World: CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND VIET NAM

The ninth World Youth Festival convened last week in Sofia, Bulgaria. As in all Communist-dominated slogan-fests, the talk in delegates' dormitories and around restaurant tables rang with indignation and accusation. No one, protested one young Rumanian Communist, has any right to interfere "in the internal affairs of other people." Was he lambasting the U.S. role in Viet Nam, as usual? Not at all. He was talking about the Soviet Union's squeeze on Czechoslovakia — a matter that exercised many of the 15,000 delegates far more than the festival's official theme of "solidarity with the Vietnamese people in their struggle against the American imperialist aggressors."

The Socialist youths in Sofia symbolized and expressed the widespread sentiment of Communist parties across Europe. It was this opposition, the prospect of profoundly splitting the already splintered Communist world, that was a big factor in the outcome of the Russian-Czechoslovak confrontation. In a memorable turn of events, Russia last week backed down on nearly all its demands of Alexander Dubcek's reformist regime in Czechoslovakia (see following story).

Learning to Limit. The U.S. involvement in South Viet Nam and Russia's handling of Czechoslovakia are, of course, totally different situations. Both conflicts, though, serve to show the limits of big-power action. The U.S. and Russia must move with caution for fear of touching off nuclear conflict, and pay some attention to the opinions of their allies. Both superpowers must come to accept some changes that they do not like. The Russians may eventually learn the limits not only of military intervention, of which they have always been rather chary, but of political subversion as well.

As for the U.S., it faces in Viet Nam a situation from which it cannot extricate itself by any Cierna-like meeting. Despite the Paris peace talks and a lull of sorts on the battlefield, the main confrontation is still on the battlefield.

Last week, in fact, Washington stiffened its attitude toward Hanoi and showed that, for the time being, President Johnson appears determined to stick to the U.S.'s full commitment to South Viet Nam. Over the past few weeks, as a lull in ground fighting continued, critics of the war have argued with increasing volume that the lull constituted Hanoi's concession toward peace. As a reciprocal step toward deescalation, they insist, the U.S. should halt all bombing of the North. Last week, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and President Johnson flatly rejected the notion that North Viet Nam had taken any such "political decision" toward a scaledown.