The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

WASHINGTON diplomats have been turning their attention back and forth from Europe to Asia so frequently in the past year that they have taken on the appearance of spectators at a tennis match. Unlike tennis, however, the game of diplomatic maneuver never ends unless peace gives way to war. The Soviet tactic of leading Austria’s Chancellor Julius Raab up to the mountaintop in Moscow to show him the promised land, after a decade of deceit and delay, sharpened the focus on Europe again.

The Eisenhower Administration had been smugly congratulating itself on having won the battle with Russia over ratification of the Paris pacts, in the belief that they would firmly tie West Germany to the West. But Moscow has shown that that was only a preliminary.

The Kremlin’s ace

With the grant of sovereignly to West Germany, the United States, Britain, and France have given the last major concession in their power to give. But Russia holds the ace of aces the power to permit reunification of East and West Germany and, beyond that, to move back the German-Polish frontier to the pre-World War II borderline. The Austrian maneuver has, for the first time, led some American officials and foreign diplomats in the capital to think that the Kremlin may, indeed, be ready to play that big card.

As viewed in Washington, there are two lines of procedure for the Soviets. One is limited and essentially negative — a holding operation playing for time. The other is more risky, but if successful it could sweep continental Europe into Soviet hands. In either case, Russia’s first step is to use the new Austrian “neutrality” as a pretext for saying to West Germany: “You want unification above all else, you say. Well, you may have it merely by getting your three Western friends to agree to the same sort of treaty for Germany as the one for Austria.”

This strategy came into full view, in fact, the day Raab returned to Vienna from his Moscow trip. Its short-term effect could be paralysis in Bonn, where Chancellor Konrad Adenauer lacks the political strength to force through the Bundestag the draft law necessary to implement the Paris pacts by raising an armed force of 500,000 within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

On the other hand, the Austrian maneuver may mean that a basic shift in Kremlin tactics already has been secretly agreed upon. It could mean that the Khrushchev-Bulganin-Zhukov team — if indeed that is the real team — has decided that the time has come to gamble the East German satellite for the immensely bigger stakes of all of Germany.

Moscow’s policies are compounded of military and political ingredients. In the first post-war decade, Moscow continued to be dominated by the traditional land-space concepts in its military thinking. But the new nuclear weapons and the Soviet creation of the means of delivery via manned bombers and submarines, and ultimately by robot intercontinental ballistic missiles, may be changing those concepts.

If so, then a new military ingredient may have been created with which a Communist political motivation can be combined in Moscow for a decision to gamble East Germany. In that case, the old defense-in-depth which has so often protected the Russian motherland in the past could be limited to the inner belt of satellites — Poland, Czeehoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria.

At the highest levels in Washington the idea is now generally accepted that it is only a matter of perhaps two, three, or at most four years before the Russians will have the weapons plus the means of delivery on which this type of strategy could reasonably be based. Such time estimates could be as incorrect as were those on Soviet atomic progress, however. Or perhaps Moscow is placing for the time to close the military gap.

In either case, Moscow will not move its 40,000 troops out ol Austria simply as a gesture of good will, however much it will try to exploit such an idea. There is a growing view in Washington that Moscow now seeks to create a new type of defensein-depth: a “neutralized" belt composed of Sweden, a united Germany, Austria, and Yugoslavia. Such an idea has attractions for many in Britain, for instance, who hope for a firm “line" between East and West and who can delude themselves into believing that such “neutralized" countries would remain that way.

Clearly, such a neutral belt, if it could be created, would force Finland into the arms of Russia, end the physical isolation of Red Albania, create new pressures on Greece, and open new avenues for infill ration into Italy and France. There are no indications that Yugoslavia is going to rejoin the Cominform. But Marshal Tito’s adoption of Jawaharlal Nehru’s “non-involvement “ thesis when he was in India comes close enough to satisfy Moscow for the time being. And who can say what will happen after Tito?

The fate of Germany

Thus the whole issue of Europe continues to center on Germany. The Western grant of sovereignty to West Germany , it is true, is limited in that the United States, Britain, and France retain their exclusive right to negotiate and settle the fate of all of Germany with the Sov iet Enion. But in fact this is more a legal right than one the West will find it politically possible to exercise, for the wishes of a sovereign West Germany cannot be ignored. Henee the battle between East and West over the fate of Germany from now on will be fought less over the head of West Germany than in West Germany itself.

The Austrian maneuver will be an attractive pattern for many West Germans, anxious for unification and wary of a revival of the military in their midst. It also will provide a wedge for Russia aimed at the Atlantic alliance. The French may have voted to permit West German rearmament within NATO, but many Frenchmen would be happier if a way were found to avoid the actual passing out of guns to the proposed twelvedivisions.

Military men in Washington accept the argument that the Russians genuinely fear the creation of twelve West German divisions. This alone is enough to account for the Kremlin’s maneuver, for it is clear that only the ratification of the Paris pacts moved Moscow from dead center on the longstalled Austrian, treaty. Yet if Moscow has determined upon a larger horizon, the Austrian gambit may indeed be the opener for a new try at the Sovietization of all of continental Europe without firing a shot. This is the real danger.

The events which could lie ahead need mere facing up to than has been evident so far in Washington. They need counter policies only now being hazily considered by policy makers recently sighing with relief at the latest narrow escape from chaos in Europe.

