The Quid Without the Quo

As both Houses of Congress moved toward an overwhelming vote against his position on the war in Viet Nam, Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, characteristically seized the occasion to advocate a new and radical departure from U.S. strategy. What Fulbright proposed last week was a grand design to settle the future of Southeast Asia by means of a solemn accord with Communist China to neutralize the entire area. "Unless," he said, "we are prepared to fight a general war to eliminate the effects of Chinese power in all of Southeast Asia, we have no alternative but to seek a general accommodation." He recommended that "we indicate to the Chinese that we are prepared to remove American military power not only from Viet Nam but from all of Southeast Asia in return for a similar prohibition on her part."

Fulbright even argued that the presence of U.S. troops in Viet Nam is comparable to the secret Soviet buildup of intercontinental ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962. Total withdrawal of U.S. troops over the years would be desirable, he contended, because "our presence itself is the principal reason for much of the activity, the insurgency, the energy and the willingness of the enemy to sacrifice."

Casualties. Fulbright's proposal for a U.S. retreat in Asia came at a time when Hanoi and Peking have been suffering notable reverses. Allied ground forces have dug out scores of previously impenetrable Viet Cong sanctuaries in South Viet Nam. And week by week, troopship by troopship, the best-trained soldiers America has ever fielded are joining battlewise U.S. combat forces in Viet Nam. Last week Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced that U.S. forces in Asia would soon total 235,000--an increase of 30,000 in less than a month. In the heaviest raids over the North to date, U.S. Navy and Air Force supersonic fighter-bombers last week cut a major railroad line 40 miles--less than two minutes' flying time--from the Red Chinese border.

During the past four months, 16,000 Communist troops have been killed in battle (v. 4,000 South Vietnamese and 1,500 U.S. dead). Viet Cong defections have increased to an unprecedented rate of 80 a day. So low is the guerrillas' morale that Tien Phong, the South Vietnamese Reds' party journal, suggested recently (see THE WORLD) that Viet Cong leaders may not be able to afford to concentrate only on battleground activities and might better focus on the "political struggle movement."

"Reversals." Washington Sinologists also note an increasingly defensive tone in official Red Chinese publications. One reason: from Algeria, where Ben Bella was deposed in June, to Ghana, where Nkrumah was ousted last month, China's sphere of international influence has seriously diminished. As Peking's fond hopes of impending victory in Viet Nam have gone glimmering, China's principal party organ, People's Daily (Jen Min Jih Pao) has had to inject more and more caution about the "upheavals" and "reversals" facing the Communists. "Like a seagull flying in a rainstorm," the paper exhorted last week, "Marxists dare to face boldly the turbulence in the current world."

If neutralization is indeed to prove the ultimate formula for Southeast Asia, the Johnson Administration was not notably eager to embrace it yet. Nor was Peking, which has yet to give any shred of evidence that it is willing to relinquish its ambitions to foment "wars of liberation" throughout Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. Even apart from its evangelistic mission to win the world for Communism, neutralism seems unlikely to appeal to the aging hierarchy in Peking, which seems more than ever convinced that it needs more rather than less militancy to sustain its own revolutionary mystique at home. In any case, diplomacy is based on the practical possibility of a quid pro quo. The quid in Fulbright's proposal is that the U.S. would eventually pull out its troops. The quo? Peking can offer none, in a direct sense, since it has no Chinese troops stationed in Southeast Asia and thus can claim that it has no divisions to withdraw.

Beyond this, there is only the knowledge that until now, Peking has made clear that it does not accept neutrality as anything but opportunity.

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