Peace Without Arms

Before the President boarded the Columbine for a two-hour flight toward his Georgia vacation last week, he called Secretary of State John Foster Dulles into a 30-minute huddle over the rapidly tightening tension between Egypt and Israel in the Middle East. Together they blocked out a statement of the U.S. position. Ike mulled it over again as he flew south, ordered it issued (and copies sent to Israel and Egypt) after checking over a final draft in his vacation office at the Augusta National Golf Club.

Under its United Nations obligations. said the statement, the U.S. will "oppose any aggression in the area . . . within constitutional means." Likewise the U.S. is "determined to support and assist any nation which might be subjected to such aggression [and] is confident that other nations will act similarly in the cause of peace."

Although the statement was only 140 words long and was issued in Eisenhower's typically low-key manner, it was an important definition of U.S. policy for the Middle East. First, it put U.S. support squarely behind the U.N. as the best instrumentality for keeping the peace in the area, and did so at the strategic time when U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was flying east to work toward a cease-fire between Israel and Egypt (see FOREIGN NEWS). Moreover, the support for U.N. implied that the U.S. would expect help from Moscow (in not using its veto power on the Security Council) if Moscow really wants to keep the peace.

If U.N. efforts should fail, and war should break out, the statement promised that the U.S. would take action against the aggressor. But the U.S. is reserving its freedom to act alone, or together with the British and French under the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, as circumstances require.

Beyond these explicit points, the statement clearly implied another: the Eisenhower Administration has made up its mind not to sell substantial amounts of arms to Israel, because it does not believe that a step-up in Israeli armed might is a solution of the problem of keeping peace in the Middle East--any more than the Communist arms for Egypt solved it. The real solution--if there is one--lies in the U.N. appeal, and beyond that, in Ike's promise that no aggressor will go unpunished and no victim of aggression unaided.

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