Ten-year building boom

Approximately 10 million new housing units have been built in the United States since the end of World War II, not quite ten years ago. This is a phenomenal record which has surprised even the optimists. But of late the building boom has been sustained by ultra-easy credit terms. There are cases in which the home buyer not only pays nothing down for his house but actually receives $50 cash or an electrical appliance when he puts his name to the mortgage.

Forty-five per cent of the 10 million units have been constructed with government aid either under the FHA or VA mortgage guarantee programs or as Treasury-subsidized public housing. In spite of this government support, the economists have for some time been saying that the building boom cannot last — that the demands stemming from both the wartime backlog and the post-war baby boom have now been so thoroughly met that saturation is just around the corner.

The economic implications of a home-building collapse are obvious enough, for construction (both home and commercial) is not only one of the nation’s largest direct employers hut creates widespread indirect employment as far away as the lorests and mines. But is a collapse actually going to occur? If it does, it will be because of an utterly needless failure of government — federal, state, and local. The reason: there is now at hand the instrument to sustain the building boom almost indefinitely, assuming a continuation of our national economic growth in peace. This instrument is urban redevelopment, a new technique laboriously created and tested in the past several years.

Rebuilding our cities

In pre-war years, slum clearance was limited to tearing down the rattraps and replacing them, for the most part, with public housing units. The public versus private housing battle so hobbled this program, however, that slum growth far outstripped slum clearance. The post-war migration to the suburbs of families in the rising-income brackets created for our big cities the most severe financial crisis in their histories. Rot has become the word for the older central areas of these cities, locked within boundaries which lack all logic, whatever their historical justification.

Urban redevelopment was conceived as a means of attacking the problem of urban rot on an all-encompassing basis: the replacement of slums not only by new housing but by wholly new neighborhoods complete with tax-producing stores and shops and in many cases light industries as well. In some instances, the plans also permit the expansion of existing heavy industries, which otherwise would have to move to the country to expand.

The urban redevelopment program has now largely won over the private housing backers because the job is done by private industry even though some public housing must be included to accommodate the lowest-income families displaced by slum clearance. Government’s hand is vital because the program depends not only on mortgage guarantees but on the use of the power of eminent domain, now finally tested and approved by the courts to include its application to areas designed for nonresidential uses.

Wide public acceptance, too, has been achieved, for which the big city newspapers deserve considerable applause. This acceptance has been won, in part, because of the clear warnings on the cash registers of the downtown merchants in the past few years that unless they help push urban redevelopment they risk a major decline in the worth of their vast fixed capital investments. Areawide or even city-wide planning, fortunately, has come to be generally accepted in principle, though each specific change always brings resistance from some of those directly affected.

There appears to be a happy coincidence between the expected decline in the suburban housing boom and the emergence of techniques for massive downtown urban redevelopment. The additional financial burden on the cities is not too great, for much of their share is met through municipal improvements such as schools, streets, parking, highways, and other public services which would have to be provided anyway. The bulk of the cash involved comes from private lending institutions. Some cities — Chicago, for example — already are deeply involved in major urban redevelopment programs. Washington is close to agreement on a model plan to end a vast area of blight and deterioration in the shadow of the Capitol dome. Incidentally, the end of the segregated school system in W ashington has simplified the program in the capital.

If urban redevelopment really works in the next decade on the grand scale which its proponents expect it to, jobs will be created for millions of Americans in construction and related industries. Beyond this simple economic factor is the social one, for the program will be a major contribution in the war on crime and juvenile delinquency, so often the products of bad housing and poor environment. Finally, if the program works in the United States, it could serve to impel suitable versions abroad. This is especially true in Western Europe, where many anti-Communists have long believed that democratic failure to satisfy housing demands has been a major weakness in the struggle against Marxism.

Mood of the capital

The pre-convention presidential political season, actually more extensive than usual this time because of the lateness of the 1956 party conventions, opened in the spring with Adlai Stevenson’s attack on the Administration s Formosa policy, and was followed by the Democratic dinner for House Speaker Sam Rayburn.

Some Democrats had been playing with the idea that there might be a political issue in the Eisenhower foreign policy. But the indications so far are that they may limit themselves to attacks on Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s flood of words and phrases rather than assault the President’s competency to handle the nation’s world-wide problems. Rayburn himself made this rather clear when he spoke in almost Biblical tones: “... now we have come upon times whose like is not in the annals of mankind. For today it is possible to enshroud all men in a seamless, cloud-borne garment of poison, and make our planet as lifeless as the moon.”

This kind of talk, coupled with Rayburn’s public prayer for Eisenhower “in the terrible loneliness that surrounds Presidents,” largely offset the whoops and hollers for Harry Truman’s shafts at the White House and State Department. The Stevenson speech, too, was centered on constructive proposals highly favored by many within the Republican Administration, whatever the political overtones of the barbs which went with it.

Many Democrats are beginning to think that President Eisenhower may be beatable in ‘56, though he is conceded to be unbeatable as of mid-’55. The strong Democratic showing in Michigan in the spring on top of the '54 national victory, and the bobbles of the GOP in Washington such as the Corsi case, are slowly building up a feeling that the public enchantment with Ike in ‘56 could not possibly be as great as it was in ‘52.

The expectation is that the Congress this year will pass a fair part of what the President has proposed, though some of the legislation will not bear too much resemblance to the Administration’s original version. The school and highway programs are in the maybe-this-session, maybe-nextsession category. But nobody expects the legislative record in ‘55 to make much difference to the voters in ‘56. What the Senators and Representatives do next year will make more difference.