The Abortive Deputies
Nothing in Mr. Morrison's statement in the House of Commons on Tuesday on the failure of the Paris talks calls for any modi- fication of the view consistently expressed in these columns, that the meeting of Deputies has constituted the most signal display of diplomatic incompetence with which the world has been pre- sented for a long time. Mr. Morrison and Mr. Davies, of course, lay all the blame for the fiasco on the Russians. But it was the Russians, not the Western Powers, who first proposed a Four-Power Conference. It was the Western Powers, not the Russians, who stipulated for the preliminary meeting of Deputies which has for three months been running its protracted and ignominious course. The Western Powers could as long ago as April have spiked M. Gromyko's guns, if they needed spiking, by closing then and there with a perfectly acceptable agenda which he put forward. If that had been done the demand for .the addition of the North Atlantic Treaty to the agenda would not have been heard„of. As to final rupture on that tenuous issue .—whether the Treaty should just be talked about, as everyone agrees it can be, at a Foreign Ministers' Conference, or talked ;about as a " disagreed " item on the agenda—Mr. Morrison declares that "we cannot accept that the treaty itself should be one of the matters on which the four Foreign Ministers can take decisions." But what question is there of their -taking decisions on it? No one doubts what the general line-up in the Conference would be. There could be no decision on anything except with the assent of the three Western Powers, and their position has been sufficiently defined by the fact that the only ower which advocated the inclusion of the treaty in the agenda, even as a disagreed item, was Russia. The three arc unneces- sarily intimidated by the one.
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