DIPLOMACY: The New Rome

Flying into the U.S. from the far ends of the earth, a flock of foreign statesmen last week demonstrated that the roads which once led to imperial Rome and London now converge on Washington. Unlike their counterparts in the days of the Caesars and the Gladstones, they came not as satraps but as friends. But each of these ambassadors to the new Rome had a plea or a complaint. Items:

¶India’s Finance Minister Morarji Desai sought first aid for his country’s second five-year plan, threatened with strangulation by an acute shortage of foreign exchange. By week’s end Desai had got the promise of i) $100 million in U.S. loans, and 2) $200 million in U.S. farm surpluses to be paid for in rupees. ¶ Japanese Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama was worried by the prospect that his country might be dragged involuntarily into a war between the U.S. and Red China. From Dulles, Fujiyama got assurances that the U.S. was ready to revise its 1951 mutual-security treaty, but failed to get what he really wanted: a Japanese veto over the deployment of U.S. forces based in Japan.

¶Turkish Finance Minister Hasan Polat-kan came to hammer out the precise uses to which inflation-ridden Turkey will put the $359 million in aid it has been promised by the U.S. and the members of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. He was rewarded with the grant of an immediate $75 million to finance vitally needed imports.

¶Taking up his new post as Nationalist China’s ambassador, personable, U.S.-educated (Amherst ’24) George Yen had only one request: “a more adequate convoy system” by U.S. warships escorting Nationalist supply vessels to Quemoy.