FOREIGN RELATIONS: Call It Peace

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From behind the Iron Curtain last week came a noisy eruption of growls and threats, mixed with a few bullets.

To lead off, Moscow pounced on a provision in the Mutual Security Act which authorizes $100 million in MSA funds for aid to "any selected persons who are residing in or escapees from" Iron Curtain countries, either to form them into military units under NATO or "for other purposes." To the State Department's embarrassment, Wisconsin's Republican Representative Charles Kersten had said quite plainly that his amendment was intended to "render aid for underground liberation movements in the Communist countries."

With Ill Grace. This was a clear case of "financing subversive activity . . . against the Soviet Union," cried the Kremlin. It also constituted "an unheard of violation of the norms of international law," and violated the Litvinov-Roosevelt agreement of 1933, in which each country promised not to interfere in the internal affairs of the other by force, propaganda or plot.*

Snapped the State Department in reply: "Charges to this effect come with singular ill grace from a Soviet regime which consistently supports subversive activities against the U.S. and other nations of the free world." Anyway, State added, the charge was "groundless."

As if on cue, junior partner Hungary piped up with a 3,000-word report designed to "prove" that the U.S. "interferes with [Hungary's] internal affairs, hinders her economic progress, and tries to overthrow her democratic existence."

At the U.K. Assembly meeting in Paris, Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky pushed the Russian charges by demanding that they be included on the agenda. In the social contacts of diplomacy, Vishinsky and his deputy, Jacob Malik, were all smiles and little pleasantries. But Vishinsky's retort to Secretary of State Acheson's dispassionate exposition of the West's disarmament proposals was savage as ever with invective.

Threats for Peace. Swiveling in another direction, Moscow fired off menacing notes to Israel and the Arab countries, warning that if they wanted to keep the friendship of Russia, they would not join the "aggressive" Middle East Command proposed by the U.S., Britain, France and Turkey. Such action, growled the Russian dove, was a threat to peace. These were followed by notes direct to the four sponsoring powers warning that the Soviet "cannot ignore these new designs" to make the Middle East "a springboard for the armed forces of the Atlantic bloc."

Washington contributed only one overt act to the week's uproar. President Harry Truman ordered all tariff concessions withdrawn from Russia and Poland as of Jan. 5, 1952, and banned the import of most furs from Russia and Communist China ($10 million in 1950). Trade concessions have already been withdrawn from all other Russian satellites in Europe except Hungary (the U.S.-Hungarian trade agreement requires a year's notice).

Twenty years ago, an observer would have surmised from such exchanges that war was imminent. Two international incidents in last week's news would have made the 1931 man sure of it.