Our Failure in Asia

...We have shunned defining an American guilt, while casting about for likely scapegoats in the forms of Communists and addle-brained "liberals" of World War II vintage, or else in trying to wish our problems away...

...OUR FAILURE IN ASIA America has been unable to inspire Asia, primarily because we still count on money and armaments instead of political policies keyed to Asia's own needs By L. Edward Shuck Jr...

...It has been confusing to Americans, who tend to view themselves as innocent bystanders...

...The ostrich tendency which accompanies the denial of guilt was well emphasized last month when Vice President Nixon, after a few days in Asia, "reported" to the nation that Communism was on the run there...

...It may be that the luxury and security in which Americans thrive creates an unbridgeable chasm between America and an Asia living at marginal and subsistence levels...

...This feeling was strengthened by the appointment of Harold E. Stassen, a long and often bitter foe of British democratic socialism, as administrator of American foreign-aid programs...

...The most important single fact in Asia during the past nine years has been America's Fall from Glory...

...L. Edward Shuck Jr...

...Our "solution" continues to be the shoring up of a fading French military and political machine...

...The root of error is America's conviction that Communism, and the threat it poses to the continuity and sanity of Western social structures, is primarily a materialistic problem that can be overcome by materialistic means...

...The Communists have monopolized the idealistic slogans and made effective use of clich?s which win the people in any fight: land redistribution, public ownership and management of formerly "imperialist"-controlled sections of the local economy, equality of racial status, uprooting of parasitic upper classes, ending of foreign domination and, to top these off, "peace...

...Nor can it be termed a U.S...

...They visualize highly competitive capitalist economies, socially fragmented, which will become economic satellites of the United States...

...This bloody, clawing struggle for survival is providing the weird spectacle of supposedly materialistic Stalinists winning with the tools of idealism and utopianism while Americans fight with materialist tools...

...Our aid is assumed to be according to a capitalist pattern, relevant only in a society forcing itself to become overly-Westernized...

...True, they forget, or have never heard of, the fate of the Kremlin's satellites...

...This stems from a basic error on the part of the humanistic West...

...Asians fear that American influence means more foreign concessions and dependence upon foreign manufacturing plants and foreign loans...

...it has little relation to national boundaries or terrain held by this or that division of troops...

...our aid since World War II has been magnificent...

...The political jousting during the past three years in Korea—since the truce negotiations first started —epitomizes the impact of America on Asia...

...Under the New Deal, the Fair Deal and, lately, the Republican Re-Deal, America's leadership has been turned or blunted by Communists, by Communist-infiltrated nationalists and by American diplomatic ineptness...

...The year 1954, like the nine before it, promises to be marked by diplomatic setbacks in Asia, by unexploited opportunities, and by the continued inability of American spokesmen to reach the mind and heart of Asia...

...We may thus be saying: "Frankly, we do not know what to do except hope that the Communist-led conspiracies will wear themselves out...

...But we hardly have the time to await the development of political sophistication in Asia...

...The growth in Communist power is not the result of American failure to send Asia enough tractors, fertilizer, technicians or guns...

...Although a continuous series of vague chants against "godless materialism" emanates from American rostrums, our Government's solution for Asia's problems consists entirely of materialist devices—and long, very long-run devices at that...

...To encourage Red Chinese leadership in Asia, and to undermine the relatively few sworn enemies of Chinese Communism, would be carrying to tragic extremes the proof of our complete lack of understanding either of Asians or of the Chinese Communists...

...Perhaps the conclusion suggested by President Eisenhower's State of the Union message—that the answer for Asia is to kill Communist-led troops in Indo-China and elsewhere—is a long-overdue admission of our political failure...

...In America, we are inclined to equate publicly supervised capitalism with freedom and plenty...

...From the wording of the President's State of the Union message, we can only conclude that the American Government has not been able to produce any leadership for the Indo-Chinese enigma after nine long years...

...Rising Asian leaders—young, idealistic and not wedded to the traditional owning class—look to publicly-controlled ventures to provide blueprints and badly-needed capitalization for the desired industrialization...

