The British Game

High in the balmy skies over Naples this week, planes from the U.S. Sixth Fleet will proudly spell out the word NATO. In the ancient German garrison town of Mainz, detachments from NATO armies will march in a grosser Zapfenstreich--the torchlight parade that is the German army's version of Britain's famed tattoo. In Washington the foreign ministers of the Atlantic nations are scheduled to sit around a V-shaped table to hear a speech from NATO's first commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

NATO is ten years old this week--and the occasion would normally be observed by congratulations on having kept the peace for a decade, mixed with strictures about the need for more strength. Instead, as has happened before, the Russians have given the Atlantic Alliance a jolt which shows that, below the surface, some basic disagreements exist in it.

Light Luggage. Last week, in language that in casual reading sounded virtually identical, the U.S., Britain and France--the three NATO powers with conqueror's rights in Berlin--fired off carefully coordinated notes to Moscow. They proposed a Big Four foreign ministers' conference on Germany, to begin May 11 and be followed," as soon as developments warrant," by the summit conference on which Nikita Khrushchev had set his heart.

But the apparently insignificant differences in wording reflected some major differences in attitudes. Of all the NATO powers, none is so eager to negotiate with Moscow as Great Britain. And as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made his stately progress from Paris to Bonn to Washington, Britain's popular press had clamorously accorded him one diplomatic triumph after another (MAC DOES IT AGAIN), as if one intransigent ally after another had been converted to Macmillan's concept of what kind of deal the West might make with Russia over Berlin.

In fact, as London's Economist soberly noted last week, "by the time he got it home, Mr. Macmillan's diplomatic luggage was pretty light." In the face of French, German and U.S. skepticism, Macmillan had dropped one pet concept after another. In the beginning the British press, taking its cue from the Macmillan-Khrushchev communique which mentioned a possible limitation of weapons "in an agreed area of Europe," had talked eagerly of steps toward "disengagement" of Western and Soviet forces in Central Europe. Macmillan's aides diluted this to a "thinning out" of the military, and finally to a simple "freeze" that would preserve the military status quo.

"These British!" Despite Harold Macmillan's insistence--a correct one--that he had been one of the few British politicians to oppose the Munich deal with Hitler and was not advocating appeasement now, most of Britain's partners continued to cherish a surprisingly strong suspicion that Britain is "wobbly" over Berlin. There were shrugging Italian references to "perfidious Albion," and open questioning in France and Germany of Britain's staunchness. Charles de Gaulle flatly declared that disengagement would be disastrous unless it involved "a zone that is as near to the Urals as to the Atlantic. Otherwise," snapped De Gaulle, "what a narrow strip would remain between the River Meuse and the ocean in which to deploy and use the means of the West." In Bonn, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was highly incensed by reports that Britain's idea of an armed freeze was one that would ban nuclear weapons for the West German army. "These British!" snorted Adenauer. "They should learn that they cannot lead the Continent any longer."

In elaborate briefings, the British dropped proposals that--if they got a bad reaction--were described as only suggestions to "study." During his visit to Moscow, Macmillan apparently became convinced that Nikita Khrushchev is obsessed with fear that the U.S. intends to attack Russia at the first opportunity. Macmillan's conclusion: the way to cure Khrushchev of his obsession is for the West to make public admission--at least by implication--that Soviet mastery of Eastern Europe is a "fact of life" that the Western powers do not intend to try to change by force. For doing this, the West might get new assurances of its rights in Berlin.

But if Soviet control of East Germany and of Eastern Europe is such a clear fact of life, as Khrushchev likes to call it, why does Khrushchev care so much whether it is formally acknowledged by the West? Obviously, such recognition would give the final stamp of legitimacy to Soviet colonialism. By destroying all hope in the conquered lands, the West could indeed relax tensions for Russia, but at a cost of weakening itself.

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