FOREIGN RELATIONS: What We Are Trying to Do

• Share

No issue was ever settled by amilitary armistice; it is what is done after the armistice that counts. At the time of the Korean truce-signing, Illinois Senator Paul Douglas remarked wryly that if the truce "had been put through by Truman and Acheson, there would have been cries throughout the country to impeach them." Douglas was probably correct, but not in the sense that he intended. The U.S. had accepted a Korean armistice because it trusted Dwight Eisenhower to make the most of the uneasy peace to work out a firm approach to Communism in Asia—something that Truman and Acheson had never been able to do.

There is increasing evidence that the Eisenhower Administration is working out just such an approach, with an eye to the concrete details. Last week, at the Governors' Conference in Seattle, the President had some things to say about the continuing goals of U.S. policy in Asia, now that the armistice has been signed. Immediate object: the defense of Indo-China.

Line Blocked. Said the President: "The last great population remaining in Asia that has not become dominated by the Kremlin, of course, is the subcontinent of India [and] Pakistan . . . Now let us assume that we lose Indo-China. If IndoChina goes, several things happen right away. The [Malay] Peninsula, the last little bit of land hanging on down there [see map^. would be scarcely defensible. The tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming, and all India would be outflanked. Burma would be in no position for defense.''

Noting the rise of Communist influence in Iran, on India's other flank, Eisenhower continued: "All of that position around there is very ominous to the U.S., because, if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see. somewhere along the line, this must be blocked and it must be blocked now. and that's what we are trying to do."

Fresh from his trip out on the line in Asia, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles flew home this week, bringing the results of his conferences with Syngman Rhee: a hard and fast treaty of alliance between the U.S. and the Republic of South Korea, which assures the Koreans of U.S. military protection, without binding the U.S. to support any vagaries of Rhee's foreign policy. Also, with a $1 billion aid program, Dulles agreed to build up ravaged South Korea into "an Asian show window of democracy.'" Clearly, the U.S. has firmly planted the flag of freedom on the coast of Asia.

Irritation Removed. On his swing back through Tokyo, Dulles prodded the Japanese to get them to step up their rearmament for defense. But he also made a striking political concession to Japan, at a time when this sensitive country, whose big industry holds Asia's balance of power, is worried about its economic future and is being sedulously wooed by Russia and Communist China. The return of the Amami Oshima archipelago to Japanese rule, after eight years of U.S. occupation, removes a major source of Japanese irritation with the U.S., and puts some uncomfortable pressure on the Russians to do likewise with the extensive Japanese real estate (e.g., the Kuril Islands) they hold in the north.