Descent from the Summit

...What is needed is not strong words but some hard thinking...

...But the United States can't afford to stand still meanwhile...

...It will have to decide between Secretary Humphrey's hopes for a balanced budget and adequate military advances, between GOP Chairman Hall's desire for an election-year tax cut and the need to spend big sums both on arms and on economic aid around the globe...

...Here we present two reactions to the recent Geneva parley-one by a reporter on the spot, the other (page 7) by Rcinhold Niebuhr...

...That reading of the summit's meaning has not been altered in the slightest by the three-week talkfest just ended here by the foreign ministers...

...It will have to forego a tax cut just as much as will the Republicans if the bills are to be paid without increasing the national debt again...

...The "Spirit of Geneva" hasn't changed a bit insofar as its real meaning is concerned, but the inevitable gloss applied by hopeful citizens and wordy editorial writers all around the world has been removed...

...And it will have to have the guts to help put such a program through Congress in the midst of a violent political whirl next year...

...There are legitimate areas of argument...

...And a lot of the fences are in bad shape...

...It had been hoped, in fact generally expected, in Washington, London and Paris that some business might be done here on improving East-West contacts...

...It is often vulnerable, and its weaknesses can be exploited...

...First of all, the Eisenhower Administration has got to make up its own mind what to do...

...It will have to decide whether it is going to set an example which it can ask the NATO nations to follow and, by all honorable means, try to get them to follow...

...This does not mean that foreign policy discussion should be barred from the coming campaign...

...How to do it is arguable, of course...

...Molotov's performance here these past three weeks was a surprise only in his manner, not in his orders from Moscow...

...Yet the alternative is to give Moscow not a clear field but a head start for nearly a year between now and Election Day, plus two months more until inauguration and an additional period before a new President can formulate and win approval of his own policies...

...But they do not concern the basic premise that the United States has got to fashion and skillfully use better tools to meet the newest form of Soviet challenge...

...Bulganin had made it clear on his return from the summit that Moscow wanted a rapprochement between the two German governments and that it cast a leery eye on President Eisenhower's proposal for aerial inspection and an exchange of military blueprints as a first step toward arms control and limitation...

...Moscow is moving out from behind the conspiratorial and underground tactics of Comintern and Cominform days to openly challenge the West in terms of Soviet diplomatic activity...

...For if the "summit" conference meant anything, it meant a tacit agreement by the United States and the Soviet Union, in the personages of President Eisenhower and Messrs...

...It is cozying up to its old enemy...

...Bulganin and Khrushchev, that nuclear warfare was too hideous to be considered as a way to settle U.S.-USSR differences...

...This is the time for unilateral fence-mending on our side...

...DESCENT FROM THE SUMMIT By Chalmers M. Roberts Moscow has definitely put Europe on ice while it woos Asia Geneva At the close of the Big Four Foreign Ministers Conference here, the West finds itself at a way-station in the descent from the summit where getting accustomed to normal, rather than rarefied, air is a useful thing...

...The Foreign Ministers Conference may have been a failure in headline terms and in the minds of 50 million West Germans...

...It can be argued, of course, that Russia would have gained more by playing it sotto voce rather than by letting Molotov adopt with some personal glee, the Westerners thought) his old Stalinist mannerisms...

...Moscow would like that...

...It is championing Arab nationalism in North Africa, which threatens to outflank NATO on the south...

...It has sent Bulganin and Khrushchev to India, Burma and Afghanistan, and it is beginning to use economic instruments, as we have done, to gain or expand footholds everywhere it can in Asia...

...It's strictly up to the West and, above all, up to the United States...

...Once it was clear that Molotox was going to be abrupt on Germany and disarmament, there was no surprise that he trotted out the familiar charges that Western ideas of lifting the Iron Curtain were all a plot to let in intelligence agents and provocateurs...

...Chalmers M. Roberts, diplomatic correspondent of the Washington Post and Times-Herald, covered both Geneva meetings this year, as well as the San Francisco UN session, and also spent part of September in Russia...

...It will have to exercise its considerable pressure on the Administration to map a program...

...In short, the Kremlin seems to have decided to let Europe sit while working over more productive areas of the globe-but all within the limits of the tacit agreement not to provoke war between the great powers...

...But we had better shore up our own military strength and cease to let the budget control our military power level...

...3. If we become so immersed in the coming Presidential election that we neglect our allies and those whom we want on our side even though not formally committed, we will make another error of the first magnitude...

...Election years mean poor times for American foreign policy, if history is any guide...

...It is trying to turn NATO's northern flank by overtures to and agreements with Iceland, Norway and Denmark, and by applying neutralist pressure through Finland...

...The Geneva foreign ministers meeting was essentially a meeting on Europe, on German reunification and European security...

...Soviet Russia, which this correspondent visited for a brief two weeks before coming to Geneva, is not the all-embracing power its monolithic front leads so many to believe...

...The campaign should be used to help public thinking on world affairs...

...It should be no surprise to anyone, and certainly was not to the diplomats here, that Moscow did not agree to Western proposals on either topic...

...But we must know-and agree on-what we are doing and be prepared to pay the cost...

...Secondly, the Democratic leadership in the Democratic-controlled Congress will have to lift its eyes above next November...

...2. If we assume that war with Russia is out because the weapons are too terrible and therefore we can afford to drift militarily, we will make an even worse mistake...

...As one of our diplomats put it, the Russians recognized that there is no such thing as a "class-conscious hydrogen bomb...

...To this correspondent, who has labored through three weeks of often repetitious speeches, the outcome of the Foreign Ministers Conference suggests these points: 1. If, because of the summit hopes of easy agreement on the world's hard problems, the American reaction to this conference is a feeling that we must return to the cold war years, we will make a great mistake...

...But Molotov made it clear that what is done-and the current slow trend will doubtless continue-will be done in Moscow's own good time and on Moscow's own terms as far as possible...

...It is an incredible mixture of strength and weakness...

...If anything, the evidence here these past three weeks was that Moscow has embarked on a new policy based on that very tacit agreement...

...It has opened a drive to penetrate the Middle East...

...Franco...

...But if the descent from the summit can be negotiated without landing on our derrieres, it may turn out to have been a worthwhile experience...

...A "little war" in the Middle East perhaps could be risked, though Molotov told Dulles here that he was sure there would be no such war...