Upside Down

Playing to the hilt his role as top banana on the world diplomatic circuit, Nikita Khrushchev last week took his road show to Asia.

In the West, Khrushchev's 13-day tour of the U.S. had produced an indefinable relaxation of mood. None of the causes of conflict had really been removed, but somehow everybody seemed to feel better. Campaigning in Britain, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan jauntily announced that "everybody is agreed" to a summit meeting and that everything seems to be clear except fixing "the date and the place and the people." And on a brief stopover in Moscow on the way from Washington to Peking, Khrushchev himself spoke of Dwight Eisenhower in language of a kind Soviet leaders have never before applied to a Western statesman. Said Khrushchev: "I must say that the President of the U.S. showed statesmanlike wisdom, courage and will power in assessing the present international situation . . . He is a man who enjoys the absolute confidence of his people."

But if Western skies temporarily looked clearer, the storm clouds were still piling up in the East. In New Delhi last week the Indian government put out a map showing in detail the extensive areas on its side of the Himalayas (including some 6,000 sq. mi. of Pakistan) that the Red Chinese claim and, in some cases, have seized by force of arms. The eight SEATO nations declared anew their determination to aid the kingdom of Laos against invasion from Communist North Viet Nam, and in Laos itself members of the U.N. fact-finding mission trying to get into the frontier village of Muong Het found that it had been taken by Communist troops.

In years past such a made-to-order opportunity to spread dissension would have brought the Soviets galloping to the scene with hot pronunciamentos and threats. And, in fact, Moscow did nothing to lessen Asian strains last week by sending a bristling note to London accusing the British of trying to draw neutral Cambodia "under foreign influence." But at the height of last week's festivities in

Peking (see cover), Khrushchev sounded a very different note. Said he: "If we are strong, it does not mean that we should resort to force to test the stability of the capitalist system. That would be wrong. The people would not understand and would never support those who took it into their heads to act in this way."

This pronouncement at the high table of aggressive Communist revolution set Western diplomats to scratching their heads; though most of them found it heartening, some clung to the suspicion that it might be just another cynical appeal to the world's yearning for peace. But it was a measure of the degree to which Khrushchev had turned the world upside down in the last month that the West could even conceive of him as a shield and buckler against the belligerence of Mao Tse-tung's China.

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