The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THE meeting “at the summit" is so pregnant with both opportunity and danger and so vast in its implications for mankind that Washington policy makers are having trouble sorting out the basic positions, assumptions, and priorities for this first heads-of-government gathering since Potsdam a decade ago. The flood of official Moscow policy statements, of not-so-casual remarks by Kremlin officials, and of carefully phrased hints in the Soviet press has given Washington so much to digest that one has the feeling the President came about as close as anyone could when he said the meeting would test the “atmosphere.”

The two vital questions are these: What is the Kremlin’s post-Stalin collective leadership really up to? What should be our response? At the signing of the Austrian treaty in Vienna, Molotov confirmed the earlier Washington judgment that the immediate Soviet objective is to prevent the implementation of West German rearmament within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But is there more to the new Soviet line than a bargaining proposal to head off arms for the Bonn government? Has the Kremlin leadership decided that nuclear weapons make imperative an honest attempt to reach an understanding with the West — above all with the United States?

The answer will certainly not be found until the West has explored with sincerity every nook and cranny of the Soviet proposals those already put forward and those to be made “at the summit,”at the subsequent meetings of the foreign ministers, at the United Nations disarmament talks, and at other diplomatic gatherings. The terrible responsibility of finding the answer is just beginning to be understood in Washington.

Neither President Eisenhower nor Secretary Dulles sought the “summit” meeting. It was agreed to only under a combination of world pressures in general and political pressures from London, Paris, and Bonn in particular. Fortunately, now that the meeting has been agreed to all around, there is in Washington a combination of men and events which should be favorable to the conduct of an earnest American inquiry into Soviet aims and proposals.

No alternative to peace

First, the President seeks an accommodation with Russia because, in his now famous phrase, there is “no alternative to peace” in the nuclear age. Given this premise, his actions are likely to be based on two assumptions: that the American people want him to search for peace with honor, and that the Soviet leaders, their Communist ideology notwithstanding, are subject to the same motivations in the human struggle as are men everywhere. The Eisenhower-Zhukov relationship is one facet of this latter tenet.

Second, Senator Walter F. George, the foreign policy voice of the vast majority in Congress, has in a few months created at the Capitol the indispensable congressional backing for every honorable effort by the executive to find an accommodation with Moscow.

Third, Secretary Dulles, a man of considerable diplomatic ability once he feels he is operating on a firm base, now can apply his skills secure in the knowledge of the Eisenhower-George stance unlike the situation a year ago at Geneva. Dulles has offended many at home and abroad with his combination of pious preaching and belligerent words, yet it should not be forgotten that it was Dulles last February who appealed to “Russians of stature” to subordinate the ambitions of international Communism to Russian security and welfare. That was no mere psychological warfare stunt but a deadly serious theme — one conceived by Dulles as far back as 1946, in fact, and one which fits the Toynbee concept that democracy and Communism in the end can learn to live together even as Christianity and Islam.

Are the Russians sincere?

Despite these three factors, however, there should be no disregarding the fact that there are many in Washington who believe Moscow is out to trick the West in a play for time, perhaps until she can launch an atomic Pearl Harbor. Some have so filled their minds with the phantasmagoria of Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam that they cannot trust their own countrymen ever again to sit down at the bargaining table with the Soviets. They are still fighting a rear-guard action in Washington, although they know that the climate of opinion has been shifting and that Senator George spoke the mood of the Capitol when he called for talks with Russia and when he declared that the United States should be “big enough and great enough” to sit down with the Chinese Communists.

It is impossible—and unnecessary — to determine in advance whether or not the Russians are sincere. What is necessary, it is being realized more and more, is a willingness to explore whether they are sincere. Above all, it is necessary to move from the rigidity of the cold war to a new flexibility of mind and diplomatic action.

Along with a willingness to probe the Soviet position, there is needed a determination to move with patience, step by step, not to seek full solution in one attempt, and to make this exceedingly plain both at home and abroad. This approach is certainly the one favored by the EisenhowerGeorge-Dulles triumvirate. But it will not hurt to have the world write on its blackboard over and over again, during the summer and fall, the words of Anthony Eden: “If you negotiate with a man who is in no hurry and you are in a hurry, you will lose out every time. This, I am sure, is true of negotiating with the Communist powers. The world cannot be banged and bustled into peace.”

The Kremlin respects strength

Many officials and diplomats who have wrestled with the issue of arms control since the days of the Acheson-Lilienthal report and the Baruch Plan took the Soviet proposal on disarmament on May 10 to be the result of the most searching inquiry ever made in Moscow of how Russia can survive in the atomic age. One diplomat quipped: “Somebody over there must have pasted on the Politburo wall Ike’s ‘no alternative to peace’ statement.”

