THE NATION: New Heart for an Old War

• Share

The Geneva Conference loomed up on the world calendar, and with it loomed a kind of complex danger that had never before confronted the U.S. in its battle against Communist aggression. Beginning April 26. Britain, France and the U.S. are to sit down with Russia and Communist China to negotiate on Korea and Indo-China. In its own right, Indo-China is an increasingly dangerous war because the Communists are now fortified with the weapons and military commanders turned loose by the Korean armistice.

But Geneva's threat has another dimension: Indo-China is essential to anti-Communist defenses in Asia, but IndoChina is technically France's war, and France, tired of almost eight years of fighting, is determined to negotiate some kind of a settlement.

United Action. To Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, this situation demanded double-barreled action. First, the U.S. had to make up its own mind where it stood on Indo-China. (Only last February President Eisenhower had said that involvement in Indo-China would be the greatest kind of tragedy.) Within the fortnight, Dulles clarified the U.S. position in a quick series of speeches and statements: the U.S. could not countenance the loss of Indo-China, and was prepared to apply its doctrine of instant retaliation to Communist China if Peking should take a direct hand in the war.

Dulles took the second course last week. He ripped the Indo-China war out of the obsolete context of "France's war" and defined it for what it has really become: a threat to the security of all free nations in the Pacific area. Publicly, he called for "united action" to stop any further Communist aggression. Privately, U.S. diplomats went to work on Britain, France, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand and Siam to get them to join—before Geneva—in a pledge to oppose any new Communist advances.

A Concert of Readiness. At his midweek press conference, President Eisenhower dispelled any doubts about his own reluctance to aid Indo-China, and threw his weight behind the Dulles definition.

Indo-China, said he, is the kind of thing that must not be handled by one nation trying to act alone. We must have a concert of opinion, he said, and a concert of readiness to react in whatever way is necessary. You had a row of dominoes set up, said Ike, and you knocked over the first one, and what would happen to the last one was the certainty that it would go over very quickly.

The fall of Indo-China, he continued, would knock over Burma, then Siam, then the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia. This, in effect, would tumble the row of island defenses consisting of Japan, Formosa and the Philippines. To the south, it then threatened Australia and New Zealand. So, said the President, the possible consequences of the loss were just incalculable to the free world.