Opportunity

As the Moscow Conference on Germany and Austria convened, Russian Foreign Minister Molotov remarked that the situation in China had not improved since the Foreign Ministers discussed it in 1945. (The interval had seen a full-scale civil war between Molotov's fellow Communists in China and the Chinese Government.) Molotov asked that the U.S., Britain and Russia exchange information on China. Secretary Marshall agreed, asked for time to consider the procedure for discussion.

If he wanted to take it, Marshall had in the Russian proposal a wide-open opportunity to turn the conference into a discussion of the current world crisis as a whole. China, Korea, the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, Eastern Europe and Germany were all parts of a single question. That question was: How great was the postwar expansion of Russian influence going to be?

The Russians had in the past preferred a piecemeal approach. U.S. policy could be more clearly crystallized and more effectively stated in a unified approach.

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