A Time for Reappraisal

I will not be a party to any treaty that makes anybody a slave; now that is all there is to it." With that unequivocal statement, the President of the U.S. last week summed up his answers to a series of newsconference questions about France's impending surrender to the Communists in Indo-China. But even as Dwight Eisenhower spoke, there were sharp new illustrations that the key allies of the U.S. did not participate in this firm resolution.

In Geneva, self-shorn of any chance to drive a hard bargain, France was fashioning a settlement that could mean nothing but another sweeping victory for Communism in Asia. In a bitter preview of what was to come, the French forces in Indo-China -- without warning or consulting the U.S. -- were abandoning 3,000,000 Vietnamese to Communist conquest and slavery (see FOREIGN NEWS). These events illustrated anew the unhappy fact that France is rapidly abdicating its long-tenuous role as a first-class world power.

As the President's statement blazed from the headlines, Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden came back to Manhattan from a trip to Canada and embarked on the Queen Elizabeth for home. They refused to talk to the press, were plainly dissatisfied with the results of their visit to the U.S. Their silent departure was. in a sense, a sad epilogue to Churchill's personal attempt to cover a compound fracture of policy with a patch of his own valiant personality. Churchill and Eden were plainly bent on what the Prime Minister called "peaceful coexistence" with the Communists. Peaceful coexistence has a wide range of meanings in the thermonuclear world, but there was every indication that the British translation means continued retreat in the face of Communist pressure.

As the Queen Elizabeth was about to sail, the most ominous word to come from the British-U.S. talks filtered out to public earshot: Britain was arguing that the Chinese Communist government might have to be admitted as a member of the United Nations. On Capitol Hill the news of Sir Winston Churchill's urgings on Eisenhower set off a dramatic display of bipartisan unity against U.N. membership for the aggressors of Peking.

The words and deeds of the week, demonstrating a further tendency toward weakness in France and Britain, and a renewed will for strength in the U.S., constituted a clear call for the "agonizing reappraisal" of U.S. foreign policy that John Foster Dulles mentioned six months ago in his dramatic appeal to the French to stand fast against Communist encroachment.

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