FOREIGN RELATIONS: Hard Line on Syria

Back from the edge of left-sliding Syria flew Loy Wesley Henderson, 65, ace State Department troubleshooter for the Middle East and respected advocate of a worldwide hard anti-Communist line. “The situation in Syria (see FOREIGN NEWS) is serious,” said he at Washington National Airport. “In fact, I would say extremely serious. It might deeply affect the security of the whole free world.” He handed a dozen pages of memoranda to a senior State Department official, headed downtown for long hours of talks with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

The Appraisal. Within the hour, word began to percolate around Washington that the U.S. was hardening fast upon a new appraisal of the Syrian situation: some sort of a forceful confrontation of world Communism in the Middle East would soon be necessary to stop Syria from slipping into satellite status and from subverting neighboring Jordan and Lebanon.

As they sat in their quiet rooms, Dulles and Henderson considered Syria in the context of a body of evidence that Communist diplomacy, for all of Communism’s interior weakness, was setting forth upon some showy new adventures. The Communists have proclaimed a test-model 3,500-mile missile, tested nuclear weapons, broken off months-old disarmament talks in London, sent light cruisers into the Mediterranean, shipped obsolete arms into Syria. Loy Henderson’s specific point was that the Russians are so persistently brandishing the threat of force before impressionable Arabs that the U.S. has to convince the Arabs that the U.S. also packs atomic hardware, and if it should come to it, the U.S. also means to use it.

The Warning. Dulles and Henderson began to make their point for all the world to hear. State issued a statement that Henderson had found, in his talks with the leaders of Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, a unanimous “deep concern lest Syria should become a base for further threatening the independence and integrity of the region.” State spread carefully publicized word that it was speeding up shipments of U.S. arms to Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, presumably to meet the needs of the crisis. C124 Globe-masters began trundling the first loads of recoilless antitank rifles from Greece and Libya to Jordan—nothing much to win a war with, but a fair symbol of the atom-packed Sixth Fleet that lay somewhere below the horizon offshore.

At week’s end, after a two-hour conference with Dwight Eisenhower and Loy Henderson, John Foster Dulles read out a statement, quoting the President, specifically warning Syria not to commit aggression or engage in “subversive activities directed toward the overthrow of the duly constituted governments” of her Arab neighbors. If Syria does this, warned the President of the U.S., she will face the military-economic force of the Eisenhower Doctrine.