On a Rutted Road

As the U.S. moves through the battlefields of the cold war, it has three main roads to choose from. One is the high, hard-surfaced speedway to war; another is the low, crawling path to appeasement. In between lies the third--a rutted, twisting route, shrouded here by patches of fog, mined there by enemy booby traps. Last week, amid cries from critics who wanted to travel either the high road or the low, Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles churned resolutely along the center route. At times, it was difficult to see where they were going, but it was clear that, by way of deterrence and diplomacy, they hoped eventually to arrive at peace.

In Europe the pacts to rearm West Germany as part of the West's defense against Communism were at last in effect. Reacting almost desperately to that fact, the Soviet Union was anxiously seeking a settlement in Austria. In Asia, at Bandung, the prime minister of Asian Communism, China's Chou Enlai, had encountered angry and unexpected opposition from fellow Asians. As a result, he had been forced to revise his tactics.

But at times the fog closed in or a booby trap exploded. With an election approaching in Great Britain, the Conservative Party adopted a campaign tone that sounded as though it would give the Communists everything they wanted in the Far East. In Viet Nam the instability of the new U.S.-supported government and the resulting civil strife was a critical problem (see FOREIGN NEWS). In the Formosa Strait there lay the danger of possibly blundering onto the low road of appeasement.

Clearly, President Eisenhower had decided that the U.S. would not sound more belligerent than the Communists. If the Chinese Reds want to talk about a ceasefire in the Formosa Strait, then the U.S. will talk. The President would not demand that the Chinese Nationalists participate in all such discussions.

The U.S. determination to respond to peace talk with peace talk was carefully explained to Nationalist China's Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa last week by Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson and J.C.S. Chief Arthur Radford, who at the same time assured Chiang that the U.S. intends to augment the U.S. Air Force strength now based upon Formosa.

Chiang, who believes no accommodation with the Chinese Communists is possible, received with Oriental calm the explanation of the U.S. peace-talk policy. He is confident that the Communists do not want peace and that eventually the U.S. will discover that honorable accommodation is impossible. He does not approve of the present U.S. line, but, since he cannot change it, he is not disposed to argue with it.

On a world basis, all this added up to net progress for the U.S. and its allies. The Reds still had the initiative in the Formosa Strait--it was they who could start a war or grab territory--but the U.S. was parrying their diplomatic thrusts. For the moment, the anti-Communist feeling shown at Bandung was the big, new fact in Asia. And the recent European success of the anti-Communist forces far outbalanced all Red Asian gains of 1955.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.