Toward a New International Balance

Almost a year has passed since Henry Kissinger's dramatic visit to Peking, but surprise diplomacy still seems to be in vogue. The unexpected news that North and South Korea were at the brink of amity after 27 years of vituperation was nearly as stunning in its own way as last summer's sudden thaw in U.S.-Chinese relations.

Korea, moreover, was only one of several prickly situations that seemed to be yielding to a kind of gathering spirit of conciliation. India's Indira Gandhi and Pakistan's Zulfikar Ali Bhutto met in the Himalayan foothills to talk over their deeply entrenched differences. The Viet Nam negotiations, which the U.S. angrily broke off two months ago, will resume this week when both U.S. Ambassador William Porter and North Viet Nam Chief Negotiator Xuan Thuy return to the Paris peace table, amid fresh speculation that both China and the Soviet Union have been pressing Hanoi to settle the war. Even the expected denunciations of American "imperialism" that Fidel Castro voiced in Moscow last week as he ended a ten-day visit to the Soviet Union seemed more ritual than rage. The suspicion persists that a U.S.-Cuban reconciliation is not out of the question --especially in light of a recent remark by Castro that "there is no such thing as a permanent enemy."

The fading of tensions along some of the fault lines dividing the old bipolar world does not necessarily mean that Richard Nixon's generation of peace is at hand. It is too easily forgotten now that a lively era of negotiations--centering around, among other things, the Big Four summit in Geneva, the Bandung Conference, the Re-packi Plan for reduction of forces in Europe--flourished after the Korean armistice during the 1950s, only to disappear in a renewal of the cold war.

Even so, events forcefully suggest that post-Viet Nam diplomacy may yet add up to a facsimile of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, at which the European powers arranged a self-imposed peace that lasted, with only sporadic and localized interruptions, for nearly 100 years.

Game. It is a cliche by now that the U.S. has its own Metternich in Henry Kissinger, and that the makings of a 19th century-style balance of power are present in that five-sided world--the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union and China--that so fascinates President Nixon. But the world is much more complex than it was when Europe's aristocratic diplomats invented "the game of nations" 200 years ago. The five "powers" are by no means equally balanced, equally willing or able to play the game. Example: the dueling between West Germany's Willy Brandt and France's Georges Pompidou over the leadership of the Common Market (see story, page 25).

Alastair Buchan, Professor of International Relations at Oxford, plausibly argued in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that what is evolving is not really a classic balance of power but merely a "balance of prudence"--a situation in which the major powers, particularly the U.S. and the Soviet Union, have simply decided, for various reasons and for the moment only, to respect each other's interests. The trouble with that sort of balance is that it can be upset by any one of the partners at any time. The hope is that a blowup in the Middle East, say, or at some other pressure point will not come along to support the doubters' case that there is, at bottom, little more to Nixon's pentagonal world than what Woodrow Wilson--no fan of balance-of-power politics--once called an "unstable equilibrium of competitive interests."

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