Back Under Protest

To anybody but a professional negotiator, the progress made in the U.S.'s negotiations with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser was imperceptible. But U.S. Ambassador Raymond Hare reportedly detected hope in the long talks he has been conducting in Cairo with Egypt's Foreign Minister Mahmoud Fawzi, and the Egyptian attitude is described as polite and reasonable. As a result, the U.S. decided against taking the problem to the U.N. Security Council, where there is also a strong likelihood that Soviet Russia would veto any formula that might conceivably suit both Egypt and Western user nations.

But already the pent-up tide of trade had rushed past the diplomats. Last week the unofficial boycott which several Western governments had managed to maintain against the reopened canal crumbled under shipowners' pressure. The first British ship since last October's invasion--the freighter West Breeze with a cargo of peanuts from Hong Kong--went through the canal and paid its dues in Swiss francs (Nasser has not yet consented to accept either French or British currencies). The ship was chartered by a Hong Kong firm doing business with Red China; nonetheless the flag that fluttered from the stern was the "Red Duster" of the British Merchant Navy.

This week the first U.S. ship, the 9,277-ton cargo liner President Jackson, is due to pass through, and two U.S. oil companies notified the State Department that their tankers would soon follow. In line with U.S. policy as clarified by President Eisenhower last week--shippers should "be prudent" in using the canal, but "I don't believe we have told them they shouldn't use it"--the Jackson will pay its dues "under protest."

AMERICA AND BRITAIN PAY TOLLS TO

EGYPT, headlined Nasser's newspaper Al Gumhuria, and gloated: "States which contested Egypt's rights in the canal and beat around the bush and hatched plots against Egyptians have at last found themselves forced to recognize Egypt's rights in supervising its own canal." Though the U.S. continued to haggle for some kind of multilateral agreement, every ship that paid its tolls and sailed through the canal widened the breach in the dike of effective Western resistance.

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