Grave rumors rumbled in the Near East last week, reverberated in the Far East. Turkish Foreign Minister Tewfik Rushdi Bey and Soviet Foreign Minister Georg Valentinovich Tchitcherin met "secretly" at Odessa and discussed there, according to despatches, a Turko-Russian pact which it was allegedly proposed to expand into an "Asiatic League" embracing in addition China, Persia and Afghanistan.
Likewise significant are the recent visits, to Angora (Turkish Capital) of the Persian Foreign Minister Mirza Abdul Hussein Khan Timurtash and the Chinese Minister to the U. S., Dr. Sao-ke Alfred Sze.
Could an alliance of these "pariah countries" be cemented, India would be so seriously threatened that the continuance of British dominance there would be out of the question. Obviously, the British Isles without India are a factory robbed of its best market and source of raw materials. Therefore it was at London that the doings of Ministers Tewfik and Tchitcherin were watched most anxiously last week. In England it was felt that the understandings known to have been arrived at by British agents with the Shah of Persia would prove a bulwark in that quarter.
"T. and T.," as Britons made haste to nickname MM. Tewfik and Tchitcherin are among the last surviving exponents of "classical diplomacy. " Minister Tchitcherin is a pre-War Tsarol diplomatic underling who has flowered into a notable intrigant in the Bolshevist hothouse. Minister Tewfik is that famed fisher in troubled waters who almost succeeded in embroiling the League of Nations, the World Court and the principal Powers in an inextricable tangle over the issue of Mosul (TIME, Sept. 28, 1925). When two such "classic diplomats" foregather with their secretaries the cause of their journeying to a tryst on the shore of the inhospitable Black Sea may be assumed to be of moment.
Eastern Reverberations. The Soviet envoys to China and Japan, MM. Karakhan and Kopf, have been recently recalled to Moscow, to appraise M. Tchitcherin of the moves on the Far Eastern chessboard. It has been widely rumored that the Soviet program of Communist subversion in China will be altered to a policy of attempted co-operation with the first Chinese government which shall emerge strong enough to contract an alliance. As if to forecast this turning of China from Western . Europe to Russia, the present unstable Peking Government recently abrogated the ChinoBelgian trade treaty of 1865.* These developments, admittedly straws bending before changing winds, gave pause to the war prophets last week.
Mediterranean Rumblings. Setting aside the distant prospect of a Pan-Asian League there loomed the immediate probability that the "T. and T." conference will serve as a counter blast to the understandings arrived at between British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain and Premier Mussolini, at their recent meeting (TIME, Oct. 11).
Premier Mussolini looks with a jealous eye at certain portions of the Turkish coast, and is likely to pass from longing to action, if the British Lion has been persuaded into noninterference. An understanding between Soviet Russia and Turkey, judiciously noised in Europe, might well halt the Dictator, no fool.