It is clearly his view of the Soviet Union that leads Barnet to depict the Western alliance as little more than a giant fraud—a military alliance, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of troops, formed to deter an adversary that poses no real threat. NATO was created merely to serve temporary political and economic interests; now that those interests no longer exist and the fraud has been exposed, it follows that the alliance cannot, and should not, survive.
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Like the standard revisionist version of the cold war which this book updates, Barnet’s history of the Western alliance rests on several false arguments. The first is that in the immediate postwar years no danger existed of Soviet aggression in Western Europe. That this danger was in fact very real was made plain by the behavior of the Soviet Union at the time: by its subversion of a democratic Czechoslovakia, its fomenting of a Communist insurrection in Greece, its encroachments on Turkey, and its attempts to frighten the Western allies into relinquishing control of a free West Berlin. It was these acts of aggression, designed to extend the domination of the Soviet Union even beyond the conquests it had already made in Eastern Europe, that led to the creation of NATO, a truly defensive alliance whose purpose was to prevent just such an outcome. It has served that purpose now for thirty-five years.
Secondly, in order to blame the failure of détente on the United States, Barnet focuses on the issue of American motives and Soviet perceptions. But regardless of motives and perceptions, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a statement of principles initiating détente; in pursuing its aggressive policies, the Soviet Union has consistently violated those principles. The list of countries that have fallen under Soviet political and/or military domination in the era of détente now includes Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Yemen, Afghanistan, Nicaragua. Moreover, these countries are not merely Soviet clients or outposts for the projection of Soviet power; they are also places afflicted by the horrors of life under Soviet-style rule. In most cases that life has been imposed, not by means of an “invasion” of Soviet troops, but through Soviet-supported terrorism, subversion, and revolution.
It is, finally, his indifference to the consequences of a life under Soviet rule that leaves Barnet undisturbed by the possibility that the Soviet threat to Western Europe might take some form other than outright invasion; that the formidable military power of the Soviet Union might, in the absence of the American “protectorate” which (he claims) Europeans today find so irksome, be used to intimidate Western Europe into becoming a Soviet protectorate, with all that such a development would imply for the future of European democracy.
Quite apart from bringing about the demise of democracy in Western Europe, the dissolution of the alliance would put an end to America’s role as a world power. Richard Barnet makes no bones about the pleasure with which he views this latter prospect; his disingenuous history of the alliance is an attempt to make it appear inevitable.
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