"If I Could Visualize . . ."

Last month, after publicly acknowledging the disaster of U.S. policy in China, Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup to sit down and think up a new U.S. policy for Asia. By last week, Jessup and his two associates (Colgate University President Everett Case and Rockefeller Foundation's ex-President Raymond Fosdick) had the beginnings of a plan cautiously in mind. Some of it was sound, some highly dangerous to the U.S. position in the world. The committee's thinking tended toward this pattern:

P: Nothing can be done to help the Nationalist government of China, just as (the State Department still insisted) nothing could have been done in the past. The $75 million for anti-Communist resistance in China, which Congress is virtually forcing on the State Department, will be reluctantly accepted.

P: For other anti-Communist governments in Southeast Asia--in French Indo-China, Siam and Burma--the U.S. should provide moral, economic and Greek-type military aid against Communist pressure.

P: The anchor of the new U.S. policy should be India. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (who will arrive in Washington on Oct. 11 for conferences with U.S. leaders) must be persuaded to give up his dream of India as a neutral "third force" between Western democracy and world Communism.

P: Despite the argument of some State Department Far Eastern experts--supported by the British Foreign Office--that the new Chinese Communist regime (see FOREIGN NEWS) should be recognized, the Jessup committee wants to go slow on recognition.

The basic and highly dubious premise behind the tentative program is that Red China will not seriously threaten U.S. interests during this generation. In that period, the Jessup committee holds optimistically, there may be an overall settlement with world Communism. Meantime, it is necessary to weave an anti-Communist belt around China. An alarming fact which became known last week is that this belt will apparently not include the rich, strategic island of Formosa, where Nationalist China is preparing a last stand. State has written off the island because of its inefficient and locally unpopular Chinese Nationalist administration; the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, headed by such Europe-wise generals as Omar Bradley and J. Lawton Collins, have decided that Formosa is of no strategic importance to American security, although the island, in Red hands, would breach the U.S. security line running from Japan southward to the Philippines (see map).

U.S. military strength in Asia is at a postwar low. The last U.S. troops have pulled out of Korea and the Philippines. General Douglas MacArthur has four divisions and seven air units in Japan, one regiment on Okinawa. The Navy has two bases in the Philippines and two in Japan. Its combat strength is limited to two carriers in the Pacific (in contrast, it has six carriers in the Atlantic and Mediterranean). Altogether, the Air Force has nine groups in the Far East.

A high U.S. officer last week summed up dominant Pentagon feeling in a statement which, if embodied in official U.S. policy, may prove more dangerous to U.S. security than Russia's possession of the atom bomb. Said he:

"If I could visualize hordes of Communist-trained Chinese troops swarming across Siberia to tear down Western civilization, I'd get excited. But I can't see it. It's not in the nature of the Chinaman to be a Communist. Moscow can't organize China for Communism, even if Moscow tries its damndest."

If the Kremlin could visualize that kind of military thinking going on in Washington, Russia's masters might be even happier over their progress in China than they are right now.

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