The U. S. Regrets . . .

Some day it may be too late for the U.S. to get itself an international air policy.

A U.S.-British-Russian-Canadian air conference was scheduled to take place in Washington in the third week of March. The third week came and went with no conference--but plenty of conjecture.

Ring around the Rosy. The scheduled meetings were supposed to be mere preliminaries leading up to a full-dress United Nations conference. But the preliminaries to the preliminaries turned out to be a caricature of the minuetlike delicacy with which diplomats approach foreign affairs. Stages in the ring-around-the-rosy:

P: Last October, Britain, with much fanfare, called an Empire conference to lay down postwar air policies. It flopped: the Dominions (notably Canada) had their own ideas about flying.

P: Then Britain, perhaps thinking to outflank her unruly daughters, asked the U.S. to confer separately with her. The U.S. regretted she was unable to lunch today--it being election year.

P: In February, the U.S. changed her mind, agreed to talk if Canada, Russia and perhaps China should come along and talk, too. It was Britain's turn to be horrified: how could she come to the party without all her Daughter Dominions?

P: At this point both parties began adding names and everything came unstuck. By last week the guest list added up to 14*--and suppose all but one came--

This week both the U.S. and the British were ready to throw in the doilies and start all over again. But no one seemed to know how. One solution that might appeal to the State Department would be to run a whole series of bilateral talks--for one thing, that would take at least all this year. But whether Britain, long on plans but short on Dominion support, would buy that compromise--or the U.S., long on plans and short on policy, suggest it--remained to be seen.

Two Plans and a Vacuum. Meanwhile, Britain and Canada already have firm air policies in print. Britain's was brief, Canada's detailed and carefully designed to distinguish Canada's special interest from the Empire's (see p. 24). But they both called for tight International Air Transport Authority to license all world air routes and carriers and, as Britain put it, "eliminate uneconomic competition."

All the U.S. had was a vacuum compounded of mistrust and indecision in the Senate, "studies" by the State Department's studious Adolf Berle--and a man to head the U.S. delegation to the forthcoming conferences. The man: ex-U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Joseph Clark Grew, a good diplomat who nonetheless knew nothing about aviation, until he got his new assignment two weeks ago. The only other certainty was that no U.S. air "expert" liked Britain's well-ordered I.A.T.A. All sides were quick to point out that Britain, as the No. 1 sea power, had never seen fit to call for such restrictions on the high seas. All asked why the world's No. 1 air power, the U.S., should call for such restrictions in the stratosphere.

Not for Discussion. Thus the U.S. last week was, in a strictly literal sense, up in the air. The clearest thing in the air was what would not come up at the overdue conference. At the head of the not-for-discussion list are the two piping-hot but purely domestic issues: 1) whether the U.S. should have one big "chosen instrument" or a few competing foreign airlines (TIME, Aug. 23 et seq.); 2) whether railroads, ship companies and bus lines should be allowed to fly. On the positive side, U.S. diplomats were fresh out of ideas.

Said forthright Captain Gill Robb Wilson, former National Aeronautic Association president and onetime Lafayette Escadrille pilot, in his copyrighted New York Herald Tribune column this week: "An International Air Conference is due to open around Japanese cherry blossom time. The blossoms and the conference appear to have much in common--neither promises fruit, fragrance or future. Of course, we can go into the conference without a national policy, but we can also come out of it without either policy or pants."

Safest thing, politically, for the U.S. Government to do is to do nothing.

* The 14: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Free France, Great Britain, Holland, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa the U.S.

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