The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THE new Dulles-Bedell Smith team of foreign policy managers has been shaped around the belief that in the great power struggle of our era the time is approaching when the Western world, led by the United States, can pass over from the defense to the offense in quest of a solution without war. The necessity of a shift to the offense was laid down by Eisenhower in the campaign, notably in his promise to seek the liberation “by peaceful means” of peoples enslaved by the Soviet expansion.

Applying World War II terms, the holding phase is nearing an end. A base line has been secured, and strength has been coming into being behind it. Berlin, Korea, and the struggle for Europe’s economic survival have been like Guadalcanal, the Coral Sea, and the Battle of Britain — the successful defenses which won the chance for the future. Perhaps an El Alamein and a Stalingrad must be won before the turn of the tide is obvious. The adversary is still powerful and still capable of penetrating if his constant probings locate a weak spot.

The areas of decision

The primary goal is to obtain the recession of the power frontiers of Russia in both Europe and Asia. In Asia that means a long-term effort to sever the mixed strands of ideological agreement and of subjugation which bind Red China to Stalinist Russia. And to be successful, the policy must be executed without starting World War III.

Nearly all, if not all, the major foreign policy problems facing the Eisenhower administration are related to that primary goal —completion of adequate military strength for the West; the revival of normal international trade and the closing of the dollar gap; a settlement in Korea in particular and the Far East in general; the advancement of European unity; a practical adjustment with the new nationalisms along the southern rim of the Mediterranean basin; friendship between India and Pakistan, and a firming of their Western ties; the rehabilitation of the United Nations.

In essence, the main problems themselves are not new to U.S. foreign policy. Henry Adams, writing in his “Education” of the problems facing American diplomacy at the turn of the century, perceived that “Hay’s and McKinley’s statesmanship turned on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might be called the Coal-power combination, rather than build up the only possible alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging Germany in Russia.” To what other purpose are President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles urging Germany now to join the Western European community?

And John Hay, as Adams notes, had his Manchurian problem at that time. It was not quite what it is today, but it involved a triangular conflict of interest among the abutting powers, Russia, China, and Japan. Dulles recognizes that the conflict remains, has enlarged, and, in its Russian Chinese aspect, should be exploited to our advantage.

The Truman-Acheson team was born and trained in the defensive period. Its historical role was defense against the great post-war outward surge of Russia. It will someday be recognized as a good defensive team. But its necessary preoccupation with defense robbed it of opportunities to develop ideas, offensive plays, or even the offensive spirit.

The shift to the offensive will not be easy. An intensified, better-organized psychological strategy program, with clearer lines of authority, a broader interdepartmental coördination, and more prestige than characterize the present operation, is essential and could be the spearhead of that offensive. Psychological strategy is implicit in Dulles’s ideas for achieving “liberation” — by which he means reduction of the Soviet power area.

Dulles’s objectives

Dulles has been rather guarded in the public utterances in which he began to recommend — long before the campaign started — a shift to the offensive. It is possible here, however, to report some specifics of what he has had in mind.

Dulles inherits the situation of Russia’s extraordinary military power development, its exploitation of 300 million people in Europe for aggressive military purposes, and its progress in exploitation of an even larger number in China. He would say that even assuming you can hold them where they are, it is too big a gamble to let those forces develop further.

The Acheson policy of containment, Dulles would say, looks to the possibility that the Russian system will eventually fall apart from the inside. (Dulles obviously does not believe in the possibility of our achieving coexistence so long as the Soviet Union is dedicated to world conquest.) If it is assumed that the system will eventually disintegrate, Dulles would ask, why not try to accelerate the process?

The only way to hold a dynamic force, Dulles would argue, is by another dynamic force. Any static bulwark is sure to crumble — ours too. That is what is happening in Asia and Africa, and the only reason it is not happening in Europe is that the Russians are not pushing very hard.

It is, in Dulles’s view, a legitimate type of preventive activity to increase internal difficulties of despotisms to such a degree that their ability to carry out external adventures becomes limited. Dulles once said publicly that he would force the Russians to stay at home by giving them some homework to do.

What Dulles has in mind is nothing so vague and intangible as “spreading the idea of democracy,” nor so long-range as undertaking to construct what he calls a social-security belt around the Soviet sphere. The approach would vary with the target. It would play upon love of country in Poland, for example, or the lowered standard of living in Czechoslovakia.

If sabotage and subversion are to be accompanying techniques in the program —which the United States could never overtly admit —it is a relevant circumstance that Bedell Smith has just been heading the Central Intelligence Agency.

Dulles and Kennan

This general concept of cold-offensive tactics was brought into at least indirect challenge just before Dulles took office, in a speech by George F. Kennan, inactive Ambassador to Moscow. Kennan warned against “doing anything at the governmental level that purports to affect directly the governmental system of another country.” He suggested it would be wrongful, risky, and probably unproductive.

By accident, Kennan spoke the day after Dulles had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urging a “strong but not reckless” foreign policy. Hasty explanations were made that Kennan had no intention of opposing his new chief in the public prints. He has only a year to go before retirement, and naturally wishes to serve it out. As a Foreign Service officer, it was stipulated, he fully recognizes Dulles’s final authority, and knows that if fundamentally opposed to a Dulles policy, he would have to move into a field where he would not be concerned with its execution.

The “incident” was officially “closed” by Dulles after a personal meeting with Kennan. However, the Kennan speech had been cleared through State Department top quarters before its delivery. By implication there is therefore a substantial task of reconciliation between Dulles and the top career men of the Department before agreement is reached on the precise meaning of the Dulles “ liberation ” strategy.

