Foreign Relations: Tough Talk

Washington was talking tough. Twice last week Dean Rusk’s State Department answered back to recent Soviet efforts to twist the means of international diplomacy for Russia’s own ends.

¶In an angry formal note on the slow-moving Geneva nuclear test-ban talks, the State Department accused the Soviet Union of “sabotaging” the negotiations. Specifically, the U.S. statement answered the Soviet demand for a three-man administrative council—rather than a single, neutral director—to supervise nuclear-test inspections. “The Government of the U.S.,” said the note, “believes that this rejection of the idea of an international civil servant acting impartially under guidance from international policy-making organs constitutes nothing less than an attack upon the executive capacity of any international organization for effective action.” In the interests of peace, the U.S. would continue with the negotiations but Russia would soon have to fish or cut bait. To make that point clear, the U.S. and Great Britain last week asked the U.N. to debate the “critical situation” caused by the Geneva deadlock at the General Assembly session beginning in September.

¶Rejecting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s demand that a three-man secretariat replace Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold as head of the U.N., the U.S. promised to use its veto to preserve the status quo. Russia’s “troika” proposal, argued Rusk, not only “flies in the face of everything we know about effective administration” but attacks “the equal rights and opportunities now enjoyed by all members of the General Assembly—and the protection afforded them by the U.N.’s peace-keeping machinery.”