Most commentators discounted President Nixon’s Parisian apostrophe to President de Gaulle as diplomatic bombast. Some found it fulsome almost to the point of caricature. But it may be he really meant it. At any rate, he is behaving lately rather like an admiring pupil of le grand professeur.
Take the four-power conference on the Mideast that got discreetly off the ground April 3. This was de Gaulle’s idea, proclaimed in January. Accepting it represented a big turn in U.S. policy, and—as Tel Aviv did not hide—a direct affront to Israel. The diplomatic implications are of more than casual moment. By thus sitting down with Soviet representatives to discuss, in that small circle, the destiny of the Mideast, we are recognizing the legitimacy of the Soviet Union’s drive to establish itself as a Mideast power. We complete the process of erasing Moscow’s aggression against Czechoslovakia from the record. We appease de Gaulle’s ego by giving him a seat at a sort of re-run of Yalta.
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