Fruits of Delay

Last September the Foreign Ministers of the Atlantic pact powers met in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria for the first time since the start of the Korean war. The world waited for their obvious move: a ringing announcement of a program for Western Europe's defense. It did not come.

Reports from the conference said that brilliant U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson had never been more brilliant. He did not, however, persuade the French to give up their opposition to arming Western Germany. At no point did the U.S. publicly and with finality tell the French what sensible French politicians would have liked to hear: the U.S. was not going to embark on a pointless effort to rearm Western Europe unless the French agreed that the Germans be allowed to have their own defenses against the U.S.S.R.

After the Waldorf meeting adjourned, with all sense of urgency and unity and purpose fizzled out of it, negotiations continued on the detailed conditions on which the French would accept German rearmament. This week brought announcement from Britain that the French had agreed to a compromise. At last the construction of a unified defense of Europe under a U.S. commander could begin.

But the unnecessary delay had brought other results. The French aroused German resentment and tossed the rearmament issue into German politics. Socialist Leader Kurt Schumacher took a strong stand against rearmament unless the Western powers recognized German "equality" with the other Western nations. Schumacher violently attacked Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for agreeing to the West's conditions. Schumacher's followers went further than he and fought election campaigns with demagogic anti-armament slogans. The Socialists in the last three weeks have made significant election gains in Hesse, Wuerttemberg-Baden and even Bavaria.*

The German anti-armament feeling has weakened Western Europe's unity and will to resist Communism at the very moment of the gravest postwar world crisis.

* Berlin's municipal elections this week showed an opposite trend: the Socialists lost ground; the Christian Democratic Union gained. Berliners agreed with staunch Socialist Mayor Ernst Reuter: they would fight the Reds whether they got Allied arms or not.

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