Closing the Triangle

Most of the men who shaped the postwar world are gone--Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, De Gaulle. This week, barring a last-minute change in plans, a VIP helicopter will touch down on the south lawn of the White House and out will step a statesman who has earned a place alongside those formidable figures: President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.

Marxist Metternich. Still vigorous at 79, Tito comes to the U.S. from a couple of the world's most sensitive spots: India and Egypt, two countries that recently signed treaties of friendship with the Soviet Union, despite their professed allegiance to Tito's policy of nonalignment. In some respects a sort of Marxist Metternich, the Yugoslav President has done a shrewd balancing act between the major powers with which Belgrade must deal. Recognizing that a triangular rivalry was inevitable among the U.S., the Soviet Union and China, he has tried to work himself into a livable relationship with all three.

Recently he re-established diplomatic bonds with Peking and extended an invitation to Premier Chou En-lai to visit Belgrade. Then he turned around and played host to Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev, with whom he joined in a declaration of friendship and cooperation. Now, closing the triangle, Tito is moving to enhance Yugoslav-American relations, which have been better than ever since President Nixon's 1970 state visit to Belgrade.

Ever since Tito's break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia's survival as an independent state outside Soviet hegemony has been treated by successive American administrations as a matter of prime U.S. interest. In the talks that Tito will hold this week, he will probably emphasize that while Yugoslavia is in sympathy with Nixon's proclaimed "era of negotiations," it insists that such big-power exchanges must not ignore the interests of the smaller countries.

Security Problem. The No. 1 headache for both American officials and Yugoslav security men, as Tito spends 61 days traveling from Washington to the space center at Houston and finally to the Los Angeles area, will be to protect him from embarrassing demonstrations and even violence by members of extremist Yugoslav emigre groups. Of the estimated 1.5 million Americans of Yugoslav origin, only a few hundred belong to fanatical Tito-baiting political organizations, some with direct spiritual links to Hitler. Still, as Premier Aleksei Kosygin's close call in Ottawa last week demonstrates, the security problem is not merely a matter of numbers. State Department representatives have been meeting with members of Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian exile groups to explain to them why good relations with the present Yugoslav government are in the national interest of the U.S. There is no chance that the dedicated anti-Communists will be converted by such sessions; the hope is that they may at least be persuaded to keep their protests nonviolent.

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