America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Ever since the breach of the Berlin Wall last November, the world has been pondering a new version of an old question: Can the interests of all Europeans be reconciled with the desire of 78 million Germans to live within a single state? This week's elections in East Germany are a reminder that the Germans will decide on their own when to unify. But the rest of the world still has a say in how unification affects NATO, European integration and Soviet reform. George Bush's position is simple and bold. He wants to keep NATO in Europe, a unified Germany in NATO, U.S. troops in Germany, a reformer in the Kremlin and a conservative in the German chancellorship.

By what he does and says in the months to come, Bush hopes to help Mikhail Gorbachev fend off the charge that he "lost Germany." At the same time, the U.S. President is doing everything he can to bolster Helmut Kohl for the West German elections in December. Kohl's coalition is committed to staying in NATO. Some of his Social Democratic opponents have talked about saying thanks and goodbye to foreign troops and perhaps even embracing neutrality. The Bush Administration believes a NATO without Germany would quickly lead to a Europe without NATO, and then . . . well, anything could happen.

Like what? A neo-Stalinist backlash in the U.S.S.R. restarts the cold war and threatens a hot one? Or a secessionist warlord in Belorussia grabs some nuclear weapons from Soviet stockpiles and brandishes them? Or Hungary presses revanchist claims to Transylvania? Astonishing developments might not always be as welcome as they were last year. The Administration's warning is deliberately vague. It invites listeners to fill in the blank with their own worst fears. The American manifesto for the '90s is that a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of "unpredictability" and "instability." Those were the words that Bush used, standing beside Kohl at Camp David last month, to identify the enemy that has taken the place of Soviet expansionism.

Bush and his top aides have been telling virtually every Central European visitor to Washington -- German, Pole, Czech -- that NATO should remain intact and G.I.s should stay in West Germany, so that the postwar order does not give way to post-postwar disorder. Bush has been making essentially the same case to Gorbachev in their correspondence and telephone conversations, and he will do so in person at their summit in the U.S. this June.

Gorbachev and his comrades may yet buy the argument. But if they do, it will be because for them unpredictability is a code word for the dangers they see in a larger Germany with a larger role in the economic and political life of Europe, perhaps eventually with its own nuclear arsenal. The same anxiety motivates Czechoslovakia's playwright-President Vaclav Havel, Poland's Solidarity Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and many politicians in Western Europe. If they accept Bush's idea of NATO uber alles, it will be as a hedge against the resurgence of a malevolent Deutschland. But will the government and citizens of a unified Germany accept that idea? Will they want to be forever, or even for long, members of an alliance whose purpose, unstated but unmistakable, is not to protect them from others but to protect others from them? If that is the German Question for the '90s, there is reason to wonder what the eventual German answer will be.