There is no soil outside the 50 American states where the 4th of July has been celebrated with the same bang, where themes of freedom echoed with the same resonance, as here in Berlin.
This Independence Day marks the end of all that.
Johnny is marching home, and few Berliners-in fact, few Europeans-are saying hurrah as America turns inward and, it seems, turns away from historic commitments in Europe and to interests elsewhere, particularly Asia.
As the U.S. Army’s famous Berlin Brigade parades its colors Monday on the Platz des 4. Juli, it will be one more wave in America’s long goodbye to a vast military presence in Europe.
This, then, is the way the war with world communism ends-not with a bang, but with a marching band, followed by the double-clutch and rumble of the moving van hauling America home.
Just as it captured the world’s imagination for 50 years as the most vivid of all Cold War symbols, Berlin, by virtue of politics and geography, is emblematic of a changing American foreign policy today.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, people move freely-but so do narcotics and, perhaps, nuclear contraband. Refugees flood Central Europe from a vile war in former Yugoslavia, a conflict that the European Union, a stunted reality of a grand dream, has been unable to resolve. NATO, too, has proven impotent to halt the medieval-style carnage.
Elsewhere on the continent, trade wars replace armed combat among neighbors, whether veteran democracies or those just emerging from beneath communism’s boot.
“We are entering a new phase of American foreign policy,” said Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, who cautioned: “This is an evolving foreign policy.”
Holbrooke has a unique perspective on America’s struggle to adapt to Europe’s “new world.” He has been stage manager for the dramatic shift in relations with Germany and recently was nominated by President Clinton to be assistant secretary of state for Europe and Canada.
During the Carter administration, Holbrooke was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. If confirmed, he will be the only diplomat in the history of the foreign service to oversee formulation of policy for Europe and Asia.
And he promises that under his watch, there will be no Europe vs. Asia debate in the State Department.
“It is wrong to assert primacy of the Pacific over the Atlantic, or of the Atlantic over the Pacific,” Holbrooke said last week. “America will follow its geographic and national interests, its economic and strategic interests wherever they lead.”
He called American foreign policy in this century “a continuous cycle of underinvolvement followed by overinvolvement.”
The lesson is that unexpected crises-war in Bosnia, nuclear proliferation in North Korea-forever will upset static foreign policy dogma and dictate a new focus.
“We are now free to move beyond the `armed truce’ of the Cold War to . . . press more vigorously for other common objectives: advancing prosperity and social justice at home, and human rights, freedom and market reforms abroad,” Holbrooke has said.
Holbrooke launched a program of “New Traditions” in which he is radically transforming a strategic partnership with Germany from one of military necessity to one of commerce, culture and, most recently, crime-fighting. Expect that to be expanded across Europe.
“Law enforcement, including investigations of possible nuclear smuggling, is at the forefront of our national security interests in this part of the world,” Holbrooke said during FBI Director Louis Freeh’s tour last week. “This is a concrete example of the new U.S. foreign policy in Europe. This is a post-Cold War issue.”
Freeh and Thomas Constantine, chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration, met with their German counterparts to open a pan-European initiative for coordinating the international battle against the Russian mafia, nuclear terrorism and hate crimes.
It is a far different set of fears than those that prompted the stationing of 314,000 U.S. troops in Europe, 6,000 of them in Berlin, during the Cold War.
By the end of 1996, only 100,000 will remain in Europe, the bulk in Germany.
But not a single combat soldier will be stationed in Berlin. The president will be here July 12 to decommission the Berlin Brigade, which defended democracy’s only offensive position on Communist soil for a half-century.
“Over the past two generations, Berlin’s place in history has been the dividing line between East and West,” Clinton told Berliners in a videotaped message announcing his visit and his vision for future U.S.-German relations.
Clinton, who will be the first American president to set foot on the soil of eastern Berlin (he will address the public just inside the Brandenburg Gate), added: “Today, Berlin is poised to play an even greater role in history-as a place that can help bring East and West together for all time.”
The Russians, as required by treaty, exit first, formally leaving the eastern sector Aug. 31. Vice President Al Gore comes Sept. 8 to join French and British leaders for a final send-off of the Allied defenders of Berlin.
This is an emotional time for Berliners, many of whom recall their first meetings with American-GIs pulling up in their jeeps to distribute chocolate to kids in the end-of-the-war rubble.
The city of The Wall. The Airlift. Checkpoint Charlie. No wonder Berlin is a microcosm for ambiguous feelings about the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe, and the potential that other ties that bind America to the continent will be similarly thinned.
“What happens to Germany on Aug. 31, and then on Sept. 8? It will be the first time in 50 years that Germans are completely on their own,” said Kurt Kasch, a prominent Berlin banker. “Will we be able, for the first time in half a century, to deal successfully with our domestic matters, with our neighbors, and the rest of the world?”
Kasch wholly supports binding America to Europe in a new alliance of culture and commerce. That is “truly important for the development of relations on both sides of the ocean,” he said.
But a fundamental anchor for many Berliners will be hauled up when the last U.S. soldier marches home. A sense of security, of democracy rooted in American values as much as American might, will disappear.
“You know, I rigged up a special antenna just so I could watch American TV shows broadcast to the troops,” said Ute Foerster, a grandmother who spent the last year of World War II in a Berlin basement. “My neighbors think I’m crazy, but I really worry about Berlin’s future after the GIs are gone.”
Walk down any street, and that sentiment is echoed by many Berliners, German or not.
The Italian barber says he wants to sell his shop and move home. The Serbian tailor just installed burglar bars.
Fears that street riots will follow the American departure from Berlin may be as ridiculous as they are heartfelt, but they can’t be discounted by U.S. policy-makers drafting a strategy for Europe.
“We have always regarded the Allies as protecting powers of minorities, and this is still true today,” said Mustafa Turgut Cakmakoglu, president of the Turkish community in Berlin.
Germany’s large Turkish community (1.8 million, among 6.4 million foreigners in a total German population of 70 million) has been the most obvious target of resurgent right-wing violence since reunification in 1990, a period of rage that has witnessed at least 30 murders categorized by federal authorities as hate crimes. Most of those victims have been Turks.
“We feel a bit insecure, and we do not know what the future might have in store for us,” Cakmakoglu said.
“You only notice the worth of friends once they are gone. The absence of the Americans will make us realize what we had in them.”
