Europe: The Grandest Tour

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Grand Finale. No other Western leader feels he has more of a right to discuss that disposition than De Gaulle. Moreover, no other Western leader is currently in a position to do so. Britain's Harold Wilson, with his Atlantic orientation and his Common Market phobia, is hardly eligible. West Germany's Ludwig Erhard has been forced into a defensive corner by Social Democratic Leader Willy Brandt's initiative on an exchange of speakers with East Germany; Italy and Spain, the Low Countries and Scandinavia are not contenders.

But for Viet Nam, the visiting President in Russia last week might have been American, not French. The U.S., which for 21 years has been the leader of Western Europe, is now so deeply engaged in Asia that even if Lyndon Johnson wanted to involve himself in the current European transmogrification, he would have neither the time nor the forum to do so. De Gaulle is perhaps the only Western leader with the freedom of action and position to do some good in Europe at the moment.

Last week's Russian journey is perhaps De Gaulle's grandest gesture—and quite likely his most valuable. Since 1945, when he was declared odd man out at Yalta by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, De Gaulle has put France back on the map as a major world power. He ended the debilitating war in Algeria and added a new dimension to Western handling of the "Third World"; he blew life into the Common Market, even if he chilled the aspirations of those who saw it as a way to political unity on the Continent. In one fell swoop, he disposed of France's colonies in Black Africa, and in the process salvaged stronger ties and greater loyalties with his former wards than any other ex-colonial power.

De Gaulle took France's defeat at the hands of Communism in Southeast Asia as stoically as possible, even turning it to his diplomatic advantage in his current Russian tour. Last week he revealed that he would visit Cambodia in September, and had dispatched a "personal message" to North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh that might very well win him an invitation to Hanoi. Still, De Gaulle can do very little about Asia. He no longer has the power base or the authority. In Europe, he has both.

Friendly Persuasion. De Gaulle's view of Europe is the traditional one of a continent of nation-states, each sovereign and each civilized enough to look out for its own interests by means of bilateral treaties. ''I intended to assure French primacy in Western Europe," wrote De Gaulle in his memoirs of 1954.

"Without ever accepting any kind of dependency, [I would] persuade the states along the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees to form a political, economic and strategic bloc; to establish this organization as one of the three world powers and, should it become necessary, as the arbiter."