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There came a barrage of objections. Sweden's Foreign Minister Osten Unden, who had been a member of the Menzies mission, urged another attempt to negotiate directly with Nasser. Nasser had offered to renew the guarantees of the 1888 Convention, he pointed out, and offered to have an international body fix tolls. Spain, too, urged "careful study'' of Nasser's offer. Italy's Gaetano Martino flatly contested the statement of Britain's Selwyn Lloyd that the 1888 Convention gave users the right to run ships through the canal with their own pilots. "This is juridically not exact," he said, and offered a resolution designed to limit the function of the users' association to negotiation with Nasser. Bluntest was Pakistan. The users' association, said new Foreign Minister Malik Firoz Khan Noon, sounded like "an imposed settlement," and, he declared, Pakistan "cannot associate itself with this proposal."
No Coercion. By its first afternoon the conference was in acute peril of bogging down in irresolution. Dulles recognized the crisis. To reassure the nervous and encourage the wary, Dulles softened the plan still further. There was no intention to coerce Nasser, he said. "Obviously, if Egypt makes it obligatory to use only pilots that are chosen and assigned to it, then I do not see that pilots of the association would practically have very much to do, and that part of the plan would have collapsed." The U.S., even if it wanted to, had no legal power to keep U.S. ships from using Egyptian pilots. As for taking the case to the U.N., as many were urging, Dulles argued that the users' association could best provide "the mechanism for a kind of provisional solution which is precisely the kind the U.N. could seize hold of." It could serve as a "bargaining body vis-a-vis Egypt."
Then he struck at the crux. It was not enough in these times simply to avoid trouble, to get past a crisis. In an extemporaneous speech he pointed out movingly that if the use of force was to be forsworn, nations must join in seeking solutions that are just, as well as peaceful (see box).
The delegates were impressed. Said Sweden's Unden: "I have noted with satisfaction that the proposal has changed considerably since it was presented." But it took another long day of maneuvering until, on the third day, the rangy, loose-limbed skeleton of the Suez Canal Users' Association (S.C.U.A.) was agreed upon. Its declared purpose was "to facilitate . . . a final or provisional solution," and to "seek the cooperation of the competent Egyptian authorities," and "deal with such problems which would arise if the traffic through the canal were to diminish or cease." Recourse would be had to the U.N. "whenever it seems that this would facilitate a settlement." Its membership was opened to the 18 user nations plus any other nation which has 1,000,000 net tons of shipping passing through the canal yearly or uses it for 50% of its total foreign trade (a provision designed to exclude Russia). It will also "study forthwith means that may render it feasible to reduce dependence on the canal." This would include construction of new oil lines and wider use of large tankers.