Perilous Positions

The West shook off the long torpor that had afflicted its attitude toward the worsening situation in the Middle East.

The summary dismissal of Lieut. General John Bagot Glubb by Jordan's King Hussein, the rioting on Cyprus, the general state of things on the Mediterranean rim, seemed to have aroused Britain to its suddenly perilous position in the Middle East. Reports of Egyptian officers training in Poland, of heavy shipments of Soviet arms brought renewed doubts that the stubbornly held policy of declining an arms race was serving its purpose. With Communist arms, Premier Abdel Gamal Nasser's vaunted dream of creating an Arab empire to thrust the West from the Middle East and North Africa as well, seemed suddenly pore reality than paper threat.

The urgency was expressed in a pulling together of policy, a tentative reshaping of plans. In Paris, U.S. Ambassador Douglas Dillon made clear the U.S. attitude toward France and North Africa. All three big Western powers moved to concert policies elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Premier Guy Mollet urged that the Big Three Foreign Ministers meet in Paris to discuss Middle East policies, suggested that the time was coming to ask for a U.N. embargo on the sale of arms either to Arab or Jew. Britain warned both sides that it would take "swift military action" if war broke out across the tense IsraeliArab borders. The U.S. asked the U.N.

Security Council to send Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold on an urgent fact-finding mission to Palestine, and President Dwight Eisenhower solemnly warned that the U.S. would consider any outbreak of hostilities there "a catastrophe to the world."

The West had not yet achieved a sense of direction. But it was an advance of sorts that it had acquired at least a sense of motion.

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