After Saigon, Peking Ahead

WASHINGTON was relieved. The embarrassing one-sided presidential election in South Viet Nam was finally over. Whatever the condition of democracy in that battered land, President Nguyen Van Thieu, the man whom the U.S. considers the best bet for stability, seemed firmly in charge. The Nixon Administration was only too eager to turn its attention from Saigon's problems to other more portentous matters: post-freeze economic plans and the return of National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to Peking late this month to make final arrangements for Richard Nixon's visit to that long-forbidden city.

"Don't Tell Me." Indeed, the Administration has fallen into the habit of talking as though the war in Viet Nam were already over. Nixon is fond of repeating, almost casually, the claim that "we are ending the longest war in the history of the U.S." Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird not long ago startled top aides at the outset of his weekly military briefing by ordering: "Don't tell me about Viet Nam now. I don't want to hear about it until the end." Viet Nam always used to be first on his agenda. Now U.S. officials seem confident that the South Vietnamese military forces can withstand Communist pressure as U.S. troop levels decline. They even speak wistfully of how military victory might have been within reach.

Unfortunately, Thieu's hig-handed re-election tactics botched the Administration's plan for a graceful exit from Viet Nam. Nixon had hoped to be able to point to the election as evidence that democracy is taking hold in South Viet Nam. Now, almost no one in Washington believes Saigon's figures on either the high voter turnout (87.7%) or Thieu's vote of confidence (94.3%). Nixon merely noted that "the road toward democracy and contested elections is a long and hard one." Almost apologetically, he argued that Thieu's unchallenged victory was no reason to cut off U.S. aid, since two-thirds of the 91 nations now getting U.S. funds also show little taste for political competition.

Sigh of Relief. However disappointed he is in the Saigon election charade, Nixon is apparently not going to change course. In November he is expected to announce a stepped-up withdrawal rate that will bring the U.S. involvement down from 213,900 troops now present to a residual force of about 40,000 by next spring. The men who remain will be mostly logistical troops and Air Force personnel. At that level, Administration leaders contend, the war will no longer be a big issue in U.S. politics. "No one will get worked up about it any more," argues one State Department official. "Everyone will just sigh with relief that we got out." The Administration's confidence that the war is no longer much of a problem politically has been reinforced by the waning influence of congressional doves.

Easy Up, Hard Down. The temptation to link Nixon's Peking trip to the possibility of a negotiated settlement in Viet Nam is being deliberately discouraged by Washington officials. It would be naive, they say, to expect Chinese Premier Chou En-lai to exert pressure on Hanoi to make concessions to the U.S. By merely agreeing to sit down with Nixon while the U.S. is involved in battle with Communist forces, Chou is straining China's relations with North Viet Nam. Any pressure from Peking might cause Hanoi to turn to Moscow for more help in its long struggle to dominate South Viet Nam.

Still unanswered in all of the speculation over the Peking trip is precisely what the U.S. can expect to gain from a Chou-Nixon meeting. The Administration modestly insists that it seeks only a "normalization of relations" between the two powers. This presumably would include exchanges of trade missions, scholars and journalists, plus some means of regular government-to-government communication, short of formal diplomatic recognition. That package in itself would be a significant breakthrough after a quarter-century of virtual noncommunication. Yet Nixon has long warned that summitry is a dubious tactic unless the expectations it usually creates can be fulfilled. He undoubtedly would agree with a Chinese saying that can apply to political as well as geographical peaks: "Easy to climb up, hard to get down."

So suspicion persists that Nixon may have something more specific in mind than merely enhancing his re-election prospects with the trip's inevitable harvest of publicity. One remote chance is that Nixon might try to coax China into joining a multinational conference on easing tensions throughout Southeast Asia, including Laos and Cambodia as well as Viet Nam. That would permit the U.S. to leave Viet Nam with less of an implication that it was forced out, or was deserting any of its Asian allies. However, Hanoi is a block to such an arrangement; it has repeatedly refused to consider any such regional negotiations. Other, even more distant possibilities include the signing of a non-aggression pact between Washington and Peking, or an agreement by both powers to renounce the use of force in any dispute in Asia. Either kind of agreement would seem to offer Peking no particular advantage and would tie its hands militarily in its avowed determination to regain control of Taiwan. Moreover, either would be taken as an unnecessarily friendly gesture toward the U.S. by Peking's allies in Hanoi and North Korea--and Peking has no desire to give the U.S.S.R. any greater influence in those two nations along its own borders.

Fatal Blow. There are other accommodations that can more reasonably be expected to result from Nixon's trip. For one thing, longstanding friction between the U.S. and China over the status of Taiwan could be eased. By the time Chou and Nixon meet, the U.N. controversy over whether to admit Peking at the expense of ousting Taipei will probably have been settled. Last week the U.S. gave the appearance of fighting desperately to keep Taiwan from being excluded. Secretary of State William Rogers even warned some delegates that Congress might cut off U.S. financial support of the U.N. if the vote goes against Taiwan. Given the U.N.'s frail financial structure, such a blow could prove fatal. Yet other delegates say that the U.S. is not serious about its pro-Taiwan stand. They contend that Kissinger's return to Peking at about the time of the U.N. vote makes the U.S. devotion to Taipei seem unconvincing.

Once the U.N. matter is out of the way, Nixon could assure Chou that the U.S. recognizes the indivisibility of China and considers the Peking-Taipei struggle an internal Chinese issue. There are limits to how far Nixon can go, however. The U.S. can hardly be expected to renounce its defense treaty with Taiwan, although it might gradually reduce its military support to Chiang if the mainland Chinese do not push the matter too hard or too fast. Nixon is also expected to try to allay Peking's fear that the U.S. might encourage a Soviet nuclear strike against China or in any way abet a resurgence of militarism in Japan.

Unusual Aside. At a time of Nixonian surprises and the continuing confusion in China (see THE WORLD), the outcome of Sino-American summitry remains difficult to predict. Secretary of State William Rogers and Kissinger are both downplaying expectations, while the President, oddly enough, keeps them alive. In an unusual aside during his brief television talk on the economy, Nixon declared that 1972 "can be a year in which historic events will take place on the international scene, events that could affect the peace of the world in the next generation, even in the next century." His listeners could not be blamed if they thought that his sweeping statement referred less to international monetary matters than to Nixon's Peking trip, which now seems likely to occur some time around New Year's Day of 1972.

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