The Neutral Gambit

In a suite overlooking the Rhine in the Black Forest resort of Buehlerhoehe, a teletype machine clattered out the text of one of the Soviet Union's most cunning diplomatic plays. Leathery old Konrad Adenauer, vainly trying to rest from his labors as Chancellor of West Germany, watched the words forming, and frowned. Impatiently, der Alte picked up the telephone and snapped out a string of orders to his Foreign Office. "I want this thing killed right away," he said. "Kill it. Kill it."

This thing was a Soviet suggestion, made by Foreign Minister Molotov during the signing of the Austrian State

Treaty (TIME, May 23), that the West Germans, too, could make a deal with the Kremlin. Molotov offered German unity and independence--boons which any German Chancellor would find hard to turn down. But the Soviet offer had its price tag: neutrality, and withdrawal from the Atlantic Alliance. Konrad Adenauer believes with all his strength that this would be the death knell of a free Germany.

Prevailing Winds. Adenauer's was the firmest but not the only voice to be raised against Russia's new diplomatic offensive.

Whether impressed by Western strength, concerned by their own weaknesses, eager to ride the prevailing winds, or moved by a combination of all these factors, the Communists were acting as if they were anxious to negotiate a temporary letup in the cold war. The situation was once again fluid, and diplomacy was once again out of the trenches.

The Communists had good reason to change their foreign policy. It was not winning. For all his cleverness, Molotov has failed to fragment NATO, has seen France's and Italy's Communists losing strength, has lost his desperate bid to keep a powerful West Germany out of the Atlantic Alliance. Moscow now seems engaged in its own agonizing reappraisal.

"Russia," says a top U.S. diplomat, "is simply not able to do all of the things it wants to do at the same time." The Soviet economy may well be strained beyond capacity in attempting simultaneously to produce nuclear weapons, keep five million men under arms, provide China with the tools and talent for a grandiose industrial buildup, and raise its own living standards.

"Neutral Belt." The new Russian talk is of a vast "neutral belt" extending from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The idea is that it would serve as a buffer zone between NATO and the Soviet empire. The frontiers of the neutral zone Molotov has not defined, but his clear intention is that it should include the whole of Germany, thus breaching the NATO front.

Work on the "neutral belt" started in early spring when Andrei Gromyko, Molotov's deputy, turned up in Stockholm to sound out the neutral Swedes. Then came the Austrian Treaty, with its show of Russian reasonableness in exchange for Austrian neutrality. Next on the Soviet list is Tito's Yugoslavia, a land which Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin described in 1949 as "a camp of imperialism and fascism" transformed by "Judas Tito and his malevolent deserters . . . into a Gestapo prison." This week, the same Bulganin and Communist Boss Nikita Khrushchev will visit the "Gestapo prison" with what Khrushchev calls "open hearts and pure souls," ready to forgive and forget if only Tito will join their neutral belt.

Russia's new neutral look was admirably styled to appeal to Europe's current passion for distensione, or relaxation of tension. So widespread is this sentiment that few European politicians are willing to disappoint it. Britain's election campaign involves a contest over which of the big parties wants negotiations more eagerly; no French Cabinet dare take office without affirming the same goal.

Surprising Resistance. Professional neutralists, e.g., France's Le Monde, thought they saw their ship coming in. Le Monde advised Frenchmen to adopt "an active neutrality," and Combat predicted: "The word neutral will be forced on all those who discredited it." Yet the surprising fact in last week's news was the unsuspected strength of the European resistance to neutral belts, Russian model. French Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay took to TV to tell the French people that "German neutrality "would offer Germany all the temptations of the seesaw policy between East and West, the disastrous effect of which we all know so well."

Italian Premier Mario Scelba, worried by the prospect of U.S. forces withdrawing from a neutralized Austria, and thus leaving Italy less protected in the north, went out of his way to insist that for Italy there is no alternative to alliance with the West.

The man with most cause for alarm was most emphatic of all. Fearful that public opinion might push the Western Big Three into a deal with the Russians over Germany's body, Chancellor Adenauer ordered his ambassadors in Washington, London and Paris to hurry home for an urgent conference. "German neutrality is out!" was the word the old man would give them when they arrive this week. To make sure his allies understood, Adenauer indicated that he would speed up legislation to get the West Germans into uniform, try to have it written into law before the Big Four meet.

Adenauer's firm refusal to consider a "neutralized Germany" pinpointed the basic weakness of the Molotov play: it flies in the face of national self-respect. No proud nation, least of all 70 million Germans, is likely to take kindly to the Russians' suggestion that it join a buffer belt of international eunuchs and meekly stand aside from conflicts which might decide its fate. Along these lines, the reaction of Tito's Yugoslavia was symptomatic and instructive. "One of the basic characteristics of a buffer state is the absence of independence," said one paper. Added another: "To imagine Yugoslavia as a passive country which has ceased to appraise events independently means to believe that she has repudiated the conditions of her existence." In such brusque rejections of the notion of "neutrality" lay the germ of a Western answer to the Kremlin's new line.

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