THE ALLIES: Hasty Pudding

With hardly any advance warning, the Foreign Ministers of the U.S. and France hopped to London last week to examine in private the cracks and crevices in their alliance, without, as Winston Churchill said, having to “cut attitudes before excitable publics.” It was a hasty get-together. As they met, new problems popped up around them.

Soon after U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stepped off the plane at London Airport, he was whisked off to dinner at No. 10 Downing Street. Over the brandy, Prime Minister Churchill launched into the subject now dearest to his stout old heart: a “parley at the summit.” But Dulles was expecting the lecture, and came determined to withstand it. In the words of one dinner guest, Dulles “flatly rejected” the P.M.’s proposal.

Then Sir Winston said: Suppose that he alone went to Moscow for a man-toman talk with Malenkov? A little more gently, Dulles advised against it.

Next morning, in Anthony Eden’s big Foreign Office suite, beneath a beaming portrait of George III, Eden, Dulles and France’s Georges Bidault formally dug into their hasty pudding of problems, disputes and proposals: Korea, Indo-China, EDC, negotiations with Moscow. Eden was by now addressing Dulles as “Foster,” while Dulles called him “Mr. Eden,” and both addressed the third man as “Monsieur Bidault.” On two urgent worries, they agreed on action: ¶ Invited Yugoslavia and Italy to sit down with them to talk over Trieste. They were somewhat disquieted by Tito’s threat to march on Trieste if Italian troops moved in, and by Italian PremierPella’s threat to resign if they gave any ground to Tito.

¶Joined in invoking an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council to consider the suddenly worsened relations between Israel and the Arab world (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Anthony Eden dutifully introduced his boss’s “parley at the summit” proposal, but far from agreeing to meet with Malenkov in Moscow, the ministers settled only on a new attempt to get Molotov to Switzerland. In separate but identical notes to Russia, they brushed aside Russia’s wordily evasive request for a conference of the Big Four and Red China, and suggested again that Molotov sit down with the Big Three Foreign Ministers to discuss a final peace settlement for Germany and Austria. Time and place: Nov. 9, in Lugano. They were all agreed that Russia is afraid to get caught now in negotiations over Germany and would not accept the invitation, but in the world of diplomacy the mail must go on.