INDO-CHINA: The New Frontier

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The U.S. now has a new frontier and a new ally in the cold war. The place is Indo-China, a Southeast Asian jungle, mountain and delta land that includes the Republic of Viet Nam and the smaller neighboring Kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia, all parts of the French Union.

For more than three years this land, in prewar times the rich French colony of Indo-China, has been suffering, on a lesser scale, the ruinous kind of civil war which won China for Communism. The Mao Tse-tung of the Indo-Chinese is a frail, but enduring comrade, who looks like a shriveled wizard; his nom de guerre is Ho Chi Minh (or One Who Shines). Chiang Kai-shek has no counterpart in Indo-China. The initial brunt of the Red attack has been borne by French soldiers. Meanwhile, the job of rallying native anti-Communist forces falls mainly on the meaty shoulders of the Emperor Bao Dai (or Guardian of Greatness), who now bears the official title of Chief of State of Viet Nam.

While the dust of the Chinese civil war was settling before the bemused eyes of the State Department, the U.S. paid scant attention to the Indo-Chinese struggle. It seemed largely a local affair between the French and their subjects. Since the dust has settled in China, Asia's Communism is thrusting southward. Indo-China stands first on the path to Singapore, Manila and the Indies (see map).

Last January, led by Peking and Moscow, the world's Communist bloc recognized Ho Chi Minh's "Democratic Republic." It was more than the Kremlin had ever done for the Communist rebels of Greece. Over the past several weeks, arms and other supplies were reported passing from Russia and China to the comrades in Indo-China. The stakes in Southeast Asia were big—as big as the global struggle between Communism and freedom.

A fortnight ago in Paris, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson drew a line in the dust that has so long beclouded U.S. diplomacy. He implicitly recognized that the war in Indo-China is no local shooting match. He pledged U.S. military and economic aid to the French and Vietnamese. The U.S. thus picked up the Russian gauntlet.

What kind of frontier and what kind of ally had history chosen for the U.S.?

A Golden Asset. Unlike China, where U.S. traders and missionaries began a fruitful acquaintance more than a century ago, Indo-China has had little contact with Americans, either commercial, cultural or diplomatic.* The last comprehensive U.S. book on the country was published in 1937. Among other things, its author observed: "IndoChina lies too far off the main scene of action to play any but a secondary role in the Pacific drama."

In the pre-French past, most of Indo-China had been conquered by the Chinese, who had left their culture indelibly behind.† Through the last half of the 19th. Century, the French converted Indo-China into a tight, profitable colonial monopoly. They explored its fever-laden jungles, lofty ranges, great river valleys. They discovered its antiquities, including the majestic loth Century towers of Angkor Wat in northern Cambodia. They wrote about its mandarins, its Buddhist temples and Confucian family life.