From the Atlantic to the Urals

Moscow’s insistence that a reunified Germany be neutral--and thus utterly divorced from NATO--is a welcome sign of Kremlin realism. However, the proposal Moscow has advanced in its place--the notion that Germany ought for some brief period to belong to both NATO and the Warsaw Pact--is a nonstarter. The Bush Administration is firmly and correctly committed to maintaining Germany’s membership in NATO, as is the Bonn government. So are the other Western allies and, in fact, the Germans’ East Bloc neighbors.

But the substance of the Soviets’ proposal is less important than the spirit in which it was made. In Moscow Tuesday, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev told British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd that German reunification ought to coincide with the formulation of “new structures of security for all Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals . . . We are prepared for a constructive search.”

Part of that quest must involve a recognition that strategic nuclear weapons are the only trapping of superpower status Moscow still retains. Its economy is in ruins, important segments of its conventional forces are a shambles, ethnic separatism is tearing at its internal cohesion and its buffer zone--the Warsaw Pact--no longer exists.

Thus, for all Gorbachev’s talk of a “common European home,” his country is, at the moment, on the outside looking in. The United States could find itself in a similar position if its leaders do not begin to engage the question of what the new Europe, whose contours are only beginning to come dimly into view, may look like. Clearly, it will be neither a safe nor stable place if room is not found for both Moscow and Washington.

The acceptance that Soviet power and American influence both have their limits is but one part of an equation in which the two countries’ permanent European interests are an equally compelling factor. Recognition of both realities is the beginning and not the end of a delicate and uncertain process. As Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze himself said recently, “Perhaps we should do some additional thinking on this.”