ABSTRACT
West Germany brought to the Alliance a burdensome legacy of revisionism stemming from the nation’s partition. The much-bemoaned Atlantic crisis of the early 1980s was a fond, the German-American crisis writ large because the onset of Cold War II drove the two key protagonists of the Alliance into opposite directions. Shaping the ambiguities of the West German role in the Atlantic order, history and geography have also defined some enduring dilemmas for the country’s security policy. Limited freedom has entailed limited choices and thus fewer strains on the West German economy. If the Federal Republic of Germany cannot find security in an Israeli-type doctrine, what about it’s opposite, viz. the idea of a rear-based “mobile defense” that has lately intrigued both American and German experts. Striking a balance between deterrence and detente will require an extraordinarily fortuitous constellation beyond West Germany’s control.
