FOREIGN RELATIONS: Traveler's Tale

Philip Jessup, who went to the Far East in December by slow boat, had hurriedly flown home. The U.S.'s long-nosed, soft-eyed roving ambassador had traveled 26,000 miles, looked in on a dozen Asiatic countries. He had nothing to say about his trip for publication. But last week, by obvious coincidence, the newspapers car ried reports about the Far East emanating from a "well-traveled source."

What the unnamed "traveler" reported was that south and east Asia, populated by more than one-fourth of the people in the world, was ripe for a Communist har vesting unless the U.S. bestirred itself.

In Korea, Indo-China, Malaya and Burma, the traveler said, the cold war was "hot." Mao Tse-tung's Peking government was using Hitler's technique—threatening reprisals against relatives in China unless Chinese in other Asiatic countries showed their loyalty to the Reds. The massing of Red troops along Asiatic borders was often enough to paralyze any incipient anti-Communist policy. Transplanted Chinese populations, Chinese-language newspapers, even wealthy Chinese were going over to Communism in wholesale lots.

The Weak Sisters. The Asiatic countries themselves—most of them "weak sisters"—showed little interest in democracy.

Theirs was a "bandwagon kind of thinking.". Caught between East & West, they were preoccupied with one neck-saving question: "Who's going to win?"

In Formosa, the traveler reported, he had found Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government still riddled with the same old feuds and mutual distrusts. He had found the U.S.-backed government of Southern Korea dictatorial and incompetent; Indonesia, harboring 2,000,000 Chinese, threatened by inflation, pervaded by a sense of hopelessness; the Philippines in economic difficulties, harassed by Red guerrillas.

He had found India and Pakistan, suspicious of the U.S., facing each other with explosive hate. If war broke out there, "the fat would be in the fire." Burma, he found, lived in fear of what could happen on her frontier zone. Siam (see cover), with 3,000,000 Chinese, was "more like a willow than an oak."

The Loud Ties. The key spot and the most dangerous one was Indo-China. On its northern border stood Mao Tse-tung's troops, giving encouragement to the guer rilla chief, Ho Chi Minh. Indo-China was coveted by the Reds not alone for its strategic advantage. Mao Tse-tung, faced with famine at home, had his eyes on IndoChina's spreading fields of rice. But in Indo-China, the traveler thought, there was also some cause for optimism. Emperor Bao Dai, despite his passion for "sports coats and loud neckties," was intelligent and an energetic leader. So far, with the aid of 130,000 French troops, he had forestalled internal collapse.