THE NATIONS: From the Debris

Returning from the wrecked summit, the West’s leaders seemed heavily aware of trouble to come. President Eisenhower warned of new irritations, new incidents that can be more than annoying. In London, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke of shock and disappointment, of threats and dangers, and concluded darkly: “The period ahead may be one of retrogression.”

But the final result of Nikita Khrushchev’s brutal behavior at the summit conference was to pull the Western alliance together. There were other side effects. Charles de Gaulle earned Ike’s heartfelt gratitude by supporting him every step of the way and by presiding with majestic confidence over the disjointed summit sessions; thus De Gaulle achieved the “tripartite directorship” of NATO that has been one of his goals since he took power in 1958. Britain and the Continent felt drawn closer together, too; under the cold draft from the East, the bickering about the Common Market suddenly seemed petty.

Steadfast Shield. Before Khrushchev’s lethal buffoonery at the summit, criticism of the U.S. was widespread. Britons grumbled at U.S. “blunders” and at the “sickening sequence of error and miscalculation” surrounding the U-2 incident. In Norway, which did not like being identified as the ultimate destination of the U2, trade unions and leftist groups argued that their country should give up its membership in NATO. Japan feared bloody demonstrations against U.S. bases.

But after Nikita’s ranting performance, Norway’s Foreign Minister Halvard Lange abruptly cancelled a scheduled visit to Moscow, and Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi rammed the revised U.S.-Japan treaty through the Japanese Diet. Wrote the London Times: “Once again the conviction has been forced uppermost that where Communist aggression is concerned, U.S. arms are our shield and U.S. steadfastness our foundation.”

Even opposition leaders, who had been arguing that Khrushchev needed greater understanding and sympathy, were shocked by his brutal intemperance. In Britain, Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell placed himself unequivocally behind Macmillan. In France, every party except the Communists blasted Khrushchev. West Germany’s Socialists, whose whole foreign policy has been based on the argument that Germany could be reunified if only Adenauer would withdraw from NATO and forswear rearmament, gulped, choked, then manfully reversed a policy of ten years’ standing. Only a policy of Western strength, admitted a party spokesman, had deterred Khrushchev from pressing his demands on Berlin—a position that Adenauer had long maintained.

Distaste v. Panic. Inevitably, some pundits and politicos saw everything according to their own lights. A newspaper in Beirut had a familiar Arab reaction: “We consider that the dispute between the two blocs is a blessing to us. They could reach agreement only at our expense.” And India’s Jawaharlal Nehru characteristically declined to blame the summit breakdown on anyone (“All that I can do, first of all, is not get too excited”), but Indians in general only hoped that Russia was not now going to match Red China in bellicosity.

In the first shock of the summit collapse, it was all too easy for many Europeans to see President Eisenhower as the London News Chronicle pictured him, an “almost pitiable figure,” and for the usual cries to be heard that nothing right would come out of America during an election year—as if their own nations were strangers to politics, elections and crises.

But the fact was that, because of U.S. strength, Khrushchev’s actions could be judged in Western Europe with distaste rather than in panic. The quieter hope of U.S. friends abroad was that the U.S. would supply leadership at least equivalent to its undoubted power.