New Heart for an Old War

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.

"It Is War." The new definition made many things clearer to many people. Washington sensed that war might be close, but it was in less of a flap than it was in the weeks when Indo-China was being argued on France's old terms. Democrats in the Senate listened sympathetically while Massachusetts' Democratic John Kennedy declared: "It is important that the Senate and the American people demonstrate their endorsement of Mr. Dulles' objectives, despite our difficulty in ascertaining the full significance of [his] key phrases." What was Kennedy's understanding of "united action?" It means, he said, that, if necessary, "the U.S. will take the ultimate step." "And what is that?" asked Montana's Democrat Mike Mansfield. Replied Kennedy calmly: "It is war."

Only Siam responded promptly to the State Department's invitation to a joint statement. But there was new debate and soul-searching in all the free countries of the world. The Vietnamese government itself was strengthened when an important bloc of local fence-sitters decided to support the fight against Ho Chi Minh. In France, the anti-Communists spoke up more boldly. For the first time the French, noting that the Chinese Communists were already providing artillery and antiaircraft guns at besieged Dienbienphu, were saying that the war had entered a new phase and might be "internationalized," if necessary, after Geneva. Officially, however, both the French and British let it be known that they could not join in a warning to Peking until after they had tested out Communist intentions at Geneva.

Bits of Freedom. To Dulles, this official reply missed the point. At week's end he packed his bags again, clapped on his Homburg, and flew off to London and Paris to discuss, as he put it, "some of the real problems involved in creating the obviously desirable united front." As he departed, he issued a statement which summed up his thinking with a forcefulness that would be hard for reasonable free men to resist. Said he: "This Government believes that if all the free people who are threatened now unite against the threat, it can be ended. The Communist bloc, with its vast resources, can win success by overwhelming, one by one, small bits of freedom. But it is different if we unite. Our purpose is not to extend the fighting, but to end the fighting. Our purpose is not to prevent a peaceful settlement to the forthcoming Geneva Conference, but to create the unity of free wills needed to assure a peaceful settlement which will, in fact, preserve the vital interests of us all."

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