THE NATION: Molting Season

Among many other items of interest in this critical time, the New York Times one day last week carried a story headlined GEESE ARE FOUND IN GROUNDED STATE. It seemed that a party of naturalists had tracked to Bylot Island in the upper reaches of Baffin Bay the Greater Snow Goose, who wanted at that point to be let alone. His zoological middle name is hyperborea, (“from beyond the north wind”), and the reason he wants to get behind the north wind once a year is that then he loses all his feathers at once. It takes him two weeks to grow new ones. Meanwhile, he is helpless—he can’t fly, can’t fight, can’t look anything but another molting Greater Snow Goose in the eye.

From Bylot Island to Washington was but a flap as the Greater Snow Goose, when not molting, flies. There the U.S. Department of State appeared to be grounded between flying seasons. What molted the State Department was a boreal wind from France, where EDC was being plucked. What next? The State Department didn’t know. It had based its hopes so thoroughly on EDC that it had hardly allowed itself to think of a course to follow if EDC should fail. There had been an assumption that EDC might be replaced by a U.S. policy of rearming West Germany and giving her complete sovereignty. But suddenly this turned out to be a notion that had been talked about, not a hard plan ready to be put into action.

The U.S., having put France in the painful position of making a decision, was stuck with a France that would expect to go on making decisions—just as if it had a grown-up government. France, Washington realized last week, would no more assent to the sim ple rearmament of Germany than it would to the plan, originally French, of rearming Germany within EDC.

And what of Britain, which had joined in last June’s statement that if EDC failed Germany would be granted sovereignty and the right to rearm? Last week there were forecasts that Britain would cave in under French pressure and would not join the U.S. in pressing for German rearmament.

As for West Germany, Chancellor Adenauer, a “good European,” had bet his government’s life on EDC. It would now take another, not necessarily a better, kind of political Germany to rearm in the teeth of French opposition.

This week, his next European step unplotted. Secretary of State Dulles emplaned for the Philippines. At the Manila conference the U.S. will seek an agreement of some Southeast Asian nations for a collective pact against Communist aggression. This idea was generated as a reaction to the Indo-China collapse. But the defects of any possible Asian pact advertise the weakness of the anti-Communist position more than its strength (see FOREIGN NEWS). India, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia will not go to Manila. South Korea and the Chinese National ists of Formosa, which have thoroughly anti-Communist governments and fighting forces, cannot be invited to Manila because the British would consider their presence “provocative.”

Washington, which has no high hopes of SEATO in any case, did not know how to react to this latest evidence of fraying in the U.S.-British bond.

But feathers grow again. What might be a start appeared last week in some fairly strong talk about how the U.S. would defend islands in Formosa Strait.