The New Fluidity

In the good old summertime, any conscientious U.S. headline reader last week was apt to feel that allies were proving faithless and the world was falling apart. The Shah flees; France goes on strike; Britain acts testily; anti-Americanism spreads. So read the headlines. Happenings in isolated and distant places interacted in unpredictable ways.

In the still August days, events were moving. The big new international fact is that the seven-year-old cold war is no longer a shoring of fixed positions; it has become a fluid diplomatic war of maneuver. Armistice in Korea had loosened the unanimity of purpose that the fighting there imposed: new decisions are needed in Asia. In Europe, Stalin's death and the evident unrest of the satellites had brought relaxation in the West; old cries no longer persuaded, old decisions no longer held.

In such an atmosphere, old-fashioned nationalism is reasserting itself, against such grand schemes as EDC and the Middle Eastern Defense pact, both of which require national pride to subordinate itself.

Since World War II, coalition had been the remedy prescribed most often for the West's big problems. Now it proved cumbersome when it had to treat with "local issues," like Trieste, Suez, the Saar. Korea was proof that multinational commands lead not to unity but to dissension, and the lesson learned there is that adding weak links to a chain does not strengthen it. Increasingly, the trend is for individual nations to go their own way, consulting their friends but not being bound by them.

Russian policy is already responsive to the new fluidity, and is hoping to channel it. Western diplomats, analyzing Malenkov's big Kremlin speech (TIME, Aug. 17), concluded that Russia has decided to concentrate its attention on France: to stir up fears of German militarism, to dangle hopes of peace in Indo-China (the only cold war front conspicuously unmentioned by Malenkov) and to break up the Western coalition by concentrating on its weakest link. To judge by his speech, the Russians have now abandoned any real hope of winning over the Germans.

The U.S. too, almost without realizing it, is heading towards a new bilateralism. Acting alone, Washington guaranteed Formosa, pledged aid to Syngman Rhee, expects to sign a treaty with Franco Spain. This week the U.S. and its U.N. allies disagreed publicly in the U.N. General Assembly: though some clucked over this trend, and others were made nervous by it, it brought a refreshing new realism into events.

This was not "going it alone," but quite the opposite. It did not mean bolting the U.N. or ignoring allies. In a time of fluidity, it was a relearning of an old truth: that agreements are most binding when they most respond to actual interests, and do not depend on reluctant assents by vast accumulations of dissatisfied or disinterested partners.

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