Nation: After Viet Nam

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While President Nixon was spreading the gospel of disengagement in Southeast Asia, Secretary of State William Rogers was deep in talks with the Japanese. Those discussions turned out to be not only diplomatically difficult but physically dangerous. A Japanese anarchist, Shigeji Hamaoka, 21, went at Rogers with a dull paint scraper and missed. Hamaoka's apparent motive: to protest the supposed injustice that Rogers was in Tokyo to discuss—continued U.S. occupation of Okinawa. The island was captured in 1945, and has since become the largest U.S. military base off the Asian mainland.

The generally pro-American government of Premier Eisaku Sato wants Okinawa to revert to Japanese control; U.S. Presidents from Eisenhower on have promised that someday it will. When that happens, however, the U.S. armory would become subject to the same conditions that now apply to American bases in Japan: no nuclear weapons under any circumstances, and no introduction of new weaponry or dispatch of U.S. forces to combat from Japanese stations without prior consultations.

Dovetail. Sato's government is saying, in effect, that it will allow an unwritten exception to these restrictions if the U.S. formally agrees to reversion for Okinawa; his regime, Sato feels, must win control of the island in order to stay in power and keep anti-American elements from gaining strength. Rogers resisted this carrot-and-stick argument; the U.S. wants no strings on its Okinawa-based forces. Japanese Foreign Minister Kiichi Aichi called Rogers' attitude "severe."

In fact, the diplomatic battle Rogers was righting is likely to become increasingly unimportant. Outside Viet Nam, where a second round of U.S. troop withdrawals already seems imminent, the American garrisons on the periphery of East Asia could be substantially reduced over the next few years. Here Nixon's goals abroad dovetail with his attempt at home to check federal spending. The Pentagon is seeking ways to reduce the overall size of the armed services. Large overseas ground forces seem the likeliest target for either disbandment or withdrawal to bases like Hawaii.

Would U.S. influence recede with the infantry? Not necessarily. Some air and sea forces would doubtless remain in place, along with the dollar. In a recent essay, Edwin Reischauer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, wrote: "We should do our best, through economic and technological aid, to assist [Asians] in their long-range development. There is no reason to believe that neoimperialists, whether they be international Communists or Chinese, can dominate other Asian nations any more successfully than we, the Japanese or the French."