THE ALLIES: Ready with a Plan

On the eve of battle, the West was ready. And after all the months of doubts and suspicions, it took the four Western Foreign Ministers only two days in Paris to agree on their strategy. The ground had been well prepared.

Going into next week’s session with Russia’s Andrei Gromyko, the West will operate from a 20-page “Phased Plan,” the result of considering hundreds of position papers. In some respects it goes farther than what the West put forward at the fruitless Geneva summit session in 1955. Though still insisting that German reunification must be brought about through free elections, it no longer insists on elections first. And it makes ingenious use of the Russian notion that reunification is something for the two Germanies to solve themselves. Main points:

1) A “German Electoral Committee” would be nominated by the West and East German governments in a proportion, based on population, of 25 West Germans to ten East Germans. The committee would arrange increasing commercial exchanges—more trains, buses, mail, books, newspapers—culminating in adoption of a common currency. After a period of “at least three years,” during which progress could be measured and trust justified, the committee would prepare legislation for free, all-German elections.

2) Gradual European disarmament would start, synchronized with and dependent upon political progress. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. would limit their forces to 2,500,000 men apiece.

3) A four-power “Control Commission,” besides supervising this program, would establish, before the program is complete, a mechanism for inspecting armaments in a broad zone extending on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

4) Once Germany is reunited and peace treaties are signed, Berlin becomes the German capital, and the need for keeping allied troops in West Berlin is ended. Western powers would then offer the East treaties safeguarding against any new menace of German imperialism.

Stance & Circumstances. The new man in these deliberations, U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), won admiration from his colleagues in gaining assent to this largely U.S. package. He placed himself well over toward the British position in favor of serious negotiations with the Russians. But he also made a significant concession to the French. He had wanted to make public the Western proposal May 10, the day before the meeting with the Russians began. But the French argued that since the Russians started all the fuss by threatening Berlin, they should be required to submit a plan first. Herter agreed.

What if the Russians reject the West’s package? The British, believing that something will still have to be done about Berlin, suggested that the U.N. might be called in. In a speech to Copenhagen students last week, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold carefully warned that “practical considerations alone” would prevent the U.N. from taking upon itself “administrative tasks which require political decisions.” The U.S. is willing to add some sort of U.N. presence in Berlin, but nothing that weakens the West’s right to have its own troops there.

“There will be plenty of pitfalls on our pilgrimage, plenty of Sloughs of Despond and some Mr. Fainthearts,” said Britain’s Harold Macmillan in a speech last week in Scotland, but he was determined to press on to the summit. There were also many skeptics who doubted that any meeting with Khrushchev, Gromyko & Co. would ever lead to the House Beautiful, the Delectable Mountain and the Enchanted Ground.