A Step Toward Unity

Formally, the subject was how to deal with the world energy shortage --but the delegates to last week's 13-nation Washington Energy Conference spent little time talking about that. The real subject was U.S.-European relations, and the denouement was straight out of the De Gaulle era: the U.S. got everyone to go along with a common approach except France, which again played the role of odd country out at the cost of a deepening split between itself and its Common Market partners.

President Nixon had invited the nine Market nations, plus Canada, Japan and Norway, to meet and work out a common program for easing the energy pinch. For three days--one more than planned--the Foreign Ministers of the 13 wrangled through rounds of formal speeches, a black-tie dinner at the White House, and a long series of private meetings and caucuses. In the end, they agreed to set up a "coordinating group" that will:

1) Work out cooperative systems for conserving energy and plans for allocating tight oil supplies equitably among consuming countries "in times of emergency and severe shortages."

2) Plan joint approaches aimed at developing non-oil sources of energy. To aid this effort, the U.S. offered to share the new technology it is developing.

3) Try to set up a meeting between oil-consuming and oil-producing nations at which the consumers would seek to convince the producers to guarantee stable supplies. Moreover the U.S. and some other nations want to persuade the producers to lower oil prices to a more bearable level. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger concedes that prices would have to stay higher than the $3.65 per bbl. that Persian Gulf producers were charging before they started the embargo in October. But he also points out that present prices, which range up to $20 per bbl., threaten severe disruption of the world economy.

The program is a sensible one and represents yet another victory for Kissinger's powers of persuasion: it contains almost everything that he and Nixon had hoped to get out of the conference. The only important point on which he could get no agreement was a proposed "code of conduct" to regulate the efforts that several governments are making to work out special deals with Middle Eastern producers in order to assure their own energy supplies. France, for example, is negotiating pacts with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya that would guarantee it millions of barrels of oil in return for stepped-up deliveries of French weapons and technology to the producers. Kissinger voiced fears that such deals would only bid up oil prices still higher, but French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert pointed out caustically that at least six other nations were negotiating similar trades.

Every other point had to be won over the loud opposition of Jobert, who put on a display of verbal pyrotechnics worthy of De Gaulle at his best. Time and again the tiny, feisty French Foreign Minister implied that the U.S. was trying to establish economic and political hegemony over Europe. He sharply criticized France's Common Market partners, and pointedly noted that the U.S. can supply more of its oil needs from its own production than any European nation or Japan. "We are living in discomfort," said Jobert. "Let those who have comfort understand it."

At one point, Jobert committed a startling breach of diplomatic etiquette by publicly endorsing Democratic criticism of Nixon's energy policy. He quoted approvingly from a speech by an unnamed U.S. Senator who was readily identifiable as Edmund Muskie of Maine. Jobert forced the conferees to rewrite their communique many times. The final version carried six asterisks to note that France disagreed with much of it. He also made it clear that France would not join the coordinating group.

This French obstinacy, reports TIME'S chief European Correspondent William Rademaekers, has little to do with energy: "Rather, the French intransigence reflects a general frustration with France's diminishing role in the world at large, and its frantic efforts to carve out a new sphere of influence." France, Rademaekers reports, is worried that smoother U.S. relations with the Soviet Union presage a deal whereby the superpowers would tacitly divide the world into areas of influence, with the U.S. getting Western Europe and France left unconsulted. Also, France is riled by its lessening power in the Common Market, where it must now share influence with Britain as well as with West Germany. All of this has apparently led the French to try to recapture the "grandeur" of the De Gaulle days by reviving his diplomatic style.

If that is so, the attempt last week boomeranged: Jobert forged a greater degree of unity between the U.S. and non-French Europe than Kissinger had been able to accomplish. West German Finance Minister Helmut Schmidt declared that his country did not want to be forced to choose between Common Market unity and backing the U.S.--but in the end, Germany chose the U.S. Other delegates were less emphatic, but in signing the communique without reservations they in effect said the same thing. Germany has proposed that Common Market Foreign Ministers meet next month to try to narrow the various splits, but the new division in Europe over relations with the U.S. bodes no good for the meeting.

The U.S. will press for an early meeting of the coordinating group, but what will happen next on energy is equally unclear. The Arabs seem, if anything, as divided as the nations that buy their oil. Leaders of oil-producing Arab nations were supposed to meet in Tripoli last week to consider, among other things, lifting the embargo and restoring some production cutbacks, but the meeting was abruptly called off at the request of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egyptian President Sadat and Saudi King Faisal gave President Nixon private assurances last month that they would try to get the embargo lifted as an expression of faith in Kissinger's peacemaking efforts in the Middle East. But when Nixon publicly referred to those assurances in his State of the Union speech, Syria brought pressure on the other Arab countries to do nothing until an agreement was reached for disengagement of Syrian and Israeli forces along the Golan Heights. Last week's conference was apparently postponed because the Egyptian and Saudi leaders realized that without more progress on disengagement it would be impossible to persuade more militant Arabs that the embargo should be eased. Four influential Arab leaders--Sadat, Faisal, Algerian President Houari Boumedienne and Syrian President Hafez Assad--held a "mini-summit" in Algiers. They decided to dispatch emissaries to Paris to thank the French for their stand and to Washington to outline Arab conditions for an Israeli-Syrian settlement.

Meanwhile the world continues to pay through the nose for the oil that it is getting. U.S. Oil Economist Walter Levy, a frequent consultant to Kissinger, figures that at present prices for imported petroleum the U.S. could run a $13 billion trade deficit this year, v. a surplus of $1.68 billion in 1973. Japan, he calculates, may have to pay $11 billion more for oil this year--a sum roughly equal to the nation's entire reserves of gold and foreign currencies--and Western Europe as a whole might have to cough up $35 billion more.

Clearly, negotiating the prices down should be a prime economic and diplomatic goal for the industrialized world. But so far the Arabs, though disunited, have shown great skill at playing off one worried consuming nation against another in order to maintain the prices. The agreement of twelve big oil consumers at last week's Washington conference on a common program could mark an important step toward the needed negotiations with the oil producers. Even the French may eventually join in. Kissinger expects to see his new diplomatic rival, Jobert, at any meeting between oil users and producers.

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