Across the Board

State Department nerves were strung fiddle-tight all last week. The U.S. was deeply and inextricably involved on a half-dozen diplomatic fronts halfway around the world. Great decisions had to be made in affairs which were at once extraordinarily delicate and momentous.

The news was that the decisions were being made. The realities of the war, the expediencies of pressing need and of passing time, dictated those decisions. The State Department was anxious, and the U.S. people would be anxious, too, if & when they fully understood the gravity of the problems and the vast spread of the possibilities. But at week's end the Department, despite the extent of its commitments, had at least no need to apologize, and at best, considerable reason to be proud. The decisions made, for one thing, were along the lines of U.S. popular opinion.

The week's work, in the world:

To Finland, apparently on the ragged edge of dropping out of the war, the U.S. applied a merciless diplomatic pincer. (The Russian planes, blasting Kotka and Helsinki, were the other pincer-prong.) Secretary of State Cordell Hull gave the Finns a final warning to get out of the war (see p. 34). This was patient Cordell Hull's umpteenth move toward this effect.

In Bolivia, the U.S. decided not to recognize the Villarroel Government until it sheds all pro-Nazis (see p. 40).

In Argentina, the U.S. awaited a real housecleaning.

To Spain, the U.S. was equally firm. When Ambassador Don Juan Francisco de Cardenas called at the State Department, he was bluntly told that the U.S. oil embargo on Spain will continue until Spain meets U.S. demands. Most important demands still to be met: 1) an embargo on Spanish wolfram; 2) expulsion of Nazi agents from Tangiers and the fringes of Gibraltar (TIME, Feb. 7).

For France. At long last the U.S., in conjunction with Great Britain, stood grudgingly ready to recognize the French Committee of National Liberation. President Roosevelt seemed finally convinced that the sentiment of the U.S. people was with General Charles de Gaulle. Within the next fortnight the U.S. would recognize the Committee as the "provisional authority" of France (see p. 33). Paving the way, Franklin Roosevelt said last week: "The time will soon come when the Nazis in France "will learn from millions of brave Frenchmen--now underground--that the people of France, also, are not at all out of this war."

Oil Policy. Perhaps transcending all these decisions was the State Department's determined groping toward a clear U.S. policy on world oil, and toward a world policy which would keep 95% of that oil firmly in United Nations' hands (see col. 3).

Despite these moves and decisions, the nation's capital still had a hollow feeling. This came from the belief that U.S.-Soviet relations had reached a point of new delicacy. Shaken by the rough-&-tumble diplomatic maneuvers of the Soviet Union, the Administration was worried lest a considerable segment of the U.S. might come to feel that the U.S. was fighting merely to make Europe safe for Russia. Such a feeling might be disastrous in an election year.

But ahead were still graver problems, things which definitely could not be solved by splendid improvisation.

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