The Other Side of the World

Secretary of State Dean Acheson returned from Europe pleased but not complacent. In Paris, the West had held its own against Russian diplomacy. Acheson came home to find the other side of the world--Asia--in need of quick attention.

At the airport, reporting on the Paris meeting, Acheson greeted the President soberly: "I'm afraid we didn't accomplish too much." At his press conference two days later he went into more detail. A newsman asked: "Was the conference a failure or a success?" The Secretary of State replied sharply: "Why do we have to take a dichotomy and say it is a success or a failure?" Big Four parleys, he explained in his precise way, are no longer enough in themselves to achieve striking changes or to create new crises. Like steam gauges which indicate how much pressure has been built up, Acheson said, the Foreign Ministers' meetings show what the gains or losses in each side's position have been.

Struggle for a Soul. "I think that the recording of this conference," he said, "is that the position of the West has grown greatly in strength, and that the position of the Soviet Union in regard to the struggle for the soul of Europe has changed from the offensive to the defensive."

The U.S. Congress could make sure of that pleasing change of affairs, said Acheson, by ratifying the North Atlantic pact, and by passing the $1,130,000,000 arms program to back it up, before adjourning. But Dean Acheson also knew that there was another explanation of Russia's seeming docility in Europe. The Russian bear had his mind on other game.

Think About Asia. Last week a stream of Senators took the floor to slash at the bankrupt U.S. policy toward China. Twenty-one Senators signed a statement demanding assurances that the U.S. would not recognize the Chinese Communists.

The State Department had not yet decided how to handle that problem. But it was showing signs of retreating from Dean Acheson's "wait -until - the -dust -settles" policy; it was at least and at last beginning to think about Asia. Before he left for Paris, Acheson, after some prodding from Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, had ordered Policy-Planner George Kennan to work on the problem. Last week Kennan handed his boss the first tentative outline of what might be done.

Kennan, like almost all U.S. officials, dismissed the possibility of an Asiatic Marshall Plan, or a Pacific version of the North Atlantic Treaty. But, he reasoned, Southeast Asia is potentially self-sufficient, and still tied flimsily to the West by frayed cords of the past. He thought the West might be able to build that part of the world into a loose, anti-Communist economic federation by friendly assistance and some money.

It was a start toward retrieving at least a part of a lost position. Time, and the Russian tide, were working against the Western nations in Asia. What had to be done had to be done fast.

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