PATTERN FOR PEACE

...On the eve of its second term the Eisenhower Administration, which had glossed over the gravity of the crisis for several months, seemed to have decided that something dramatic was needed to establish its concern and to muffle criticism that it had been too pacifist-minded in repudiating Israeli and Anglo-French aggression...

...Pattern for Peace "TVURING THEIR first tour years at the helm of American foreign policy President Eisenhower would talk hopefully and earnestly of peace while Secretary of State Dulles went tearing around the world dangling one foot over the brink of war...

...With the excellent start made by the U.N...

...they gave us a patchwork of doctrines, treaties, and proclamations but no pattern of action that could be called a policy...

...But most urgently, agreement on a 1,000-mile demilitarized belt in Central Europe would remove the time-bomb that ticks away on the border between West and East Germany...

...Moreover, the rulers of Russia realize that revulsion against their conduct in Hungary is not confined to the anti-communist West, but extends throughout the world and is shared by many neutral nations...

...His frigid rejection of the Bulganin proposal, if left undisturbed, can only lead to an intensification of the Cold War and increased re-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and its satellites...

...If they are not sincere, there is precious little if anything we can lose by trying...

...Like so many of its predecessors in recent years, this proposal pecks at the periphery of our problem without coming to grips with basic issues...

...It knows now, for the first time, that far from relying on the tier of Eastern European states from the Baltic to the Black Sea to bear the initial brunt of war with the West, the guns of these countries will be pointing eastward to Russia if war comes...

...dangerous not only because it would give one man blank-check authority to embroil us in war but, more fundamentally for the longer haul, because its effect might be to magnify tensions in the Middle East, intensify cold war psychology, and divert us from the far more hopeful path of negotiated settlements...

...As they embarked recently on their second term together, the President and his Secretary of State showed themselves as wedded as ever to the temporizing approach of dabbling with trouble when it comes but doing little or nothing to prevent conflict by affirmative efforts at peacemaking...

...The Soviet Union has not been so isolated since the days when Stalin's megalomania and xenophobia touched bottom during the last year of his life...

...how great we shall never know until we explore it...

...But these developments have a deeper meaning for us because they are bound to have an enormous impact on Soviet foreign policy...

...When Congressional leaders were summoned to the White House, they were subjected to what one guest bitterly described as the "snow treatment...

...But we ought at the very least to call their bluff—if bluff it is...

...It is presently deeply involved in negotiations aimed at the earliest possible reopening of the Canal...

...They account for the continuing brutalities in Hungary, for the first significant signs of the resurgence of Stalinism, and for the increasingly harsh note struck in the public pronouncements of Soviet spokesmen...

...The U.N...

...A few days later Mr...

...It is difficult to understand how Mr...

...Clearly, if the Soviet Union would join with the West in agreeing to an arms embargo for the Middle East and insisting on bona fide negotiations between the Arabs and Israelis, the prospects for settlement would be enormously enhanced...

...Clearly the Soviet premier had left the door ajar to the possibility of reaching agreement that might result in Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe if we in turn agreed to pull our forces west of the Rhine...

...These, it seems to us, are 1) a live-and-let-live agreement between Israel and her Arab neighbors to respect each other's national integrity and observe boundary lines drawn in negotiations, the agreement to be enforced by the United Nations...

...the proper course must be to encourage that body to seek to negotiate lasting political settlements striking at the roots of conflict in the Middle East...

...Divided Germany represents the greatest threat of all-out hydrogen-bomb world war...

...Should they mean business this time, the prospect of achieving a durable peace would be greater than at any time since the start of the Cold War...

...It succeeded in mobilizing an international patrol to supervise the withdrawal of invading forces...

...We hope it isn't too late for Mr...

...It is the virtually unanimous judgment of diplomats and correspondents in and near the Soviet Union that the developments in Poland and Hungary, and the rumblings of more to come elsewhere in the satellite sphere, have weakened if not destroyed the Kremlin's basic military strategy in Europe...

...The Eisenhower-Dulles Doctrine for the Middle East turned out to be another patch in the crazy-quilt of expedients that mark our fitful efforts to exercise leadership in the world...

...Such a possibility does now exist...

...For many months we pursued a zigzag course in the Middle East, fawning over and then infuriating Egypt's Colonel Nasser, offering him economic aid and then withdrawing the offer in the most humiliating fashion, refusing him arms and then berating him for taking them where he could find them, ranging ourselves in favor of preserving Israel's integrity and then standing immobile while Egypt closed the Canal to that infant nation and embarked on a program of boycotts and border harassment...

...But it is important to keep in mind that the more recent outbreaks of Soviet brutality have been the pankky response of frightened men—not the calculated design of relaxed leaders planning a new strategy ol expansion...

