338. Research Memorandum No. RSE–1751
SUBJECT
- Soviet Response to the Brussels Meeting of the NATO Ministers
The NATO Ministerial Council agreed at Brussels in November on new defense measures and noted the creation of a NATO air surveillance command for operation in the Mediterranean. This paper recounts Moscow’s reaction to these measures, and to reports from Brussels that the Council had also discussed NATO’s security interest in states adjacent to the USSR.
Abstract
The November 15–16 meeting of the NATO Ministerial Council in Brussels produced developments in three areas which could hardly have been welcome to Moscow. The participants agreed on increased national contributions to the Alliance’s defense forces; they welcomed the new NATO air surveillance command organized for Mediterranean operation; and reports from the meeting indicated that NATO’s security concerns might extend beyond its membership, to states on the USSR’s periphery. Soviet reaction to these Brussels discussions has thus far been relatively limited at least in the propaganda realm. TASS did issue an “authorized” statement on the Brussels session on November 23 (the first such TASS statement on a Council meeting since December 1958 when NATO extended a guarantee to Berlin), and Soviet diplomats delivered a series of oral demarches about the air surveillance command in a variety of NATO capitals. On the whole, however, the Kremlin has remained generally reticent, in part perhaps to avoid giving the NATO members more cause for concern about Soviet intentions. More pertinently, however, the Soviet leaders may themselves be undecided as to the actual significance of the Brussels decisions and are still debating about suitable policy lines for the situation brought on by their invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Their reactions to date suggest there is a preliminary and provisional Soviet assessment that the new attitude on defense issues in Western Europe is a manageable problem for the moment, even though it is an undesirable development. Moscow probably calculates it still has scope for maneuver here, and time for bringing its propaganda apparatus (overt and covert) to bear within the individual NATO states to limit, or [Page 794] dilute, the measures agreed upon at Brussels. The NATO Mediterranean air command, in contrast, poses an immediate challenge to Soviet interests and one which would have to be met immediately if the USSR is to safeguard the political principles on which it seems to be developing its Mediterranean role. The “grey area” of NATO security interest is probably evaluated in the Kremlin as an even more serious potential problem, but a less tangible one, and therefore less amenable to concrete countermeasures. Moscow has carefully given no hint as to how it expects to cope with this latter issue; it only insists that the states mentioned in connection with a “NATO umbrella” are all disassociating themselves from this “unwanted” concern with their affairs.
Only in the case of the Mediterranean air surveillance unit has the USSR resorted to formal action. The Soviet ambassadors in Athens, Ankara, Rome, London and Washington delivered oral demarches (November 18–19), castigating the new unit as a “premeditated and flagrant violation of international standards governing the freedom of navigation in the open seas.” But while decrying the new NATO creation, Moscow also utilized the demarche to register in diplomatic channels for the first time its own claims to be, and to be acknowledged as, a Mediterranean power. (The thesis that as a Black Sea power the USSR is “therefore” a Mediterranean power was first enunciated by Gromyko in May 1968; Soviet media began stressing the point only in November.) Moscow’s major concern at the moment seems to be to put on record—and have it accepted internationally—that the Soviet naval presence in the Mediterranean is a vital element of the USSR’s global defense posture and that Soviet ships will remain there regardless of what NATO does. But since the number of Soviet ships operating in the Mediterranean has declined somewhat in the past two months from the levels reached with the Arab-Israeli war, it also seems that the USSR intends to avoid any undue exacerbation of tension in the area while it attempts to register its point of principle.
In delivering their various demarches, some of the Soviet ambassadors reportedly also raised the idea of a possible conference of Mediterranean powers to deal with the problems of that area. It still is not clear whether these hints were merely interpolations by the diplomats themselves or whether they were intended to presage a serious initiative. Moscow must be aware that the prospects for getting agreement from the interested powers for such a conference seem hardly promising, let alone realistic, at this point. The Soviets may, however, be contemplating some future initiative with their old “sea of peace” ideas and might feel mere negotiations about a conference on the topic could prove useful, even if no conference ever materializes.
[Here follows the body of the memorandum.]
- Source: Department of State, Central Files, NATO 3 BEL(BR). Confidential. Transmitted from Thomas L. Hughes to Secretary Rusk.↩