Toward a New Approach

Acting on instructions from Washington, U.S. Ambassador James B. Conant made a special call on West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Bonn one day last week. His mission: to hand Adenauer a German translation of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' proposals for expanding the political and economic roles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (TIME, April 30). This, Conant told Adenauer gravely, should be regarded as a major statement of U.S. policy.

Even before Conant underscored the point, the West had begun to sense that the U.S. was in the midst of a serious updating of its foreign policies, designed to meet the new Russian approach and to deal with a world relaxed by Russian displays of nonbelligerence, trade negotiation and foreign economic aid. The generalized NATO proposal, which Dulles will discuss broadly in Paris this week with the NATO ministers' council (see FOREIGN NEWS), was one instance--and a symbolic one. The U.S. plans no weakening of NATO's essential defense function, but wants to add to defense a solid community of interest growing out of political and economic pursuits.

The new approach has other aspects. In his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last fortnight, President Eisenhower went out of his way to identify the U.S. with the independence-urge of young governments, and asked for tolerance of treaty-wary neutralists. The Administration wants to put foreign aid on some sort of long-range basis, extending as far as ten years. Last week the U.S. added 700 items to the list of nonstrategic goods, e.g., rubber products and photographic equipment, that exporters may ship to European Communist nations.

The course of the new policies is far from completely mapped. But from the hints of direction, it is clear that the U.S. is well on the way to fulfilling a seemingly casual remark that the President made to the newspaper editors after his formal speech: "It is necessary that we find better, more effective ways of keeping ourselves in tune with the world's needs."

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