Foreign Relations: Rumanian Welcome

In almost everything he discussed with the leaders of Asia, President Nixon found it necessary to deal in immediacies: a shooting war, changing alliances, a U.S. troop withdrawal that has already begun. By contrast, in Rumania the President had almost no major questions of the moment on his mind. As the first U.S. chief executive to visit a Communist nation since the cold war began, Nixon last week broke diplomatic ground just by arriving in Bucharest. “We seek normal relations with all countries, regardless of their domestic systems,” the President assured Rumanian President Nicolae Ceausescu. The two leaders thus began with nowhere to go but up. Whatever the eventual results, the visit represented a milestone in Nixon’s promised “era of negotiations” with the Communists.

If Nixon had happened to arrive in Bucharest one day early, he would have been hard put to believe that Rumania was expecting him at all. Until the night before he was due, the only visible preparations for his visit were special parking regulations along main boulevards. This studied calm, however, turned out to be yet another indication of President Ceausescu’s masterful diplomatic balancing act: an assurance to Russia, which had expressed displeasure over a U.S. presidential visit in its front yard, that he was not going all-out to welcome Nixon.

Then, overnight, Rumania’s warm Latinate temperament—and Ceausescu’s determined policy of independence—began to blossom. Workmen decked out the motorcade route with U.S. and Rumanian flags, newspapers bannered the arrival, and factory workers—let off their jobs several hours early—began streaming out to Otopeni Airport. By the time President and Mrs. Nixon stepped into the brilliant Bucharest sunshine, some 600,000 Rumanians had lined up to provide the warmest and most tumultuous welcome of Nixon’s trip. The joviality continued into the evening, when Ceausescu put on a splashy state dinner in the marbled palace of Rumania’s kings. Raising his champagne glass, Ceausescu toasted “the triumph of peace, this grand ideal of human beings on all continents.” The President eagerly clinked glasses with his Rumanian host before launching into his own, similar speech. There was, besides the evening’s three wines and two varieties of brandy, an extraordinary atmosphere of good will.

Prime Benefit. Discussions between the two leaders were necessarily tentative and general. As a firm believer in normalized—if not outright neutralized—relations with all countries, Ceausescu welcomed the President’s opening remarks. The prime benefit of these relations to Rumania, of course, has been a sharp increase in trade with the West —up 25% in the past four years. It was on this subject that Ceausescu became quite specific: he is eager for Rumania to gain most-favored-nation trading status in the U.S. Congress alone can grant such status (Yugoslavia and Poland are the only Eastern European nations that now have it), and legislators may be reluctant to add Rumania so long as Bucharest continues to be a chief supplier of goods to North Viet Nam.

Nixon made no immediate commitment to press for most-favored-nation status for Rumania. He and Ceausescu did agree to an exchange of information-service library centers. The two men also decided to resume negotiations toward a U.S.-Rumanian civil air agreement—none now exists—and to open formal discussions aimed at mutual extension of consular facilities. Most of the remaining time was spent discussing East-West relations, which both men are anxious to improve. In his toast to improving those relations during a state dinner at week’s end, the President declared: “We are flexible about the methods by which peace is to be sought and built. We see value neither in the exchange of polemics nor in a false euphoria.” In Nixon’s precedent-breaking visit behind the Iron Curtain, very little of either was in evidence.