Verbal Volleys

Growling across the Atlantic

From Paris to Bonn, from London to Rome, the reaction was immediate: a touch of pique, a dash of perplexity and a pinch of barely controlled anger. "It doesn't help us achieve a clearer under-standing of each other's problems, does it?" asked a British official. A diplomat in Bonn called it "unfortunate, ill tuned and wrong." Said an Italian official: "We were rather surprised. We would like to react, but it is wiser that we don't."

The restraint was admirably diplomatic, considering the provocation. The day before, U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs Lawrence Eagleburger had denounced Western Europe for its selfish neglect of the Atlantic Alliance. As he told a foreign policy conference in Washington, "We have seen a more and more inner-directed Western Europe, more and more concerned with its own problems, more and more concerned with its economic difficulties, less and less in time with the U.S. It is ever more difficult to get Western Europe to look outside its own borders." He described Western Europe's attitude as "almost a contemplation of the navel."

Eagleburger argued that an inward-looking Western Europe is a beneficiary of detente with the Soviet Union, but that the U.S., with its global security and balance-of-power concerns, views detente as a failure. The U.S. and its allies, he said, "have tended, to some degree imperceptibly, to move farther and farther apart." As a result, he predicted "a shift in the center of gravity of U.S. foreign policy" away from the Atlantic relationship and toward the Pacific, especially Japan.

Despite Western Europe's strong reaction to the accusations, there is little new in them. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in recognizing 1973 as the "year of Europe" for U.S. policy, expressed similar anxieties about an increasingly neutralist Western Europe. Eagleburger has long shared his onetime mentor's views, and has been restating them privately in recent months. His reasons for speaking out now, at a moment of relative quiet in transatlantic relations, may be as much personal as diplomatic. The Under Secretary, at 53, is widely believed to be planning to leave Government service, and may simply want to state his views clearly in his last months on the job.

Whatever the reasons, West European officials were quick to deny Eagleburger's allegations. "How can anyone in Washington charge Europe with ignoring American interests," asked a British official, "when we British, the Germans and Italians have just deployed U.S. medium-range missiles in the face of much domestic opposition?" The Paris daily Le Monde noted that French, British and Italian troops are serving beside U.S. Marines in Beirut. Not to mention, said Bonn offi cials, the broad allied support for U.S. policy in southern Africa and Central America. Eagleburger, however, is not finished. He is preparing to give a major speech on the subject in March.