What to Talk About

In his first call for a summit meeting on the Middle East, Nikita Khrushchev declared that "the world is on the brink of catastrophe," and the fighting had already begun. Last week Khrushchev was still rumbling about "a powder barrel which can explode at the slightest spark." The summit meeting that was shaping up could no longer be justified by such hoarse cries. The flames of violence that had flared in the Middle East had been dampened. Iraq's new regime had diplomatic recognition from just about everybody. In Lebanon the election of General Fuad Chehab as President (see below) raised hopes for an end to civil war and withdrawal in due season of U.S. troops.

But the momentum of summitry continued. Every nation was busy extracting every drop of propaganda value in the negotiating, and preparing its positions for the meeting itself. Khrushchev himself made a jet flight to Peking to talk things over with Comrade Mao, who had given Soviet summit maneuverings full endorsement--but had been noticeably cool about having the talks under Security Council auspices, where Nationalist China sits--especially as Red China has never succeeded, as Warren Austin once said, in shooting its way into the U.N.

India's Nehru, initially pleased by Russia's invitation, was now less keen to participate at the risk of promoting Nasserism and looking like a Soviet stooge. France's Charles de Gaulle continued to play his lone hand in the grand manner. Unmoved by Anglo-American disapproval, unshaken by the fact that every other NATO nation opposed his position in an impassioned 5 1/2-hour session of the NATO Council, De Gaulle continued to call for private five-power chats, somewhere in Europe in the "necessary conditions of objectivity and serenity," and never mind about gathering a U.N. crowd--where somebody might want to bring up Algeria. De Gaulle had less success seeking Rome and Bonn support to speak for continental Europe. Italy's new Premier, Amintore Fanfani, a U.S. visitor last week, was selling an old Italian idea that in one form or another had some chance of adoption: a Western-sponsored Middle East development plan, operated through the U.N.

The Degree of Worry. Was a U.N. summit session doomed to be held in a cave of winds, reverberating with propaganda and with each side eager only to put the other in the dock, and to stay out of the dock itself? The West might be prepared to come to terms with Pan-Arabism, but knew no way and had no desire to come to terms with a Nasserism founded on anti-Westernism, buoyed up by Soviet arms, spreading inflammatory lies, preaching assassination. The British might warn Khrushchev, as Anthony Eden in a moment of crisis did once before, that British national solvency depends on ability to buy Persian Gulf oil for sterling, and that the British are prepared to take all necessary steps to protect its source.

Khrushchev could be counted upon to demand that the Anglo-American forces get out immediately, and that the great powers bind themselves not to intervene militarily in the Middle East from now on. He might get further mileage out of proposing an embargo on arms shipments to the area, knowing that the West would not abandon arms support of the Northern Tier of nations. The U.S., to accent the positive, would propose, among other things, an international economic development fund for the Middle East and a strengthening of U.N. capabilities to deal with "indirect aggression."

Some of these schemes had no hope of adoption; others had little short-run relevance to the political ferment in the Middle East. ("When the principal personalities in a government are living in daily fear of murder and assassination," noted Secretary of State Dulles last week, "it is very hard to get their minds onto a program of economic development.") But, whether a summit meeting might do more than register familiar attitudes depended on how much either Khrushchev or Nasser really worried that the Middle East might get out of hand, and how willing they would be to treat specific sources of tension.

Unwanted Volunteers. Was Nasser still worried that next time Moscow might send him unwanted "Moslem volunteers," Communist troops he would have a hard time getting rid of? The onrush of events had momentarily been stalled, but agitation everywhere continued, and nothing had been solved. Jordan was one sign of the danger. Should the British go home, leave Hussein to be ousted by Nasserites? In such a case Israel, its existence threatened as never before, might even take military action. British troops were thus holding the peace while accused of spreading war. Rather than accept a third Arab-Israeli war with its incalculable risks to the great powers (and its threat to his Nasserite friends), Khrushchev might prove willing to accept some kind of U.N. guarantee, not of Hussein's regime, but of Jordan's continued independence.

But in the last analysis, whether or not anything useful was achieved would depend not only on Dwight Eisenhower, Harold Macmillan and Nikita Khrushchev. It would depend, too, on Gamal Abdel Nasser, a man who in the past has shown a blind determination to gratify his own imperialistic ambitions though the heavens fall. Unless Nasser renounced his habit of setting international forest fires in the calm assumption that someone else would put them out, no agreements achieved at any summit meeting could bring stability to the Middle East.

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