War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Josef Joffe, 1987
Description:
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.
