"POSITIVE . . . CONSTRUCTIVE . . . BIPARTISAN"

In a week of great turmoil at home, the U.S. people discovered that their Government had, at last, a working foreign policy. It was not a perfect policy; it had not yet been translated into success. It was a policy formed in response to events, in defensive opposition to the dark self-interest of Russia. It still groped for specific solutions. But in outline and intent it was there for all to see.

Secretary of State James Francis Byrnes had come back from the Paris failure with renewed determination rather than disheartenment. His proposal to throw the whole peace-making machinery into the United Nations was a diplomatic masterstroke (TIME, May 27). Then Michigan's Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, an aide to Byrnes at Paris, rose in the Senate to define U.S. policy, and give it his unqualified support. Said he:

The [Paris] Council was not a success in gaining agreement upon several key questions. . . . Eastern communism and Western democracy were unable, for the time being, to see eye to eye in most of these considerations.

It is unfortunate that great progress cannot be immediately reported. But delay is preferable to error in such vital matters. We can "compromise" within the boundaries of a principle. We can no longer compromise principles themselves. That becomes "appeasement," and appeasement only multiplies the hazard from which it seeks escape. History leaves no room for doubt upon that score. The wrong answers will breed wars for tomorrow. . . .

But, in my view, the more important news is that the Council was a complete success in developing, at last, and in disclosing a positive, constructive, peace-seeking, bipartisan foreign policy for the United States. It is based, at last, upon the moralities of the Atlantic and the San Francisco Charters. Yet it is based equally upon the practical necessities required for Europe's rehabilitation.

It is a policy which seeks promptly to end the present, inconclusive armistice regimes which are postponing peace beyond all limits of reason and of safety. It is a policy which demands action in concluding peace treaties not only with Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland, but also with Austria, which is close to the center of the total continental problem. It is a policy which demands action in arriving at decisions for a unified Germany, where the real core of Europe's recuperation resides, and where the problem must be considered as a whole rather than in four airtight compartments in four zones of military occupation.

It is a policy which guarantees maximum protections against resurgent Axis aggressors, and which dramatically offers specific guaranties as an earnest of American good faith. It is a demilitarization policy. It is a policy which now substitutes justice for vengeance in these formulas of peace; which now insists upon ethnic recognitions that no longer traffic in the lives and destinies of helpless peoples; and which spurns expansionism as a plague upon tomorrow's peace and security. It is a policy which invites all of our partners in the war--instead of a closed corporation of big powers--to have a proper voice in the making of the treaties and the writing of the peace which result from the common victories which we all helped win. It is a policy which wants a people's peace.

That is what I think we Americans were trying to do at Paris.

That is what I pray we may yet succeed in doing.

I will support that sort of foreign policy under any administration; and I hope that any administration, whatever its political complexion, will stick to that sort of a foreign policy for keeps. This sort of a policy, plus the effective operation of the United Nations, is the way to stop World War III before it starts.

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