In Looking Eastward, Germans See West’s Profit

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s visit to Moscow this week will raise the heat on a conflict between West Germany and the United States over Bonn’s attitude toward liberalization in the Soviet Union. When Kohl comes to Washington next month, he will hear American criticism that Germany’s enthusiasm for Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is leading to economic and disarmament policies that endanger the Western alliance.

West Germany’s granting a $1.67-billion credit to the Soviet Union has already been criticized by U.S. Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci as freeing Soviet funds for military use. (Britain, Italy and France are readying another $4.5 billion in bank credits to the Soviets.)

Dramatic evidence of the rift came in May when the U.S. ambassador to Bonn, Richard R. Burt, in an unusual speech to the French Institute for International Relations accused West Germany of “Gorbymania.� Burt, who is angling to be the national-security adviser in a Bush Administration, also warned of an anti-nuclear-weapons alliance between West Germany’s left and right and urged the French to help keep Germany “anchored� in the alliance.

Ever since Bonn began its policy of detente almost two decades ago, the West has been uneasy about the implications. While hard-liners believe that it could lead to a reunified Germany, few serious students of German politics can imagine a fully integrated relationship between West Germany, where even the Social Democrats are free-marketers, and an East Germany that bad-mouths perestroika. It is even more unlikely after the European Economic Community’s “market without borders� is established in 1992.

Now, as the allies search for a common response to changes in the Soviet Bloc, Bonn’s singular enthusiasm for Gorbachev needs explaining.

The West German consensus supporting perestroika is driven by evidence that liberalization in the Soviet Union is leading to disarmament and to more human rights--as Kohl was proud to demonstrate this week.

Dietrich Stobbe, a Social Democrat in Parliament and former mayor of West Berlin, explained, “If the Soviet Union has more freedom, there will be less dominance toward Eastern Europe; if the East European nations get more maneuver room for politics, that is good for all of Europe.�

Bonn especially hopes for a human-rights spillover in East Germany, where many relatives of West Germans live. Its own German-German detente , with Bonn offering favorable terms of trade and subsidizing of roads and railroads, has led to eased travel restrictions on East Germans. Last year 3 million out of a population of 17 million traveled to the West.

Bonn backs disarmament out of conviction that an East-West confrontation in Europe would begin on German soil. Disagreement over modernization of short-range missiles has provoked sharp differences between Washington and Bonn.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has 88 short-range Lance missiles deployed in West Germany; the Soviets have 1,365 short-range weapons (defined as up to 300 miles in range). The United States wants to modernize the Lances, with procurement and development next year and deployment in 1995. Congress is unlikely to vote financing unless West Germany approves stationing.

However, West Germans want a disarmament agreement on short-range nuclear weapons. Volker Ruhe, security spokesman in Parliament for Kohl’s Christian Democrats, explained, “When short-range missiles are deployed in Germany, they have to be used in Germany--the shorter the range, the deader the Germans.�

The chancellor’s office believes that the matter can be decided only after there is a clearer view of where conventional-force and long-range-missile-reduction talks are going. An adviser added, “It doesn’t fit that when we discuss disarmament we put forward a new modernization.�

To West Germans the conservative American view lacks vision. “If people stick to their enemy picture, because it was so easy and comfortable to consider the Soviet Union evil, it will be disastrous and stupid for the West,� said Helmut Schaefer, deputy foreign minister. “We don’t forget our security situation, but we should not sit back and look like a theater audience at the stage where Gorbachev wins or fails. We should use the time so he doesn’t fail.� He added, “Economic cooperation could create a different climate in which the questions of disarmament can be solved more easily.�

A Kohl adviser went further, saying that it was in the West’s interest for the Soviet Union to be integrated into the international economic system and to become more dependent on the West. He explained, “That means the Soviet Union realistically must give up its idea of destroying the system, because it lives on the system.�

It takes courage and imagination for American politicians confronting a new Soviet reality to discard the politically safe dogma that whatever the Soviets do is a cover for a plot to defeat the West militarily. The real danger is not enthusiasm for Gorbachev; it is the old mind-set that makes U.S. policy-makers unable to seize the historic moment and turn the Cold War into the economic competition at which the West excels.