The Long, Difficult Road

In conversational tones but with carefully chosen words, Secretary of State Dean Acheson last week defined the new position on foreign policy that the Administration had slowly--and sadly--come around to: the U.S. is putting its hope of peace not in negotiations with the U.S.S.R. but in the old-fashioned doctrine that strength bows only to strength.

"We have seen that agreements reached with the Soviet government are useful when those agreements register facts or a situation which exists," Acheson told his news conference, "and that they are not useful when they are merely agreements which do not register the existing facts." In the frosty, gloomy classrooms of the cold war, said the Secretary of State, the U.S. had learned this lesson well. There was Berlin, where the Russians spurned agreements and threw up the blockade, then backed down before the airlift and the West's show of strength. There was Greece, where Russia defied the U.N. to foment rebellion, then retreated before the persuasive weight of the Truman doctrine. There was Turkey, where relentless Soviet pressure was shut off by U.S. economic and military aid.

Don't Argue with Rivers. "Now," said Dean Acheson, "you see the same exhibition on the other side in regard to Soviet policy in China . . . There have been created all over the world these situations of weakness. Every time one of those situations exists, and they exist in Asia and they exist in Europe, it is not only an invitation but an irresistible invitation for the Soviet government to fish in those troubled waters. To ask them not to fish and to say we will have an agreement that you won't fish is like trying to deal with a force of nature."

You can't argue with a river, said the Secretary of State: it is going to flow. You can dam it or damn it, put it to useful purposes or divert it, but you can't argue with it. The U.S., Dean Acheson said, was through trying to argue with the torrent of Communism. "Therefore," he said, "we go to work ... to change those situations of weakness so that they won't create opportunities for fishing and opportunities for. trouble . . . We are trying to extend the area of possible agreement with the Soviet Union by creating situations so strong that they can be recognized and out of them can grow agreement."

Very Steady Nerves. Such a policy, said Dean Acheson, requires "purpose, continuity of purpose, perseverance, sacrifice and . . . more than almost anything else, very steady nerves," for the U.S. has chosen the "long and difficult" road to peace. Though many people were troubled and "rightly troubled" by the H-bomb, he added, it did not change these facts. So with a firm no he answered those friends abroad and citizens at home who wanted a fresh approach to negotiating an atomic-control treaty with Russia before both the world's great powers stand poised with the H-bomb. This was no time--the "facts" were not advantageous--to get a useful agreement from Russia, he argued.

At his own press conference next day, President Truman was asked whether he felt the U.S. should make a new bid for atomic control. Harry Truman replied that he had been trying to get world atomic control through the U.N. since 1946. Our position hasn't changed a bit, said the President. There is no use getting all steamed up, he went on, for every possible effort has been made. If the Soviet government would give just a little bit of cooperation the job would be done.

The U.S. was still trying its best to get peace in the world that would be good for everybody. That, said the President of the U.S., is all we want.

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