Someone Must Speak

The cascade of European comments on the U.S. and its foreign policy has grown thick of late with brickbats, ripe tomatoes and plaints that the U.S. is bullying its allies. Last week a hard-bitten veteran of diplomacy tossed in his opinion. Said peppery old (73) Lord Vansittart, longtime Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and a major voice in British foreign policy until his retirement in 1941: "It is time to stop messing about. Someone must speak out, and it may as well be a lifelong Francophile . . . Europe is pushing the American people toward isolation . . . For their own enormous contributions, the Americans have got nothing but abuse in the waste lands where Socialists and fellow travelers meet, and insufficient gratitude on more cultivated soil. If I were an American, I should feel exactly like that, though I would check myself. Should this feeling go much further, no American politician will be able to master it . . . After four years of vacillation, Western Europe is still indefensible, though the Communist menace grows yearly with gigantic forces not aimed at the man in the moon . . . An immediate and unanimous alternative [to EDC] is needed. We are all in too deep peril to let [U.S.] candor be misrepresented as 'bullying.' "

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