Healthy Realization

Both Britain and Russia knew what they wanted UNO to be. The U.S. was not quite sure.

On one side of the fence stood Britain, insisting that the Big Three could not run the postwar world as they ran the Allied world of wartime and that UNO, as Clement Attlee said last week, "must become the overriding factor in foreign policy." The British were for true collective security on a world scale.

On the other side stood the Russians, insisting that it is still a big-power world, which must be run by the big powers.

The U.S. sat squarely on the fence. It saluted the idea of a collective world--up to a point. But in the conduct of Assembly business and the incessant maneuvering which went on behind the scenes, not even the Russians gave any more naked demonstrations than did Jimmy Byrnes of his intent to use the veto whenever necessary to protect U.S. prerogatives. The vigorous U.S. fight to get three of the six nonpermanent Security Council seats for the New World, two of them for her immediate neighbors, was plain power politics.

(To the undisguised annoyance of some of his delegation, Jimmy Byrnes also seemed to be making every major U.S. decision himself. There was little his colleagues could do about it. But Harry Truman, who had reportedly been irritated at getting no fill-in while Byrnes was in Moscow, began calling his Secretary of State by radio teletype.)

The mood of all the nations, the Big Three and their 48 partners alike, was more realistic than it had been when the League first met in 1920. This time there was a healthy realization that to disagree was human. UNO, created not to make the peace but keep it (this week the deputies of the Council of Foreign Ministers would resume work on the peace treaties in London), had weeks of disagreement ahead of it.

The first question had been whether the baby could talk. It could. Soon the world would know whether it could walk too.

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