...nor could it deal in any way with the sources of conflict between Israel and the Arab nations or with Europe's desperate need for the oil of the Middle East...

...The result was the Bagdad Pact, which we instigated but did not join...

...With tension areas neutralized, borders protected, and bloodshed prevented, the United Nations could then proceed to create a special agency of negotiation that would be charged with reaching settlements that emphasize durability rather than emergency improvisation...

...One constituted partial Soviet acceptance of President Eisenhower's plan for aerial inspection...

...They were simply snowed under with graphs, charts, diagrams, tables, maps, and the other paraphernalia of huckster persuasion...

...There is a towering "il" in this argument, to be sure—"if the Soviet Union . . ." The "if" seems to many to be more formidable than ever as a result of the cruel tyranny of the Soviets in Hungary and the new wave of repression that has swept the Soviet empire...

...It can dissipate those gains by adhering to the Eisenhower Administration's negative scheme of pledging war against Communist aggression in the Middle East —or it can strengthen that reservoir of good-will by assuming the lender-ship for a bold, affirmative approach that would command the support of much of mankind...

...Here, of course, would lie the great challenge, for there are countless issues involved, some of them deeply imbedded in fanatical nationalism, many of them with tangled roots that run far back in history...

...Premier Bulganin suggested a high-level conference of the major powers to negotiate on this basis...

...Perhaps this proposal, like so many in the past, is loaded with booby-traps, or was intended for propaganda purposes only...

...As Soviet penetration in the area increased, we decided, as we always do whenever there is a hard problem in foreign affairs, that the solution was still another anti-Communist alliance...

...Failure to act now may rob us of our last best chance to reach a live-and-let-live settlement with the Soviets...

...But the Eisenhower Administration has now abandoned its devotion to the U.N...

...The opportunity is not centered on or even significantly concerned with the crisis in the Middle East...

...First steps might well include the establishment of a U.N...

...A study of the resolution, the President's message that preceded its introduction, and the supporting testimony of Administration spokesmen before Congressional committees, fails to disclose a single current problem or future eventuality that the Administration's proposal for war-making authority could deal with—with the one exception of what is unanimously characterized as the least possible, open Soviet military aggression in the Middle East...

...Actually, however, there is a timely and persuasive basis for the hope that a fundamental settlement in tlie Middle East might be attainable...

...How in the world are you ever going to get agreement on these lofty proposals...

...The Administration seemed headed on the right road in November when it placed its reliance on the United Nations—perhaps more reliance than so frail a body had a right to be asked to carry...

...Their combined efforts yielded many stalemates but no settlements...

...The subsequent intervention by the United Nations, with powerful support from the United States, brought a cease-fire but no settlement...

...Adoption of the resolution could have no conceivable effect in resolving the problem of the Suez Canal...

...For here is the one place on earth where crack Soviet and NATO troops stand armed only blocks away from each other...

...Eisenhower can turn his back on this unprecedented opportunity to negotiate the settlement of specific conflicts that constitute so great a part of the Cold War...

...Emergency Force to patrol those sectors until basic agreements are negotiated under U.N...

...It strikes us as both ineffectual and dangerous—ineffectual because its adoption by Congress would leave every source of conflict in the Middle East totally undisturbed...

...The provision for economic aid to the countries of the Middle East might have some meaning if there were not on hand many millions of dollars earmarked but never spent for economic aid in the area...

...succeeded in negotiating a cease-fire...

...Perhaps the Kremlin has no intention of engaging in the kind of negotiations proposed by Premier Bulganin...

...Our great chance lies in the patient pursuit of a negotiated settlement of all major issues between the Soviet camp and the Western world...

...With insecurity so dominant in the Kremlin today, a revolt in East Germany might lead frightened men to trigger the world into the war of annihilation...

...And what of the scheme itself...

...Certainly it will take extraordinary patience, tact, and skill to resolve the conflicts, especially if the settlement is to include the minimum essentials of a lasting peace...

...And the Kremlin itself, for all the diatribes that emanate from the citadel of communism, has offered significant encouragement of that hope...

...Dulles exerted the final and familiar pressure of the snow treatment by asserting that it would be "quite disastrous" if Congress failed to pass the resolution, or if it delayed, or even if it were sharply divided...

...Many of Europe's most relentless critics of Soviet society and Soviet foreign policy feel that there is now for the first time a realistic hope for successful negotiation with the Russians on basic issues...

...President Eisenhower made no response for nearly six weeks...

...His reply was brusquely written...

...The burden of all the Administration's failures in the Middle East, it was now clear, would have to be borne by those who opposed or delayed adoption of the resolution authorizing the President to make war against overt Communist aggression in that area...

