Show of Strength

On both sides of Europe the guns of cold war thundered more furiously last week than in many months. The target once again was Germany. But this time, the West held the initiative.

After a summer of doldrums and defeats--Geneva, Indo-China, the death of EDC--the democracies had suddenly rallied and rolled out some new and hand some diplomatic field-pieces: the all but completed Anglo-Egyptian settlement over Suez, the Anglo-Iranian oil agreement, the harmonious partition of Trieste and, above all, the potentially history-changing Act of London. With this quick parade of successes, the Atlantic alliance seemed to recover the ground, and the spirit, that were lost with EDC. Europe, with the potent help of the U.S., had produced a new plan to rearm the West Germans, and in it lay the promise of a truly closed anti-Communist front.

Vague Exceptions. The best measure of the West's advance was the way the Communists struck back before the ink was dry on the London agreement. Cunningly, the Kremlin sent Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin with a newly tailored model of the old maneuver for Big Four talks on Germany. This time, said Molotov, Russia would be willing to discuss--though not necessarily to agree to--"free all-German elections." This held out to the Germans hope of unity, which all ardently desire, while offering the French a fresh excuse to delay still longer their agonizing decision over Germany, The Soviet anti-London tactics did not stop with Molotov. In the United Nations. Andrei Vishinsky revived the debate (and with it the soul-searching) of atomic age disarmament simply by suggesting that Moscow might, with certain vague exceptions, be willing to come a little closer to the West's terms. Thus the Communists offered ammunition to Europe's neutralists and hope to the millions everywhere who knew too little to see the true objective of the Communist "coexistence offensive."

The Soviet tactics were so familiar and had been employed so often before that they stood no chance of disrupting the achievement of London. The real question was whether all London's participants were really interested in bringing the agreement to realization. "The politicians," cautioned Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitimg, "will fish around in the soup looking for hairs, and will surely find some."

Split Hairs. The West Germans had long ago made up their minds: last year they repulsed the same Soviet offer of "unity" by overwhelmingly re-electing Konrad Adenauer. And last week they did it again when the Bundestag emphatically endorsed the London agreement.

If the week had ended there, the Western allies could have counted it one of the most salutary in a long time. But it did not. The French could not yet bring themselves to the moment of decision. In the National Assembly, French politicians not only sought out hairs in the London agreement, but avidly split them.

Was it to be the same long and fruitless story of EDC all over again? On the surface it may have seemed so. But the London Conference, in producing a blueprint to replace EDC, had also produced a determination among France's allies to go ahead with the integration of West Germany whatever the decision in Paris.

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