The Stockade

FOREIGN RELATIONS

The North Atlantic Treaty became public last week. It was greeted in the U.S. by what, considering the immensity of the commitment, seemed almost a disinterested silence.

The pact was perhaps the most fateful peacetime step in U.S. diplomatic history since the Monroe Doctrine. The concern that President James Monroe had extended to the Americas, President Harry Truman had extended from the Tana to the Rhine, and perhaps to Trieste. And how did the U.S. people feel about it? The State Department, which gets bushels of letters when Palestine, China or Spain is involved, had gotten only a trickle in the 14 weeks the North Atlantic pact was being negotiated. Did this indicate apathy or agreement? As far as anxious State Department men could discern, the U.S. public had accepted, long since, the important principles involved.

State's presentation had been grave, cautious and deliberate. The reaction was in kind. In the Senate, no jingoistic ranters sawed the air. Only one Senator--Nevada's Republican George W. Malone --said publicly that he would vote against it. Most of the nation's editorialists gave their sober approval--with the notable exception of the nation's largest newspaper, the America Firsting New York Daily News. Snapped the Daily News: "Uncle Sam or Sap is now . . . making official his scrapping of President George Washington's solemn warning to this country to keep out of foreign entanglements." The Omaha World Herald slyly demolished that classic argument by predicting: "Washington's words about foreign alliances . . . will be as dead as his warning against the formation of political parties."

For the majority of newspapers, the New York Herald Tribune declared: "It is a pact for peace . . . essentially and inescapably defensive ... No nation that respects the rights of its neighbors need fear the pact; only a guilty conscience could see a threat in its terms."

The North Atlantic pact confirmed on paper what most people knew in their hearts: that the world's nations are divided into two massive blocs. Reluctantly, the free nations had turned back from the high hopes of San Francisco to the bitter lesson learned at Munich in 1938. There were some Americans who feared that the pact might seem provocative. But peaceful men have always found it only common prudence to build stockades in the face of danger.

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