Agreeing to Disagree

The 16 U.N. nations whose troops fought side by side in Korea got together in Manhattan last week, on the eve of a special meeting of the U.N. Assembly. They tried to coordinate their plans for confronting the Communists at the post-Korean political conference. But instead of getting together, they did a convincing job of disagreeing in public.

Article 60. U.S. Representative Henry Cabot Lodge informed the other allies that he regarded the arrangements for the conference as "perfectly clear." Lodge cited Article 60 of the armistice agreement, which provides that a conference "of a higher level of both sides be held" within three months after the armistice was signed (July 27). The conference agenda: "To settle through negotiation . . . the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, etc." In the U.S. view, said Lodge, "both sides" means what it did at Panmunjom: them and us. "One side consists of the nations who had armed forces fighting under the U.N. flag. The other consists of the Communists." In the U.S. view, it follows that the U.N. ought not to invite either Russia ("definitely not on our side") nor India (which had no fighting forces in Korea). Lodge tried to persuade Sir Gladwyn Jebb, but the British found Lodge's stand "unrealistic," and when Canada and France sided with Britain, a first-class row ensued.

ARGUMENT No. I was over Russian participation. If the North Koreans want to invite the Russians, Cabot Lodge had "no particular objections." It would simply prove what the U.S. had contended all along: that the U.N. fought a war not only against North Korea and Red China but against the Soviet Union, too. What the U.S. objected to was an invitation to Moscow to sit on the U.N. side as a "neutral." Too many Americans have been killed by Russian weapons to make such a thing palatable.

To the British Commonwealth countries, the conference would be a failure if Russia were not there. The British hope to convert the Korean parley into a de facto Big Five conference and talk magniloquently of driving a wedge between Moscow and Peking. This week U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold implied that the British approach was "cooperative and constructive," and Cabot Lodge, bowing to the inevitable, accepted a compromise that was a U.S. capitulation in everything but name. In deference to the U.S., the Assembly might not actually invite Russia to the conference. It could simply recommend that a Soviet representative be seated at the table.

ARGUMENT No. 2 was over India. Washington worried that the Indians might turn out to be "neutral on the side of the Communists." Syngman Rhee was quite likely to boycott the conference if the Indians were seated.

British Commonwealth spokesmen thought that India had worked her passage by helping to frame the prisoner-repatriation formula that led to an armistice. Much more important was Britain's view that, with India seated, the conference could roam at will across the whole range of Asian problems, including the question of U.N. recognition of Red China. The British were prepared to sponsor India on the floor of the full Assembly, where the Indians might pick up enough Asian and African votes to secure them an invitation.

Bloody Nuisance. Britain's willingness to discuss the recognition question at the Korean conference rested on the tiny word "etc." tacked onto Article 60 by the Communists. The much more urgent objective--Korean unity--is regarded in London as nothing more than a bloody nuisance. British editorialists almost unanimously regard Syngman Rhee as a dangerous man and John Foster Dulles as too ready to give in to him. Then, to rouse these feelings even higher, came the Aug. 7 U.N. declaration that all 16 members who fought in Korea would jointly resist a Communist breach of the armistice. The last sentence read: "The consequences of such a breach . . . would be so grave that, in all probability, it would not be possible to confine hostilities within the frontiers of Korea."

To most Americans, this was fair warning that Peking should not expect to escape from a second aggression as easily as it had from the first. To the British Labor Party it was senseless warmongering which the Foreign Office had no right to agree to. This outburst struck the London Economist as proof that the Labor Party is against "any British firmness anywhere (except, of course, in Washington)." But the Tory government hastened to explain that the warning was not really a warning, but only a statement of probabilities.

This dustup only served to prove how futile and eventually disillusionary a practice it is to cover over disagreements with calculated ambiguities. In the new, more realistic vein, the West's proposal for the forthcoming political conference declares that no nation on the U.N. side need be bound by any decision for which it has not voted.

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