Moscow has always respected power and force. What it has now proposed is in response to the West’s strength, especially the big steps toward West German rearmament. It also is related to Russia’s weakness, above all to its internal economic weakness — especially in agriculture — compared with the vastly improved Western European economies and the American economy, which defies all Marxist predictions of doom.

Moscow has strapped its people to keep up the arms race with the United States. Washington took the May disclosures of new Soviet aircraft in significant numbers as calculated to say to the West before the “summit” meeting, “See for yourself that we now have not only the bombs but the ability to deliver them.” Whether in fact practical parity in the art of destruction exists at the moment the “summit” meeting convenes, Moscow seems to be saying, “We come to the bargaining table as equals in power. We offer to negotiate on that basis.”

Arms control and inspection

For this or other reasons, Moscow has come up with something new on the key question of an international arms control mechanism. Ever since the Baruch Plan was put forward in 1946, the West has called for unrestricted control and inspection while Russia has never conceded anything but the most limited, and therefore worse than useless, incursion behind the Iron Curtain.

Now Moscow argues that in any future big war there must first be concentrations “at definite points” of “large military formations with big quantities of conventional armaments.” Hence, says Moscow, let us set up an international alarm system by stationing inspectors at “control posts in big ports, railway junctions, motor roads and airdromes.” For, the argument goes, “with the present military techniques, the significance of such points for preparing for aggressive war, far from declining, on the contrary rises.”

The Washington technicians in the arms problem at once labeled this a “Korean type” control system — that is, utterly inadequate. But others incline to the view that Moscow may, indeed, have something. The facts of nuclear development have now passed the point where effective control within a vast nation such as the Soviet Union or the United States is still technically feasible. It is too easy to hide existing stockpiles and too difficult to detect new small productive facilities. Thus, it is argued, no system could guard against a surprise attack (say by intercontinental ballistic missiles if and when available), but Russia could not mount an attack certain of obliterating the United States without “alarm system” inspectors knowing about it and initiating retaliation.

The Russian proposal may have been put forward as an honest effort to find a way out. Americans should expect no less from their government than that it probe the idea with that possibility in mind.

Watch on the Potomac

The senators, congressmen, governors, old friends, business leaders, Democrats for Eisenhower, and other White House callers trek out of the oval office with at least one impression in common: the President really would prefer to retire to Gettysburg when his term is up. Some hear Eisenhower talk about five o’clock fatigue; others hear him say he has little time to think. Countless people heard him refer to “my age” during a televised press conference.

Even the most blasé political reporters were shaken when he casually referred to the remaining twenty-one months of his term (he was off by only a week, the reporters found out. by counting on their fingers). This amounts to about as conclusive evidence as one could seek that the President would be happy to settle for one term. The question, however, is: Can he be persuaded to run again?

Many in Washington, including some of those very close to Eisenhower, are coming to believe that the state of the world will be decisive. If the “summit” meeting and the diplomatic conversations next fall and winter lessen tensions and clear the way toward peace, will the President feel that he can retire?

There are some Republicans who go about saying that they can appeal to the President to run again on the grounds that the nation is not yet safe from socialism, that the country will be turned over to the Democratic left-wingers if he deserts the party.

The only gauge of this sort of appeal is the lack of interest Eisenhower has been showing this year in the domestic parts of his legislative program. At press conference after press conference, the President has been badly informed, partly informed, or uninformed about domestic problems. He has allowed all sorts of appointments to be made without any real knowledge of the men named to high office. The Corsi case was one instance, the choice of John B. Hollister to head the foreign aid program another.

The President has spoken repeatedly about the need for a liberal foreign trade program. Yet he has accepted amendments voted by the Senate which, in the opinion of a good many experts, seriously imperil the program. He has won the principle and that seems to be enough for him. The fine print, so important in Washington’s bureaucratic world, couldn’t interest the President less.

In the case of the trade bill, amendments will bring escape-clause case after case to the President’s desk in the full glare of publicity and amid the full cry of injured industry. Some of his opponents figure the President will find it impossible to resist giving in as election day nears, whether or not he is the candidate, and so the special interests will get what they want.

Eisenhower will have three escapes from the Washington dungeon this year: the “summit" trip to Europe, another vacation in Colorado, and weekends at the Gettysburg farm. In fact, Washington expects to see Ike at Gettysburg emulate F.D.R. at Hyde Park for work-play periods away from the Capital.

But winter will come again with its dreary round of budget-making, fussing between Cabinet members and among the Pentagon brass, and more and more party pressure to declare for a second term. The log fire and the golden fields of Gettysburg will become even more attractive. And if there is the prospect of peace, how can you argue with an old soldier’s desire to retire — victor in war, architect of peace?