Conference Diplomacy

Report Outline
Public Diplomacy in Middle East Crisis
Conference Diplomacy in Peace and War
Diplomacy at the Summit Since 1953
Special Focus

Public Diplomacy in Middle East Crisis

Big-Power Maneuvering on the Middle East

Soviet demands for a summit conference on the Middle East, discussed back and forth for three weeks in contentious correspondence between Premier Khrushchev and the heads of Western governments, have finally produced an extraordinary session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Neither the independent top-level parley originally sought by the Soviet Union nor a Western-favored meeting in the framework of the U.N. Security Council survived East-West jockeying for position in a public debate on conduct of the great powers in a crisis-ridden corner of the world.

Periodic conferences during World War II between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, with the later addition of Premier Stalin, proved an invaluable means of reaching mutual agreement on plans for war and peace. When the practice of summit diplomacy was revived at Geneva in 1955, the participants were deeply divided on the questions before them and no more than a semblance of agreement was achieved. Relief of cold war tensions was not the spur to harmony that had been provided a decade earlier by the drive for victory over a tangible enemy; diametrically opposed interests would not yield to genuine compromise.

Recent maneuvering to project the Middle East into the realm of summit diplomacy was hardly animated by a spirit of accommodation. When Khrushchev on July 19 proposed that President Eisenhower, British Prime Minister Macmillan, French Premier de Gaulle, and Indian Prime Minister Nehru meet him three days later at Geneva, he called the dispatch of American marines to Lebanon and of British paratroopers to Jordan “military invasion” and “armed intervention” and accused the United States and Great Britain of planning to intervene in Iraq. In replying on July 22, suggesting a heads-of-government meeting in the framework of the Security Council, President Eisenhower told Khrushchev that “The real danger of war would come if one small nation after another were to be engulfed by expansionist and aggressive forces supported by the Soviet Union.”