The Week

Citizen Eisenhower, at ease in Palm Springs, said he didn’t have a plan beyond the next golf shot. It’s hard to break old habits.

Britain’s foreign minister, the Earl of Home, like Adlai Stevenson, though not for the same reasons, has just publicly declared that Communist China’s admission to the UN (why anyone would want to join the UN these days beats us) is inevitable. Mr. Stevenson thinks it inevitable, and wants it, because he is at bottom an appeaser. Lord Home, paradoxically, included his prediction, with a correlated critique of U.S. conduct in the matter, in a foreign policy speech that was on the whole tough for a British context; and a few days later, his government motivated a rise in the arms budget by the “growing threat from Communist China.” Actually, Lord Home was merely repeating what has for many centuries been British peacetime policy on diplomatic recognition: to exclude altogether issues of approval, morality, and so on, and extend recognition automatically to the regime, in any country, that holds de facto power. As a general rule, this seems to us correct, and more intelligent than the American “moral” conditioning that began with Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg in the twenties. But, unfortunately, the British fail to recognize, a) that this is not “peacetime” in the traditional sense of past generations; and b) the specific consequences of universal diplomatic recognition of this particular regime in this particular period would be in major degree injurious to the interests of all the free world, Britain very much included.

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Citizen Eisenhower, at ease in Palm Springs, said he didn’t have a plan beyond the next golf shot. It’s hard to break old habits.

Britain’s foreign minister, the Earl of Home, like Adlai Stevenson, though not for the same reasons, has just publicly declared that Communist China’s admission to the UN (why anyone would want to join the UN these days beats us) is inevitable. Mr. Stevenson thinks it inevitable, and wants it, because he is at bottom an appeaser. Lord Home, paradoxically, included his prediction, with a correlated critique of U.S. conduct in the matter, in a foreign policy speech that was on the whole tough for a British context; and a few days later, his government motivated a rise in the arms budget by the “growing threat from Communist China.” Actually, Lord Home was merely repeating what has for many centuries been British peacetime policy on diplomatic recognition: to exclude altogether issues of approval, morality, and so on, and extend recognition automatically to the regime, in any country, that holds de facto power. As a general rule, this seems to us correct, and more intelligent than the American “moral” conditioning that began with Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg in the twenties. But, unfortunately, the British fail to recognize, a) that this is not “peacetime” in the traditional sense of past generations; and b) the specific consequences of universal diplomatic recognition of this particular regime in this particular period would be in major degree injurious to the interests of all the free world, Britain very much included.