The Green Party

To the Editors of The Crimson:

With the loss of Doonesbury, the reasons for reading The Crimson in the morning seemed to have withered to none. But leave it to the brilliant editorial staff (in the guise of Errol T. Louis) to bring back another Crimson tradition which appeared to be dying out with the graduation of "Red Bill"--the infuriating, nonsensical, and generally banal leftist editorial.

Instead of rewriting the history of Vietnam (McKibben's favorite subject), Louis chose to praise the rise of the Green Party in West Germany. If one is anti-NATO, anti-American, somewhat pro-Soviet, and a neutralist who hearkens back to the disorder of Weimar, then I suppose one could support the Greens. They are a loosely organized agglomeration of environmentalist and so-called peace parties who envision a firmly neutralist Europe (along the lines of Finland perhaps?), but their main accomplishment, should they get the 5 percent of the vote needed to become represented in parliament, would be to make West Germany ungovernable, as they have rejected the possibility of coalition with the left-leaning Social Democrats.

As with most of the recent spate of "peace" organizations, the Greens misunderstand entirely the basic premise of deterrence and the reality of the Soviet threat. Acting as if the real danger to Europe is not the 350 Soviet SS-20's aimed at all major military installations and cities in Western Europe, but the American Pershing II and Cruise missiles about to be deployed to deter Soviet Hawkishness, the Greens demand that West Germany refuse to allow the new American weapons on its soil. The very threat of deployment has driven the Soviets to the bargaining table in Geneva, but if NATO succumbs to the Soviet propaganda designed to split Europe from the United States, and refuses to deploy, then the Soviets will enjoy a permanent advantage in intermediate range missiles and will have no reason to negotiate.

More basic is the fact that the existence of a balance of power in Europe (a balance that is now being upset by the SS-20's) has kept the peace these past 38 years. NATO has been able to keep up a credible enough threat to make the Soviets think twice before rolling into Western Europe. A NATO without its main bulwark, West Germany, as envisioned by the Greens, would leave Europe undefended and subject to Soviet invasion or (as seems more likely) Soviet domination.

The Greens leave not, as Louis so righteously states, "injected a needed bit of sanity into the nuclear debate," but have replaced policy with sheer folly. A nuclear free world is certainly to be desired, but no one with even a modicum of intelligence expects that we shall soon (or perhaps ever) be able to achieve it. Our best hope is negotiated reductions in the strengths of both sides--a bilateral approach that will maintain the balance in Europe, not the unilateralist, pie-in-the-sky dreaming of the idealistic but misguided Greens. Eric Stockel '84