Puzzled Alliance
A correspondent in Paris writes:
Paris in the course of the NATO council meeting this week was hardly different from Brighton last weekend. Mr. Wilson's proposals —or lack of them—on the MLF had the same baffling effect on foreign diplomats as on the left and right wings of the Labour Party. `Ah,' the Gaullists were saying, 'that's his way of scuppering the mixed-manned force altogether.' To which the Americans replied that President Johnson and his advisers got a very different idea of what Mr. Wilson intends in Washington last week, and the Germans talked on of the MLF with British participation early in the new year.
But if here all was obscurity, Mr. Wilson has upset the French well and truly with his talk of special Anglo-American responsibilities east of Suez. This way of parcelling out spheres of in- fluence is exactly what the French have been objecting to all along, and its re-emergence now is seen as one more crucial example of Anglo- Saxon assertiveness. Few people believed any- thing much would happen at the NATO meet- ing, since everyone was determined to play it cool. But the connection' between the MLF and NATO is becoming more and more tenuous. If the MLF comes to anything—and the feeling in Paris is naturally that it won't—it will be quite a separate organisation, and this, say the Gaul- lists, is how it was always intended.
Yet if for the moment Mr. Wilson can get away with as many different voices on defence as he chooses, it is certainly not true of Mr. Brown. The British economy is under scrutiny, by critics and sympathisers alike. Its condition is related to everything Britain does, or intends. Mr. Brown may use one voice for the European bankers. He will be hard pressed if he insists on using a different one at home.
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