New Variations on Old Themes
1 w h e n one reads today about the crises and problems facing NATO, it is worth realizing that they are essentially new variations on very old themes. Indeed, when one looks back at the thirty years of NATO, one finds barely a moment when the Alliance was not said to be in a crisis-and very often it was. The Alliance began at the time of the first Berlin crisis, and its signature came shortly before the end of the Soviet blockade, in spring, 1949. As soon as the ink was dry on the treaty’s paper, a battle began over German rearmament, and intensified after what was seen as the Soviet offensive in Korea. That battle lasted several years. As soon as a formula had been found for rearming the West Germans, the Suez crisis racked the Alliance; and as soon as that episode had been liquidated, Mr. Khrushchev began to bang shoes, threaten to bury us, and provoke another set of Berlin crises. That in turn led to another protracted intra-Alliance dispute over the famous-or infamousMulti-Lateral Force (MLF), which fostered not only discord among the allies but also an intellectual civil war among the academic members of the U.S. strategic community. That crisis more or less coincided with another long battle over General de Gaulle’s idiosyncracies and his decision to withdraw France from the military organization of the Alliance. The latest shock was the crisis of 1973-74 over the Middle East and the oil embargo. Even the present dilemmas pale by comparison. On the other hand, during the few periods that did not have any major crisis, the Europeans usually charged that they were being neglected by the Americans. That was the case during the exceptional period from 1969-the year of de Gaulle’s disappearance from the political scene-to Mr. Kissinger’s bizarre desire to christen 1973 the Year of the Continent, thus mixing the categories of time and space. (There was, during those quiet years, a crisis that agitated American-European relations, but not in NATO itself: the monetary crisis that began when President Nixon and Secretary of the Treasury Connally put an end to the convertibility of the dollar.)
The Western Alliance: Drift or Harmony?
I A number of factors have led, in the past couple of years, to an acute sense of crisis among the members of the Atlantic Alliance and to heightened tensions within it.' Of those, the recent report of the Directors of the American, French, German and British Councils or Institutes of International Relations constitutes an excellent survey.2 Clearly, the three fundamental considerations are: a new awareness of the fact that the world has become a single strategic stage, and that the security of the members of the Alliance can be threatened by events occurring outside its geographic area, especially in the Middle East and Persian Gulf region; the unfavorable evolution of the military balance in Europe, because of the relentless modernization of Soviet conventional forces and of the development of new Soviet middle-range nuclear weapon systems that are both mobile and highly precise; and the collapse of the SovietAmerican detente. In this essay, I will concentrate on what I deem essential: the different reactions to these events within the Alliance, and the causes of these divergences. I will then suggest certain ways to restore harmony.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.