...Ot course the road will be rough, perhaps in the end impassable...

...All this, of course, assumes the prospect that the Soviet Union might be persuaded to reverse its present trouble-making role in the Middle East...

...But that time, he made it clear, was not now...

...Khrushchev and Bulganin have seen how the good-will they cultivated and won durin...

...The Eisenhower-Dulles scheme was born of desperation...

...development program for a region-wide attack on poverty, disease, and illiteracy...

...He would favor a high level negotiating conference, he said, "whenever circumstances would make it seem likely to accomplish a significant result...

...their Asian and European travels last year has disintegrated as the news from Hungary unfolded its grisly story...

...When the decision was reached to do something "Big" in the Middle East, the Administration resorted to familiar tactics in unveiling and pressing for its new scheme...

...A settlement of this magnitude would go a long way toward reaching an overall resolution of other outstanding problems, including those of the Middle East which are an inseparable part of the Cold War...

...It is a prospect as yet dimly seen but breathtaking in its possibilities—the prospect of an overall settlement with the Soviets that would encompass agreement in the Middle East...

...The Administration's scheme provides for a measure of increased military and economic assistance in that area, but its central thesis is to be found in the provision authorizing the President to make war against any Communist or Communist-dominated aggressor in the Middle East...

...The conflict in the Middle East is indivisible from the rest of the Cold War...

...The fatal weakness of the Eiscn-hower Administration's approach to the crisis in the Middle East is the complete absence of creative proposals lor negotiated settlement of the unresolved issues that produced and prolong the conflict...

...the problems of that area, which sometimes seem so insoluble, could in fact be resolved reasonably and promptly il the Soviet Union and the United States would stand together before the United Nations in support of a negotiated settlement...

...These two developments—the collapse of Russia's basic military calculations and her aloneness in the world—have produced something akin to panic in the Kremlin...

...Without Soviet arms and without Soviet pressure to combat the West and Israel, Colonel Nasser's Egypt would have to respond to United Nations demands for a negotiated settlement, or find itself helpless and alone in the world...

...But sometime somewhere someone must make a start before the hell bombs start falling...

...sponsorship...

...But in mid-November, when the rebellious Poles had wrested a degree of independence from the mother country and Hungary was exploding in new waves of revolt each day, the Soviet Union's Premier Bulganin wrote a long letter to President Eisenhower...

...We are under no illusion about the staggering difficulties that would confront anyone bent on seeking an overall settlement, but the Eisenhower Administration's proposal does not even faintly suggest a start in that direction...

...the other proposed a mutual 500-mile withdrawal of all armed forces to form a demilitarized zone in Central Europe that would be subject to both ground and air inspection...

...The men in the Kremlin feel far less secure today than at any time since they assumed power...

...The Kremlin's military involvement has consisted of providing arms and staff experts, but here again the blank-check authorization to the President could have no impact on the continuance, or, for that matter, the great expansion of Soviet military assistance to nations like Egypt and Syria...

...There was no official announcement, no conference with Congressional leaders, no consultations with the nations in the Middle East we were bent on protecting before the story was leaked to the New York Times and then picked up by other papers...

...Moreover, the proposed grant of war-making authority would by-pass the entire field in which Soviet strategy has made its greatest gains in the area—penetration of the Arab world by economic, political, and psychological methods...

...It sounds wonderful, but straight out of the ivory-tower, the skeptics will say...

...When he did reply in early January, the Chief Executive said nothing that indicated he saw in the Bulganin note the possibility of freeing the satellites from Soviet subjugation, providing for a unified Germany, and reaching an all-European agreement...

...The United States greatly increased its world stature by its resolute stand against aggression in Egypt...

...trusteeship in the disputed areas and the considerable expansion of the U.N...

...Until the upheaval in Poland and Hungary last year, the Soviet leaders refused to engage in negotiations which might in any way result.in loosening their stranglehold on their satellites...

...Much of the verbiage consisted of the usual rambling tirade against the West, but there were two significant additions...

...It has retreated to its familiar fox-hole of military aid and unilateral American guarantees against potential Communist aggression...

...Perhaps the Soviets are not sincere...

...The invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain, and France last fall marked the culmination of a long period of vacillating and contradictory conduct by the major powers and complete inaction by the United Nations...

...Its network of buffer states has crumbled almost overnight...

...2) a settlement of the Suez dispute that guarantees freedom of navigation to all nations, and 3) the adoption of a U.N...

...Eisenhower to reconsider...

...Far from relaxing tensions in the area, the new alliance frightened and angered half the nations in the Middle East and brought the Soviet Union into that area on a vastly greater scale than had ever been the case before...