ABSTRACT
As we saw in chapter 2, burden sharing is an old issue within the Atlantic Alliance. What is not so well appreciated is that it is also an issue that, for some time, has complicated the Franco-German defense and security regime, To the limited extent that analysts have sought to employ the burden-sharing model within the bilateral context, they have usually concentrated upon the German gravamen, which boils down to the allegation that the French, while dependent upon German sacrifices to ensure their own security, have been unprepared to alter their vaunted defense "independence" for the sake of the ally from whom they seem to expect so much. We observed in the previous two chapters that there is a nuclear as well as a conventional dimension to this German dissatisfaction—or at least there was, for it is less than clear how many of the old assumptions about German security remain valid in the post-1989 period. In large part, the Germans had been concerned about the share of the French defense budget that got consumed by the needs of the French nuclear arsenal—an arsenal that many in Germany have regarded as a double curse, for it not only, according to one way of construing strategic reality, endangered German territory and people, but it also deprived Western defense of those conventional assets so necessary for the sustaining of the credibility of flexible response.
