THE NATION: Victory at San Francisco

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In the five days of the San Francisco conference, the U.S. found out more about the modern world and its own destiny than it had discovered in the full six years since the end of World War II. The 49 signers of the Japanese Peace Treaty wrote a resounding diplomatic victory for the world's free nations, the sharpest defeat yet suffered by the Communists, and marked a decisive turning point in cold-war diplomacy.

To the U.S., the signatures meant even more: San Francisco was the most clean-cut demonstration yet of what bold U.S. initiative can accomplish. This fact centered particularly on two men. John Foster Dulles had spent a year working his way through the barriers—the fears and natural prejudices of the free nations, the threats and legalisms thrown up by the Russians to block a Japanese Peace Treaty. He had succeeded with the kind of patient persistence and resourcefulness that U.S. statecraft had all but forgotten. As president of the conference, Secretary of State Dean Acheson personified U.S. determination to get on with the job. His urbane evenhandedness and parliamentary precision provided all nations with a right to be heard, provided none with a right to disrupt.

By contrast, the Russians sounded strangely halfhearted and ineffective. The old record of exaggerated charges, threats and denunciations impressed nobody, whether it was played off in Russian, Polish or English. Against the West's new and surprising unity, the Communists had lost the power to paralyze, terrorize and delay. Not even the frank threat from the Peking Radio that the fate of the Kaesong armistice talks might hang on events at San Francisco could crack the unanimity of the non-Communist world. Up stood Asians, Buddhists and Moslems alike. Up stood small nations, which had trembled before at the first hint of Russian displeasure. Up stood those who had their own disputes with each other, but could resolve them in favor of a united front. Iran and Egypt, at Britain's throat in the Middle East, could still sign with her to stabilize the Pacific.

Nor was the Japanese Treaty the only accomplishment of the San Francisco meeting. A new network of mutual defense treaties—between the U.S. and the Philippines, between the U.S. and Japan, a third among the U.S., New Zealand and Australia—projected U.S. strength into the Pacific as a stabilizing force against the old rivalries that Communism loves to exploit. They set the stage for the next episode in strengthening the free world this week—the Big Three Foreign Ministers conference in Washington, and the Ottawa conference of the North Atlantic Treaty powers.