The Double Standard

Only two days after Secretary of State Dean Rusk in Frankfurt repeated the U.S. pledge to maintain six divisions in West Germany, newspapers reported that the U.S. has "scheduled the withdrawal" of an armored cavalry regiment from Germany. Sooner or later it may indeed be withdrawn but not for the time being. Anyway, the 5,000-man regiment plus five other regiments were rushed to Germany at the height of the Berlin crisis in 1961 in order to reinforce the six U.S. divisions committed to NATO. These temporary reinforcements would all have been brought back after the crisis eased--at a saving of nearly $200 million a year--if the Pentagon had been allowed its way. But to placate Bonn, the Kennedy Administration promised in September that it would not withdraw any troops "without consultation." The furor in Bonn last week forced President Kennedy to repeat, somewhat wearily, that the six NATO divisions plus the six additional regiments that are not committed to NATO would remain on German soil.

The excitement over a single regiment is a symptom of what Washington calls NATO's "double standard." German fears are understandable, but Europeans in general, Washington feels, expect the U.S. to meet its NATO commitments as a matter of course, while never coming near to fulfilling their own obligations in the alliance. As one U.S. official told reporters last week: "For a long time NATO has been a 20-mule-team wagon, with one mule pulling and the others sitting in the wagon. It is time for them to get out and pull too."

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