An Urgent Condition

THE NATION An Urgent Condition During one of the tangled debates of his first Administration, President Grover Cleveland rapped out an apt reminder to Congress: "It is a condition which confronts us--not a theory." Last week, as the 85th Congress took up President Eisenhower's resolution authorizing the use of force to keep the Communists out of the Middle East, the U.S. was confronted by an urgent world condition that was increasingly apparent the greater the distance from Capitol Hill.

One sure measure of the critical condition (and of the value of the President's proposal) was that the Communists, from Moscow to Peking, were reacting against Eisenhower with a fury unheard since their last hoped-for conquests (Formosa, South Viet Nam) slipped from their hands. Another measure was that the British, too long preoccupied with attacks on U.S. policy, were rallying around the point that the President's plan for the Middle East is a real contribution to world stability. "Everybody in Britain who is not lost in imperialist nostalgia or neutralist daydreams," keynoted London's middle-of-the-road News Chronicle, "should welcome it as a first step to better things."

In the Middle East itself, reported seasoned observers, the President's plan was being read (as it was meant to be read) not only as an offer of U.S. help and a symbol of the U.S.'s support for the independence of Arab nations, but as a sharp warning that the Arabs should no longer try to play off East against West. And never was there more urgent need, reported these observers, for the U.S. to consolidate its position with skillfully applied economic aid.

Thus confronted by crisis and a doctrine to ease it, the House Foreign Relations Committee last week opened hearings (see below) on the President's plan. Both Secretary of State Dulles and ex-Secretary of State Acheson propounded long-stored-up views and ran the gauntlet of the kind of serious, specific questions that Congress must and should ask. In a sense this was the kind of foreign-policy debate, unheard amid the oratory on the H-bombs and Joe Smiths of the 1956 campaign, that was long overdue. In an other sense, however, it was now for the House and Senate to relate the tone and the length of the debate to the critical condition, to bear in mind especially that the Communists will interpret undue delay in approving the bulk of the Eisenhower plan to mean that the U.S. is deeply divided about the wisdom of opposing Communism with both force and dollars in the Middle East.

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