New Realism

Through the grinding experience of the postwar years, the U.S. has sloughed off layer after layer of cherished illusions about its foreign policy, tasted again & again the bitter fruits of indecision and inaction. Last week there were solid signs that the nation's leaders had achieved a course of realism to match the nation's peril.

At Kaesong, even under the threat of a breakdown in the cease-fire talks, U.S. negotiators did not even nibble at the bait: withdrawal of all foreign troops from Korea. Said Secretary of State Dean Acheson with a new bluntness: "A United Nations force must remain in Korea until a genuine peace has been firmly established." Once before the U.S. had withdrawn its troops in an effort to get a Korean settlement, and the Communists had attacked. "The Korean people can be assured that a repetition of this act will not be tolerated," promised Acheson.

Confronted with the protests of its chief allies that nobody should do business with Franco, the State Department was equally firm in the conviction that Spain's bases are essential to the defense of Western Europe.

In Washington, President Truman, too, had taken a harder look at the U.S.'s peril. In his message on the midyear report of economic advisers, he pointed to smoldering danger in Iran, in Yugoslavia, in Indo-China, and weighed them against the U.S.'s "immediate goals for military strength." Warned Truman: "It now appears, as we review our strategic situation in the light of world events, that these goals may need to be raised, whether or not we have an armistice in Korea."

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