GREAT BRITAIN: The Resiler

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Far from being mere domestic expedience, the "American excuse" can serve the only promising Suez strategy left to Diplomat Eden—the strategy of procrastination. Some might call it "dithering," others "muddling through," but the Foreign Office likes to call it "resiling." The strict dictionary definition of "resile" is "draw back, recoil . . . return to its original position as an elastic body." In Foreign Office usage, however, resile means to appear elastic without actually budging from one's original position.

In the coming days, Eden will resile in several directions—with other diplomats in London, and probably in the debating halls of the U.N. His enemies are likely to conclude that Eden (and Britain) will never resort to force, even when all hope of any satisfactory negotiated settlement has clearly been exhausted. This could be an unsafe assumption. One purpose of resiling is to wait for one's antagonist to commit a blunder that weakens him, or a provocation that provides the Resiler with a casus belli.

Because Veteran Resiler Eden did not quite mean what he said in the first flush of the Suez seizures does not guarantee that he did not mean what he said privately to Bulganin and Khrushchev during their London visit, and publicly three months ago: "Our country's industrial life . . . must depend for many years on oil supplies from the Middle East. If ever our oil resources were imperiled, we should be compelled to defend them."