Conferences: How the Balance Has Changed

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As the seven fighting allies of the Pacific converged on Manila last week, two other groups of allies were winding up conferences. Their cautious confrontations were a reminder of how the world's balance of ideological power has altered in the past decade.

How to Reunite? In Moscow, the leaders of nine Communist nations* gathered for a secret summit and a show of Soviet spaceshots. Not long ago, such a gathering would inevitably result in barbed blasts at the West accompanied by the rattle of rockets or the slap of brick on mortar. Not so last week. In their bland communiqué, there was not one howl at the "imperialists," not one threat of "burial." Indeed, the haste with which the meeting was called implied a response to Washington initiatives rather than a new move by Moscow. What the Reds talked about remained a mystery. Presumably, the question of coping with Red China was on the agenda. And no doubt they dealt with the tricky balance of peaceful coexistence with the U.S. and a search for Red victory in Viet Nam.

Whatever the subjects were, they were discussed in quiet voices. Even the space spectacular at Baikonur, the Soviet missile site deep in Central Asia, was a bit sotto voce. Instead of the multinational, six-man lunar shot that some observers had predicted, the Russians showed their guests the launch of a radio-and-TV-relay satellite named Molniya (Lightning). About the only clue from the Moscow summit was a negative one: in the list of slogans promulgated last week for the 49th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a key phrase was missing. For the first time since 1918, the Soviets failed to say, "Workers of the world, unite!"

How to Nonalign? The question of unity was also on the agenda in New Delhi, where the leaders of the world's three original "nonaligned" nations met last week. Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and India's Indira Gandhi did not quite know why they were getting together. Nostalgically recalling the good old days, Nasser remarked that the world was no longer so sharply split between East and West. "Our world is still governed by strife," he added, as if to suggest that this, at least, was reason to gather.

Only a decade ago at Bandung, 29 nonaligned leaders gathered for ten days to prescribe a cure for the cold war's ills. Since then, many of the non-aligned world's leaders have fallen: India's Nehru is dead; Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Algeria's Ahmed ben Bella and Indonesia's Sukarno have dropped from supreme power. Indeed, nonalignment itself badly needs redefinition: the former nonaligneds have hardly anyone left to nonalign with.