THE NATIONS: Obstacle Race

All through the Foreign Ministers’ conference Jimmy Byrnes had set the pace. When the bruises from the same old obstacles round the same old course became too painfully familiar last week, he urged a recess to June 15. His equally battered colleagues agreed. Next day, as the adjournment meeting droned to a close, Byrnes made another move. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I propose we go to the bar.” Replied Viacheslav Molotov: “It will be the only proposal of the conference which was immediately and unanimously adopted.”

The Four and their advisers then went and drank champagne in the spirit of amiable frustration which marked the 26 sessions of their 22 days in Paris.

One World or Two? The Four had narrowed a number of gaps, but their actual agreements were only three: 1) the preamble to the Italian treaty, 2) a revised armistice giving Italy a bit more control over her own affairs—thus merely enraging Italians, who wanted a full-fledged peace treaty, 3) formal shuffling of a few Balkan boundaries informally settled over a year ago.

Byrnes’s forceful radio report to the U.S. people this week said that if that if the Four did not agree after their recess to summon the 21-nation peace conference by “July 1 or July 15,” the U.S. would submit the whole question of the peace treaties to the 51 nations of the U.N. General Assembly. “We must take the offensive for peace,” he added. “There is no iron curtain that the aggregate sentiments of mankind cannot penetrate.” In this speech, and in his attitude at Paris, Byrnes ably and clearly demonstrated the Western Powers’ determination to resist Russian expansionism. If one world was not possible, the West was reluctantly ready to go ahead with the organization of the areas outside the Russian orbit. One fact about the two-world solution would not be lost on Moscow: the Western half was still incomparably the stronger.

On central Europe, where the two worlds divided, the Ministers made no progress at all. Molotov refused to put Austria on the agenda, even for June 15. The far more important question of Germany’s future was left in midair. Russia also vetoed a Byrnes move for a “general Allied conference” on Germany next November.

Of the other obstacles, the biggest was still Trieste. The Italians and Yugoslavs both swore they would sign no treaty that did not give them this key port at the head of the Adriatic. Byrnes and Bevin switched their proposed boundaries in this area to a line (suggested by France) which gave Yugoslavia roughly 2,000 sq. miles but left Trieste to Italy. Molotov did not budge an inch from his line, which would put 500,000 Italians in Yugoslavia.

Through European capitals flew rumors that the Foreign Ministers had agreed on more than they said they had. Most persistent: that Byrnes engineered a deal under which Britain got trade concessions in Italy in return for a further recognition of Russian predominance in the Balkans. Officials denied these reports, but remembrance of the secret deals of Yalta gave wings to the gossip.

Whose Armistice? Faced with their fourth failure in ten months to solve the problems of peace, the big powers’ tension was undeniable. The Soviet press attacked the West more bitterly than ever, called Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg the “gravedigger” of the conference. “The real tragedy,” said London’s left wing New Statesman and Nation, “is that the Foreign Ministers . . . talked about a revised armistice for Italy without showing any recognition of the necessity for an armistice among themselves.”

But the clear-cut opposition between Russia and the West made more sense than the former pretense that the conflict did not exist.