The new high command at State is better related and devised for the assignment than is generally realized. Smith, the slight, tense, dry-minded, dedicated World War II chief of staff to Eisenhower, is no presidential “plant” in State to curb the more imaginative and freewheeling Dulles,

On the contrary, Dulles picked Smith for his own reasons. Smith knows the bureaucratic labyrinth of Washington. He served high in the Budget Bureau for four and a half years after World War I. He was ambassador in Moscow for three years.

Finally, Smith and Dulles went through several great post-war international conferences together and discovered a mutuality of thought.

The problem of Ching

The freedom of movement and decision with which the Dulles-Smith team at State is blessed can be illustrated by taking a look through their eves at Chiang Kai-shek.

During recent years, Chiang had become enwrapped in an intricately wound cocoon of warring American political ideologies. It became heresy for a Democrat to propose using Chiang, and equally heretical for a Republican to doubt that Chiang represented the perfect answer to the Far East problem.

Whether Chiang and his forces will be put to genuine strategic use depends on the answers to certain questions comprehending the whole Far Eastern problem. Is there any serious prospect that the Chinese people will ever rise and throw off the Communist government? If so, Chiang is a possible, though improbable, instrument of the rising. If not, then Chiang is a pawn in a longer game. He can be used to threaten the flank so long as Peiping remains in the Moscow embrace. Eisenhower’s order to the Seventh Fleet to cease “shielding” Communist. China from Formosa-based Nationalist attacks was an act combining “psychological strategy" with exploitation of Chinng’s role as a flanking threat.

Dulles and Smith both incline toward the diplomacy of using a wedge between Red China and the Soviet Union. A commitment to that course could only mean for Chiang that his future is behind him.

To Secretary Dulles the separation of China from Russia must be the overriding objective of Far East policy, to be reached either by upsetting the Red regime or by accepting its durability as a fact of life and attempting to persuade it towards Titoism. It has been a Dulles conviction that the United States has at the most ten Years in which it can maintain a divorce of Japan from China. By then, he would say, China will either be drawn from behind the Iron Curtain or Japan will be lost to it. He well recognizes the economic attraction the two have for each other, and his purpose is to see that attraction moves China out, not Japan in.

It was with at least a groping sense of this long-range goal that the Eisenhower group which went to Korea decided, in their conferences homeward bound, to treat the Korean War not as an isolated problem but as only a part of the whole Far Eastern problem. It was viewed in its relation to Japan, to Indo-China, to Hong Kong, to Formosa, to Malaya, and to Asiatic public opinion, and the hot wars in the Far East were considered also in relation to the drain they impose on forces needed for defense of the decisiv e theater, Europe.

Germany and Conant

Our new diplomatic GHQ understands that in Europe the economic relationship of Germany to the satellite area is much the same as the Japanese—Chinese relationship, with the same magnetism of trade potential at work. Eisenhower’s advisers quickly grasped the import of Stalin’s words during the Communist Party Congress last fall, and warned that the new Soviet tactic would be to offer trade as bait to pry economically beset nations from the freeworld alliance. It must be a Dulles objective to see that the satellite areas are persuaded toward trade with a Germany aligned with the West, rather than finding one fine day it has worked the other way around.

But the cleaving of China from Moscow is not something that is going to happen overnight, nor is there much sense of assurance right now that Germanycan be committed irrevocably to the West as quickly as had once been hoped. In the meantime, persistent economic distortions, resulting principally from the establishment of the economic iron curtain, threaten the whole fabric of the antiCommunist alliance, and some interim means of lessening the unbalance must be found.

The importance Eisenhower attaches to Germany’s role is indicated by his appointment of James B. Conant as U.S. High Commissioner, later to become Ambassador. The Harvard president is a welcome giant to a people who hold scholarship and scientific attainment in high regard. As the Scientific Advisor on Atomic. Energy to General Grove and again as the American Consultant on Atomic Energy at the Moscow Conference in 1947, Conant has held Federal appointments of major importance.

Conant’s statement to the Harvard Crimson explaining why he took the post deserves to be quoted: “A person in good health is, perhaps, justified in laying down prematurely the heavy responsibilities of the presi, deney of Harvard only if in so doing he accepts an equally challenging task of prime significance.” He warned that “the greatest threat to our national security is our failure to realize how great in fact is the threat,” and added: “Those who have agreed with my diagnosis of the present danger will need no convincing when I say that I believe the position of the representative of the President of the United States in Germany in the coming years is one of vital importance.”

The Catholic Standard, newspaper of the Washington Archdiocese, found the Conant appointment “puzzling.” Its observations reflected the interest of the American Catholic community in the present West German government with its strong Catholic coloration. The Standard’s criticism is based on the fact that Conant has opposed the granting of Federal aid to parochial schools as he has to all independent schools.

On the other hand, the appointment may come as balm of Gilead to German Protestants who have felt left out of Chancellor Adenauer’s predominantly Catholic government.

Mood of the Capital

The fresh winds of pragmatism are blowing all through Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Washington. The new question is not “What doctrine do we apply here?” but “What will work?”

There are exceptions to the new pragmatism. Eisenhower men have their beliefs: successful men of business are peculiarly qualified for government; less government is better than more; decentralized government is better than centralized government. But even these do not weigh against facts when there is conflict. The need for a labor leader in the cabinet outweighed the fondness for businessmen.

The best example of the new mood occurred when the Eisenhower administration came face to face with budgetary fact. There were campaign prospects of lower taxes, budget cuts, and balanced ledgers. The fact turned out to be enormous commitments already made against revenues. It was the campaign prospect that gave way in the painful moment of confrontation. Eisenhower decided that campaign promises are subordinate to reality.