Interview with Josef Joffe, 1987 [Part 2 of 2]
Summary
Josef Joffe, an international-relations analyst from the Federal Republic of Germany, has taught and written extensively in the journals Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. He has also regularly contributed essays and commentary to print and electronic media, and he has served as publisher-editor of Die Zeit, an influential German newsweekly. In the interview he conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: “Zero Hour,” Joffe describes why peace movements gathering steam in Europe in the early 1980s were unable to steer the outcome of elections. He analyzes the insecure position of a power like Germany, which was threatened by superpower relations that were either too amicable or too adversarial. Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Joffe explains, would have preferred to retain some long-range missiles instead of the zero-zero option adopted by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, on the principle that “the shorter the ranges the deader the Germans.” Joffe describes German and Western European apprehensions about the 1986 Gorbachev-Reagan Reykjavik Talks. He describes the public’s anxiety about meetings between the superpowers in which they agree “on Europe without Europe.” Joffe also covers the potential impact on Germany of “the momentum of de-nuclearization,” a direction that a coalition of ally leaders failed to block. Never a “great believer” in flexible-response strategy, Joffe is more concerned with ensuring and expanding the risk of war for the Soviet Union in order to preserve “extended deterrence.” By his calculation, the best safeguard against nuclear war is the presence of U.S. troops in Western Europe. Nations that depend on the United States’ protective umbrella, Joffe observes, continually try to gauge the reliability of their “patron power.” For different reasons, Joffe concludes, the United States and Europe need each other. And for those “overarching interests,” the alliance will endure.
Topics
International relations, Nuclear arms control, Nuclear weapons, Newspapers, Newspaper editors, Germany Foreign relations 1945-
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Transcript
Stability of the Alliance Between the United States and Western Europe
Interviewer:
Herr Joffe, we mentioned briefly the factor of domestic public opinion here, do you think that the domestic politics of nuclear weapons in Germany and in Western Europe have been completely transformed or do you think they will quietly, if everything is left well alone, they will quietly revert to as it were what they were before 1977, or do you think that things have changed?
Joffe:
I am not sure but I can tell you first of all that the picture throughout Western Europe is really quite different. You have probably the most anti-nuclear reason in Britain and and of course the least anti-nuclear reason in France with the Germans somewhere in between. Second, I don't think that anti-nuclear reason has taken hold in the electorate, it doesn't show up in those very rough, of course, public opinion figures you get out of samples of two thousand. The most important question which is going to decide all of this is what the role of parties is going to be, precisely because the populace itself does not articulate nuclear positions because they don't understand them, they don't care enough about them. The important thing is what are the leaders trying to say, are they going to persist on the anti-nuclear campaign or not and here democratic left faces a classic dilemma, if you've lost two successive elections because you went out on a limb on anti-nuclear issues, will you persist on losing issues and my sense is that the democratic left is already and will return to the center and once that happens given the decisive impact of leadership opinion on the populace that the anti-nuclear issues will at least be muted, they'll never disappear.
Interviewer:
OK, two or three questions now about what the sequence of events which you wrote a book about which we are making a programme about, what they amount to. This is a story which begins with Schmidt being worried about SALT II, it ends with Kohl being worried about an INF deal, do Germans now feel that the American nuclear guarantee is in doubt?
Joffe:
I don't know what the Germans feel because as I said, the Germans don't have any feelings or opinions on nuclear strategy, even the experts have stopped understanding those gyrations. I can tell you what I feel which is that I think would have been better off if we had kept some long-range INF in Western Europe just to give the Soviets a pause in case they were foolish enough to contemplate an attack, but I don't think as some of the more excited people on the right in this country feel that because the INF may be gone, the Germans are going to be left out in the cold. We still have an awful lot of nuclear weapons in Western Europe, we still have an awful lot of nuclear weapons, mainly bombs, which can reach deep into Warsaw Pact territory and even the Soviet Union and finally and most importantly we have a hell of a lot of American soldiers right on the battle line and that American contingent spells out the most important deterrence messages of them all. If you attack West Germany you have to attack a sizable group of American soldiers and that poses risks which you may not want to take.
Interviewer:
So you're not one of those who feel that flexible response is now dead.
Joffe:
I don't know about flexible response, but I don't think that extended deterrence is dead for reason which I've outlined, which is as long as the United States.
Interviewer:
But what about flexible response?
Joffe:
Can I ask you a question, what do you mean by flexible response?
Interviewer:
Well I mean that strategy which was felt to have weaknesses in it which caused the 1979 decision as much as anything else did, now they've taken out that middle-rung stuff, where does not leave the strategy?
Joffe:
Do I have to answer this question?
Interviewer:
Not if you don't want to.
Joffe:
It's going to go very complicated, I mean the basic point is what I said before, I'll talk about the core of flexible response, the deterrence.
Interviewer:
Where does this deal leave flexible response, the 1979 deal, among other things, had the purpose of making flexible response work militarily, those ingredients have now been removed, where does this leave the strategy of flexible response?
Joffe:
I was never a great believer in flexible response as annunciated because flexible response essentially requires what the experts call escalation dominance, that no matter how the tit for tat goes, we can go one tit better than the Soviets. We haven't been able to do this for the past 25 years, since parity so I'm concerned about something else, which is, not what we can do, but what goes on in the minds of the Soviets as they contemplate war against Western Europe, what are the risk calculations, what can we do to make those risks calculations a bit more risky for them. Now it is quite clear one of the reasons why Gorbachev gave away fifty hundred warheads of his for four hundred warheads of ours is that the Russians were afraid of the INF presence in Western Europe which could demolish part of their country. They are so afraid of it that they were willing to give away a great deal more than they got in return. So in terms of extended deterrence, I think this is bad that INF went. Will extended deterrents collapse as a result? I don't think so because I would like to evoke the old Denis Healey theorem, who said, while it takes 95 percent credibility to reassure allies, it may only take 5 percent credibility to scare off adversaries and I think those 5 percent are still there with a lot of American troops, with a lot of American nuclear weapons which, no matter how many INF have gone, still pose unbearable risks for the Russians and still signal to the Russians you can't count on a small war in Central Europe, you have to count on a big one and that is the essence of extended deterrence in Europe. That was more than 45 seconds.
Interviewer:
It was a very good answer,
Joffe:
It is a very good question, that's precisely why I'm not so sure whether it will work in little soundbites. There is of course an insoluble problem in nuclear alliances where very big powers protect with their nuclear weapons a bunch of small to middling ones which is that the small to middling powers will always suspect the fealty of their patrons. That is an irreducible dilemma of nuclear alliances because nuclear weapons impose such horrific, horrific costs on nations which give guarantees to non-nuclear nations, but we've lived with that since the early 60's since the beginning of parity between the two superpowers. Will the events of Reykjavik to double zero increase those anxieties of the dependents as to whether their patron powers are reliable? Yes of course they will. But what are the consequences? I'd like to talk about consequences in a larger framework than say this month or next month. And here would keep in mind a basic feature of the post-war international system which is that America is Western Europe's natural ally and that the West Europeans no matter how many noises they are making, are not neither willing nor really capable of defending themselves, so they need that transatlantic counter-balancing weight and the United States needs Western Europe as the most important strategic weight in the global balance and that's why I think that these over-arching interests which keep the alliance together will, at least I hope, will maintain the alliance even in the face of yet another phase of superpower big twoism. Those phases come and go too. but the basic glue that has held the alliance together is not likely to disappear in our lifetime.
Interviewer:
Good answer, thank you.
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