Ball and branch

JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE

One of the charges often levelled at the Johnson administration is that it has 'lost interest in

Europe.' In reality the Kennedy administra- tion's preoccupation with European affairs was something of an aberration in the course of American history. After the war, notwithstand- ing the Marshall Plan and the continued presence of American troops in Western Europe, Asia enjoyed first priority in us foreign policy until, under President Kennedy, the order of priorities was temporarily reversed.

None of the President's circle of advisers was more influential in bringing about this reversal than Mr George Ball, Under-Secretary of State to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson for more than six years from January 1961, and now the us Ambassador to the United Nations. Any analysis of American foreign policy from the pen of Ambassador Ball would command attention: but in The Discipline of Power he has produced a lucid and refreshingly outspoken apologia for the European school of American foreignpolicy. I remember that after I had met Mr Ball in Washington in the autumn of 1963 one of his colleagues commented that 'poor George doesn't seem to realise that they've sawn off the branch he's sitting on.'

'Poor George' would not have agreed then, and he does not agree now. He quotes with approval the comment of an anonymous friend that the epitaph of the United States would be 'a great world power that died of a surfeit of pragmatism,' and appeals for recognition that the vital interests of his country are *most heavily concentrated in the world's north tem- perate zone.' The second principle of American foreign policy, it follows from this, should be the search for 'a better allocation of power among industrialised countries and an improved East-West balance'; and this can only come about through the reunification of Western Europe, including Britain.

The phrase 'a better allocation of power' is significant. After the war Mr Ball was a member of Jean Monnet's exclusive kindergarten, and he subsequently served for many years as counsel for the European Communities on Capitol Hill. Most American enthusiasts for European integration think of it as being the only way in which the nations of Western Europe can be induced to share the burden of 'holding the ring' against international com- munism. They seek, in other words, a 'better allocation of responsibilities.' Mr Ball is at once more realistic and more generous. He accepts — indeed he welcomes — the prospect that a united Western Europe would have its own objectives which would not always coin- cide with those of the United States; for he regards the present preponderance of the United States and the Soviet Union as unhealthy.

His relatively detached approach to the pre- dicament of Asia and the southern hemisphere produces some refreshingly unconventional and shrewd comments about such emotion-picked topics as South Africa and the Portuguese colonies. He roundly rejects all attempts to exclude nations from the pale of civilisation, whether they are applied to Communist China or to South Africa, and he is equally impatient with trade boycotts, whether applied to Rhodesia or to Eastern Europe. Instead of trying to force on the southern Africans an abandonment of apartheid, he suggests we should encourage them to do the job properly

by establishing-a series of genuinely autonomous

Bantustans for the native population.. He has no easy answer for Vietnam: and, in the light of events since his book was written, he clearly underestimates the war-weariness of his fellow- countrymen. But he is principally concerned to argue that the United States must not allow itself to become bogged down in such peripheral commitments again.

The picture of the author that emerges from The Discipline of Power is that of a civilised

and sophisticated philosopher who would make an admirable Secretary of State—if this is, as rumour has it, his ambition. Yet one is left with the nagging suspicion that the cause of European unity in which he so passionately believes would be more likely to make headway without his assistance.

This is not only because he sometimes shows a surprising insensitiveness to European sus- picions of American involvement in their designs -(notwithstanding an effective exposure of the miseries of the *special relationship,' he apparently found nothing incongruous about the way in which Mr Heath., in 1961, felt it necessary to clear the Macmillan government's approach to the European Community with him before the Six heard a word about it). It is more worrying that for all his European training he evidently has a complete mental block on the subject of the control of nuclear weapons.

Mr Ball wanted President Kennedy to use the opportunity of Nassau to put an end to the Anglo-American nuclear arrangements, and he now suggests that the existing agreements governing the exchange of knowledge and materials should be allowed to expire when they come to an end, in December 1968 and 1969 respectively. But all he can suggest in their place is that most fatuous and discredited of devices—a device of which he was the principal inventor — the multi-national force. He dis- misses out of hand the possibility of a European

deterrent based, in the first instance, on the pooling of the French and British nuclear arms, arguing—incorrectly—that it has already been flatly rejected by the Germans.

Similarly it is depressing to find that the reunification of Germany is advanced as the second main purpose of European integration.

Like most of his countrymen who have been closely involved in European affairs, Mr Ball

has been too easily impressed by the lip-service which Germans pay to this•ambition. He asks us to believe that, if they are indefinitely frustrated, at some future stage a West German government will bribe the Russians to accept reunification, in return for pledges of neutrality which would in turn lead to the resentments provoked by the Treaty of Versailles and a repetition of the prewar cycle of European history. Today we have the best of all possible arrangements. Confident in the knowledge that the Russians will never agree to reunification we can safely vie with the Germans in outrage at their obstinacy. The danger of the prewar situation sprang from the fact that Germany

was isolated and yet at the same time sur- rounded by powers who were too weak to restrain her ambitions. Today she is surrounded by allies and yet at the same time restrained in her ambitions by a power with whom she dare not try conclusions.

For these reasons the cause of European integration—from the Shannon to the Elbe— is more likely to make headway without the vigorous assistance of Mr Ball or those who share his view of American priorities. The pity is that, at a time when the American Presidency was willing to leave Europeans to work out their own destiny, the mismanage- ment of the British economy destroyed any chance that the opportunity would be seized. Much as one admires The Discipline of Power, one is left hoping that the author will not frustrate the next chance, when it comes, by too great a display of eagerness to help.