First Steps Toward a New Diplomacy:

...It seems silly to run the chance of failure in the hazardous reconnaissance flights and not to take ordinary diplomatic precautions against a surprise diplomatic coup...

...Meanwhile we still face the problem of avoiding a nuclear catastrophe and preventing the Russians from becoming so strong that it will be more difficult to negotiate with them...

...It is ironic that they, and not we, are negotiating from strength...

...But these considerations, relating to the diminution of American prestige and the ineptitude of our dealing with Russian chicanery, do not go to the heart of the deeper problems faced by a whole world enjoying a precarious peace and prosperity on the edge of a nuclear abyss...

...If the U-2 incident had not helped to extricate him, he would have been forced to find another pretext for wrecking the conference which he had worked so hard to bring about...

...But by then it was too late to escape from the trap prepared for the President by our own ineptitude and the dilemma in which Soviet policy found itself...

...It will only prevent repeating the serious and hazardous mistakes which we have made...

...Adlai Stevenson may be right in asserting that we gave him the tools by which he achieved it...

...We ought long since to have followed de Gaulle's lead in recognizing the Oder-Neisse line, which in any event could not be changed except through war, and which might make more freedom from Russia possible for the Poles as an added attraction...

...He thus makes it virtually impossible for any succeeding president, Republican or Democratic, to resume such summit diplomacy...

...Surely, in our world-wide diplomatic intelligence service, someone must have known about the Chinese pressure on Russia and the pressure of the disquieted generals on Khrushchev...

...Regular diplomatic channels could certainly have uncovered the hidden pressures under which the Communist boss was working and from which he sought to extricate himself by such rude measures...

...We might even have taken advantage of these dilemmas which Khrushchev faced, instead of being trapped by them...

...But it is also true that Khrushchev had reasons of his own to wreck the conference...

...a reconnaissance plane over Russia just before the summit was risky business, and our contradictory and untruthful explanations compounded the error...

...must go beyond the 'spirit of Camp David' as it takes the FIRST STEPS TOWARD A NEW DIPLOMACY By Reinhold Niebuhr THE TUMULT AND the shouting about the summit debacle at Paris is still with us and will be for some time...

...The fate of mankind is hanging in the balance while we go through the rituals of summitry, which is what makes the otherwise comic debacle in Paris so tragic...

...We must increase our military and political strength, without aggravating the tensions...

...China policy must be changed, if for no other reason than that our European allies think it absurd for a great nation to continue to be prisoner of the fiction that Chinese Communism triumphed because we failed to give the Nationalists adequate support...

...One of the shrewdest wrinkles in Russian diplomacy is Khrushchev's statement that he will wait until a new President is elected before engaging in another summit meeting...

...Khrushchev was truly in an embarrassing position...

...When the President made his rather naive report on the summit debacle, he confessed that Prime Minister Harold Macmitlan and President Charles de Gaulle had warned him of the Soviet demands before the meeting began...

...Of course, rejection of the discredited personal diplomacy and re-institution of the old and tried diplomacy through regular channels will not solve the acute problems of the cold war...

...The question still remains why our Government, or the Allied governments, permitted themselves to be driven into this hazardous diplomacy by "summitry" when too much was at stake and when ordinary prudence would have suggested that a conference should not be held if some hope of agreement had not been assured in preliminary negotiations...

...Clearly, our team has no match for this shrewd peasant, at least on the present performance records...

...At no time in our history has the nation and its President been subjected to the demeaning insults with which Nikita Khrushchev wrecked the summit conference...

...Both resolute action and cautious diplomacy are required to achieve these ends...

...The united stand of the Allies on Berlin and Germany made Soviet hope of success on the German question very dim...

...Thus, occasionally, wise men offer foolish counsel and foolish men give good counsel...

...All this is true...

...John Foster Dulles was wrong on most issues of foreign policy, but let us give him credit for this piece of wisdom, of which we and our Allies have been heedless since his death...

...Perhaps it is too late to beguile the Chinese from their pathological hatred of the United States, but U.S...

...And the Chinese "true believers" had certainly challenged the Leninist orthodoxy of a detente with the capitalist imperialist...

...A genuine effort to arrive at agreement on the prohibition of all atomic tests would be more telling...

...Since such diplomacy has proved too hazardous, that may be all to the good, but meanwhile Khrushchev can play the role of an anxious but frustrated peacemaker...

...For, if the amiable Eisenhower is too tough for them, a compliant President would practically advertise his softness by another trip to the summit...

...Slowly, we must dig ourselves out of the pit into which we have fallen by a sublime and absurd exposition of "open diplomacy openly arrived at...

...We must, of course, continue every possible cultural exchange in order to change the old Communist stereotypes about our nation...

...The reluctance of Khrushchev's own military to accept his Utopian disarmament proposals seemed to have shaken his authority in Russia itself...

...Incidentally, it was a much greater statesman than Dulles, Winston Churchill, who started this passion for the summit meeting...

...Maybe the renewal of the President's "open skies" proposal will help, but the Russians will probably reject it again...

...Something must be done to "relax tensions" more creatively than "in the spirit of Camp David," where Eisenhower asked Khrushchev to "call him Ike," perhaps the most damaging thing the Russian boss revealed in his rude attack on the President in that remarkable Paris press conference...