The New Technique

All around the globe the diplomatic consequences of the Eisenhower-Khrushchev talks snowballed. Cautiously, with many a hedge and continuing mutual suspicion, the Big Two pushed ahead last week with a historic attempt to change the "balance of terror" stalemate between East and West.

In the West, Harold Macmillan's smashing victory in Britain's general election (see cover) cleared the way for serious summit planning. Until the British election results were in, Washington had seen no point to making any summit decisions; a Labor victory would have confronted the rest of the Western alliance with a British government that needed time to learn the ropes and that might well have proposed summit schemes even flashier than Macmillan's. Now, assured of a familiar quantity in London, Western foreign offices could settle down to working out a unified position for the great confrontation with Khrushchev.

The only hanger-back was France's Charles de Gaulle, who, skeptical as ever, was suggesting that Moscow still had not offered enough evidence that a Big Four meeting would be productive. But even De Gaulle did not oppose the summit in principle: his argument was that it should be delayed until after Ike's trip to Russia next spring.

Courteous but Unchanged. That was not Nikita Khrushchev's thinking. Wending his leisurely way back to Moscow from Peking last week, Russia's boss, with obvious satisfaction, declared that summit talks will "evidently be held this fall or winter."

In this expectation, the U.S.S.R. was already busily constructing prepared bargaining positions. Last week, as Communist East Germany celebrated its tenth anniversary--and cockily plastered West Berlin elevated railway stations with the new East German hammer-and-compass flag--Russia's First Deputy Premier Frol Kozlov was on hand to announce that Moscow would demand that the East Germans be seated at any summit meeting dealing with Germany. And in the U.N., the Russians were busily beating the drum for the "general disarmament plan" unveiled by Khrushchev last month. Last week, after maneuvering the General Assembly into agreeing to a debate restricted to the Khrushchev proposals, Russia's First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov announced that if the general disarmament plan were accepted "in principle," the task of working out controls "would not be difficult." Kuznetsov's tone was unwontedly courteous, but nothing he said represented any real concession to Western insistence that workable disarmament must be preceded by agreement on a rigid inspection and control system.

Which Label? But the biggest question mark in East-West relations remained Russia's position v. Red China's. In Peking fortnight ago, seemingly bent on restraining Chinese aggressiveness, Khrushchev had denounced "wars of conquest" but added that Marxists could still recognize "liberating wars"--precisely the label Red China would apply to an attack on Formosa. From Washington last week, U.S. Secretary of State Herter and Under Secretary Douglas Dillon moved quickly to plug this loophole (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), warned that Moscow must share responsibility for Peking's acts.

Out of the week's exchanges one thing came clear: all the specific issues that had long troubled East-West relations were still there and nobody had much idea how a summit meeting could remove them. But equally clearly, both the U.S. and Russia were employing a new diplomatic technique--one which Pundit Walter Lippmann described as "talk without time limits and without precision, without threats but without promises." And at least for the moment the new technique had lowered the world's temperature.

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