To defend the Atlantic home

Abstract

Abstract There are forces at work that would dissolve NATO in favor of a European security arrangement or no security arrangement at all. American leadership of NATO is a concept whose time has passed and which is, in itself, a threat to the alliance's future. The concept of the European Home threatens to exclude the United States from this area of vital economic and security interests. Now is the time for the United States to foster the concept of an Atlantic Home, in which the United States is a partner rather than a leader. A restructured NATO is the forum under which the Atlantic Home will survive and prosper. In order for the United States to step out of its leadership position in the alliance, the stumbling block of nuclear weapons must be removed from the NATO framework. But first, NATO's long‐standing conventional inferiority must be rectified to remove the temptation for an aggressor to attack conventionally. Now, for the first time since 1945, there is an opportunity to achieve conventional parity, through ongoing arms reduction talks and the apparent political disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. Finally, the greatest contribution to peace and stability in Western Europe and North America will be a strong sense of the Atlantic Home: a group of nations whose fates are bound together by mutual interests that transcend national interests and threats to those interests. The United States must take the initiative in this evolution, or a neo‐Ostpolitik could lead to a European Home of the twenty‐first century, which excludes, or perhaps even opposes, the United States.