The Big Two

Traditional diplomacy hardly stood a chance last week as the world's two superpowers poked, prodded, and clutched at each other.

While Richard Nixon whistle-stopped his way through the vast expanse of Siberia, the world barely noted the foreign ministers' conference grinding to an inconclusive end in Geneva. In Vienna, young Americans and Russians alike were learning some of the facts of international life at a rowdy, Red-run youth festival. And in their twin expositions--the Soviet in New York and the U.S. in Moscow--the superpowers sought with all the arts of salesmanship and propaganda to convince each other of their strength, wealth and contentment.

Asking Price. Traveling ballet troupes and mutual exchanges of praiseworthy banalities were, of course, getting to be old stuff. But the new turn in last week's accumulation of events was the emergence of the Big Two as a conscious entity. To Nixon, as to previous U.S. visitors, Khrushchev voiced the opinion that world peace could be guaranteed if only the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could get together. But Khrushchev's more crucial decision to give Nixon a chance to shine in Russia was a conscious effort to persuade the U.S. to bypass NATO, the Big Four and the U.N., in favor of direct dealings with Moscow. Khrushchev had been almost indifferent--as well as rude--to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Now, in return for his welcome to Nixon, Nikita unabashedly hoped to get an invitation to the U.S. And judging from the sounds emerging from Washington--and from Nixon himself in Moscow (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), he was likely in due course to get it.

Already the Big Two were close enough to being a speaking-and-dealing reality that Western European diplomats were openly discussing it. "You don't know General de Gaulle," snapped a French government official, "if you think he is going to stand idly by and let Russia and the U.S. settle everything." In Britain, the Economist surprisingly took the opposite tack. Ignoring the usual British argument that the West would be lost without the benefit of Britain's deeper diplomatic savvy, the Economist saw an Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting as "an alternative to the summit," iaatly declared: "The job can be done better in Washington than anywhere else."

Visiting Time. Both the vague expectancies of those who saw nothing else to pin their hopes on and the exaggerated fears of Europeans who thought that they would not be allowed to settle their own destinies rested on a false premise. The U.S. has no desire and no intention of sitting down with Khrushchev in a new Yalta on the Potomac, disposing of one crisis after another in a grand "world settlement." The U.S. is fully aware that if it did so, it would only alienate its most valued friends; furthermore, anything negotiated would also require U.S. Senate approval. Such a deal is simply not in the cards. What the new trend in Big Twoness does foreshadow is the possibility of an ever-growing mutual exploration conducted in public of each other's ways. Neither side could hope to convert the other, but more realistic diplomatic dealings may be possible once that pragmatic fellow, Nikita Khrushchev, sees for himself that the U.S. is big, prosperous, and growing, as well as friendly to those who do not menace her, and unitedly resolute toward those who do.

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