From Manila to Bucharest

Encouraged by the favorable reactions to his European trip last winter, Richard Nixon has been eager to embark on another venture in person-to-person diplomacy. Last week he flew to Canada to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the St. Lawrence Seaway with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the only real question was where he would go next. The answer: Nearly everywhere. Late this month, the White House announced, Nixon will begin an approximately eleven-day trip around the world that will take him to five Asian countries and the Eastern European state of Rumania --marking the first time that a U.S. President has visited a Communist country since F.D.R. conferred with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in 1945.

Fact Finding. The trip will start in the mid-Pacific, where, on July 24, Nixon plans to watch the splashdown of Apollo 11 from the pickup carrier, U.S.S. Hornet. He will then visit the Philippines, Indonesia (which no U.S. President has ever visited), Thailand, India and Pakistan, from which he will fly to Bucharest. There he will talk with Rumanian Chief of State Nicolae Ceausescu, at the latter's invitation.

Like his earlier trip abroad, the newest expedition will be primarily a fact-finding effort. The chief concern, of course, will be Viet Nam (which he is not scheduled to visit) and the shape of post-war Asia. The President, said a White House official, "wants to begin to lay the foundation for a post-Viet Nam South Asia policy. He has had a long-standing concern for the region and is convinced that the U.S. must remain a Pacific power. In the long term, the concern is for a lasting Asian peace in which we are not dragged into conflict and the people can shape their own future without intervention."

On to Moscow? The stopover in Bucharest may ultimately prove even more significant than the Asian swing. Rumania is a leading maverick in the Russians' European orbit. Nixon's visit, Washington believes, will symbolize the fact that the U.S. does not accept the "Brezhnev Doctrine," put forth by Moscow after the invasion of Czechoslovakia to justify Soviet intervention in any independent Communist state within its sphere.

At the same time, the White House insists, the President has no intention of making the visit to Rumania seem like an anti-Soviet gesture. "Eastern Europe, after all," says one man close to the President, "is central to the issue of East-West peace." In fact, if there is any likelihood of detente with Russia, with the upcoming disarmament talks as a first step, Nixon's next major mission may well be to Moscow.

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