Energy: A Step Toward Unity

Formally, the subject was how to deal with the world energy shortage —but the delegates to last week's 13-nation Washington Energy Conference spent little time talking about that. The real subject was U.S.-European relations, and the denouement was straight out of the De Gaulle era: the U.S. got everyone to go along with a common approach except France, which again played the role of odd country out at the cost of a deepening split between itself and its Common Market partners.

President Nixon had invited the nine Market nations, plus Canada, Japan and Norway, to meet and work out a common program for easing the energy pinch. For three days—one more than planned—the Foreign Ministers of the 13 wrangled through rounds of formal speeches, a black-tie dinner at the White House, and a long series of private meetings and caucuses. In the end, they agreed to set up a "coordinating group" that will:

1) Work out cooperative systems for conserving energy and plans for allocating tight oil supplies equitably among consuming countries "in times of emergency and severe shortages."

2) Plan joint approaches aimed at developing non-oil sources of energy. To aid this effort, the U.S. offered to share the new technology it is developing.

3) Try to set up a meeting between oil-consuming and oil-producing nations at which the consumers would seek to convince the producers to guarantee stable supplies. Moreover the U.S. and some other nations want to persuade the producers to lower oil prices to a more bearable level. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger concedes that prices would have to stay higher than the $3.65 per bbl. that Persian Gulf producers were charging before they started the embargo in October. But he also points out that present prices, which range up to $20 per bbl., threaten severe disruption of the world economy.

The program is a sensible one and represents yet another victory for Kissinger's powers of persuasion: it contains almost everything that he and Nixon had hoped to get out of the conference. The only important point on which he could get no agreement was a proposed "code of conduct" to regulate the efforts that several governments are making to work out special deals with Middle Eastern producers in order to assure their own energy supplies. France, for example, is negotiating pacts with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya that would guarantee it millions of barrels of oil in return for stepped-up deliveries of French weapons and technology to the producers. Kissinger voiced fears that such deals would only bid up oil prices still higher, but French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert pointed out caustically that at least six other nations were negotiating similar trades.

Every other point had to be won over the loud opposition of Jobert, who put on a display of verbal pyrotechnics worthy of De Gaulle at his best. Time and again the tiny, feisty French Foreign Minister implied that the U.S. was trying to establish economic and political hegemony over Europe. He sharply criticized France's Common Market partners, and pointedly noted that the U.S. can supply more of its oil needs from its own production than any European nation or Japan. "We are living in discomfort," said Jobert. "Let those who have comfort understand it."