World Events in a Month

• Not since the end of the last war has the world witnessed diplomatic activity like that which the statesmen of East and West are exerting today. The harvest of world diplomacy during the month of May was so plentiful and great that it occupied the governments and monopolized their care and attention at home and abroad. In Jordan, King Hussein put out the fire of a communist conspiracy that had all but carried off the throne and made of that small kingdom the arena of a civil war of dire consequences for the entire Middle East. But the wisdom of the young King put an end to the conspirators' hopes.

• King Saud paid an official visit to Iraq, met with King Faisal and the leading men of the Iraqi government, and conferred with them on the bulk of the questions that concern the Arabs in general, and Iraq and Saudi Arabia in particular. The joint Saudi-Iraqi communiqué was decisive proof of the importance of the two kingdoms' cooperation in gathering the Arabs' word and unifying their ranks, at a time when the Arab states need to cast aside disputes and clear the air, in order to work at solving the problems that stand in their way toward building their economy, their defense, and their trade on sound and firm foundations.

• Egypt announced in the meantime that it had lifted the ban imposed on the passage of English and French ships through the Suez Canal, as well as the restrictions concerning the prohibition of commercial exchange, provisioning, and the like, between Egypt and the states with which dealings had been cut off during the Suez problem.

• In Syria, the Foreign Minister, Mr. Salah al-Bitar, declared that the question of restoring diplomatic relations between Syria and Britain had become a necessity that could not be avoided, after the dispersal of the clouds that had dominated the atmosphere of relations between London and Paris and certain Arab capitals.

• And if we set aside the question of the French complaint to the international Security Council concerning Suez, and Syria's complaint to the Council against Israel over its erecting a movable bridge in the demilitarized zone, we see that the events of the Arab East incline toward stability and honorable diplomatic reconciliations, by way of putting the dots on the letters — or, in the common phrase, "the wolf does not die, and the sheep do not perish." All of this, in the observers' view, supports the standpoints of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon on the necessity of Arab cooperation on the basis of the general interest. For Lebanon, in the person of His Excellency its President and the persons of the standing government, has brought out the existing Arab events as they ought to be, and on the scale that makes it easy to treat them in a spirit of realism and that guarantees the benefits sought from cooperation and mutual support in arriving at honorable, reasonable solutions.

As for the Eisenhower Doctrine, which Lebanon accepted and against which opponents at home and abroad enlisted themselves in propaganda, it was not long before the Lebanese theory was acknowledged by all the states that made reason, interest, and the building of humanity's channels to freedom their lens upon the facts.

• Thus President Chamoun, Minister Charles Malik, and the Lebanese government, headed by His Excellency Prime Minister Solh, have been seeking the Lebanese interest before everything, and the interest of the Arabs in the first degree.

As for why Zayd among the opponents did not accept, and Amr among the neighbors was not pleased — that is a matter that concerns Zayd the opponent and Amr the neighboring neighbor.

So much for the Arab East; in the Western sphere, the question of disarmament, now under discussion in London, was among the greatest of the major international questions, tugged back and forth between America and her allies on one side, and the Soviet Union and its partisans on the other.

There is no doubt that the solution of the problem of the armaments race between the blocs of West and East hangs on the position of the Soviet Union, after both America and Britain declared that they will not halt atomic tests unless a decisive agreement is reached on an explicit plan that guarantees the free world its security and its peace.