Correspondence

CORRESPONDENCE. NATO's Demise? To the Editor: Immanuel Wallerstein's article "North Atlanticism in Decline" (SAIS Review, Summer 1982) declares that the end of NATO is near. He may in fact be correct; he is certainly not the only person who sees this event on the horizon. Yet, given the number of soothsaying analysts contributing to the current body of literature on the future viability of the North Atlantic alliance, it should be incumbent upon each to prove the logic of his case better than Professor Wallerstein does. Professor Wallerstein's argument reduced to its essentials seems to be that U.S. economic hegemony has disappeared as has the importance of the "great ideological faultline" between East and West. With ideology no longer providing the brake on the "thrust" of economic forces, a competitive struggle within the capitalist world "will press objectively toward geopolitical realignments , despite the degree to which such realignments will contradict ideological commitments." The first element of Professor Wallerstein 's argument is indeed important. The disappearance of U.S. economic hegemony is perhaps the key change we have witnessed in the postwar order, in my mind considerably more important than the emergence of superpower parity for explaining current and probably future difficulties in the alliance. There is currently no "stabilizer" for the world economic system , which, in turn, has permitted the rise of the competitive atmosphere among the allies as well as the tendency to examine very closely where one's allies' policies may in fact be at least partially responsible for one's own problems of economic management . One of the inevitable results of this situation is the resurgence of the burdensharing discussion we see within the alliance today. Current tensions within NATO may well be the most serious the alliance has ever witnessed. For the first time there is an absence of strategic consensus coinciding with an economic crisis ofdramatic proportions. But alliances presumably collapse when their raison d'être no longer exists or when another "threat" becomes a more important criterion for determining national policy. And it is here that Professor Wallerstein fails to provide adequate evidence for his argument. First, while he talks of what has changed in the postwar order, he gives only glancing acknowledgment of what has not changed. Perhaps the most important of these is the basic nature of the confrontation between East and West in Europe—i.e., the reasons why NATO was formed in the first place. Professor Wallerstein describes this as an ideological confrontation, and of course it was and remains so. But the differences that emerged between East and West after World War II were considerably deeper than just a question of priorities within societies. At issue was how to organize security in 247 248 SAIS REVIEW Europe. Soviet security requirements have always included maximum political control, enforced by military power, in Eastern Europe (and to the extent possible in Western Europe). It is this notion of total control which the West has always found incompatible with its own security requirements. Despite all of the changes we have witnessed in the East-West relationship since the cold war, this basic problem still remains —and with it the raison d'être of the alliance, something that continues to be recognized by wide segments of populations in all NATO countries. The second problem with Professor Wallerstein's analysis is that there is absolutely no ineluctable logic to his assertion that since ideology has lost its braking power, economic pressures will force a realignment of global relationships. For this to be true, the economic threat the allies see from each other would have to be greater than that confronted from the outside world. But surely the basic economic challenge of the 1980s is not that which the advanced industrial countries pose each other, but that which they collectively face from the newly industrializing procedures of the Third World. Our countries face permanent shifts of comparative advantage to other parts of the world and the question is how to restructure our productive base to adapt to the new conditions. It is anything but certain that this will result in uncontrollable centrifugal pressures in the industrial world significant enough to force...