...For years, we have watched reporters journey from one luxurious American mission in Asia to another to accept the entertainment of local American officials and of a few well-chosen Asian politicians...

...The Communists exploit the various negotiations on Korea as worldwide propaganda material, while we passively await the next "surprising" move by the Communists...

...We do not have any immediate plan that can check the spread of Communism, or prevent the Communists from harnessing all the dissatisfaction of Asia to their bid for political power...

...When false advice is steadily returned and used to soothe the average poorly-informed, Europe-minded American, the situation becomes doubly dangerous...

...Moreover, Asians feel they know something of Western capitalism, while they only vaguely imagine, and in brightly colored imagery at that, the organization of society along Leninist-Stalinist lines...

...The Korean truce, subsequent peace negotiations and the war itself have marked a Communist ideological triumph...

...They are accustomed to paternalism, not only from experience with colonial regimes, but also from their own national experiences and needs...

...Nevertheless, it would be consistent with the policy of having no policy...

...To Asia, the United States is the very source and embodiment of materialism and material power...

...And this is a political failure on our part...

...Perhaps no greater political defeat has been inflicted upon a super-great power in so short a time...

...It will come from the rigid control of national assets and their careful exchange for foreign credits and currency, which will then be shepherded by a "socialist"-minded local government...

...But most of the world's peoples equate capitalism with poverty for the many and opulence for the few...

...Asia needs capital, and if Asian leaders can help it the capital will not come from private Western investors demanding special treatment and special powers...

...By limiting our thoughts to logistics and tactical problems, rather than the conflicts going on within men's minds and souls, we can provide nothing but a temporary stopgap...

...Shuck is now associated with Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa...

...Perhaps the tide of revolution cannot be led and directed by a nation so thoroughly joined with the old order again which the Asian revolt is directed...

...This suggestion seems credible in the light of growing rumors that some in the Administration are thinking vaguely of trying to make friends with the Chinese Communists in order to drive a wedge between Russia and China...

...The two most explosive spots in East Asia are, of course, Indo-China and Korea...

...diplomatic triumph that those East Asian governments which are politically responsible to their people —again, excepting the Philippines—grow progressively more nationalistic and emotionally aloof from the West...

...Perhaps the fumbling of the past few years in Asia is the practical result of a too-inflexible social philosophy...

...Essentially, our foreign-aid programs are long-range and they are logically sound—provided we have two or three generations to work them out...

...Asians, with rare exceptions—and particularly is this true of South and Southeast Asians—regard public ownership, sponsorship and control of the economic plant as a natural and inevitable law of society...

...Each deceitful outburst from the enemy's propaganda machine evokes a halting, confused American response...

...In an Asia seething with social revolt, psychotically jealous and envious of the material superiority as well as the superiority complex of the West, in an Asia searching frantically for ideological formulas to solve its problems, Stalinists and Americans are fighting a political battle for partisan support...

...We aggravate this estrangement by refusing to acknowledge the political impracticality of our peculiar and quite "un-Asian" economic institutions...

...Our slogans fall on deaf or unsympathetic ears because they are not couched in terms relevant to Asians...

...We will increase our bounty of arms without attaching any conditions in the form of policy leadership or suggestions for stopping the fighting...

...We are considered the inheritor, magnifier and protector of all the imperialist and capitalist values and evils that have plagued the East through the centuries...

...One cannot deny the necessity of meeting Communist military aggression with force and determination...

...The fact is that all local Communist organizations in East Asia, outside the Philippines, have grown in power and self-confidence from 1945 to 1953, while taking advantage of American diplomatic ineptness...

...If that is our answer to Asia's need for understanding and leadership in the confused new world of the 1950s, then the pessimists are justified and America's Time of Despair is upon us...

...How, it seemed to Asians, could a man with Stassen's economic and political views possibly understand the moods and needs of Asia...

...Disillusionment has been bitter for Asians...

...is a California political scientist who recently spent more than a year as a visiting professor at Indonesian universities...

...This is provable in terms of election statistics, public demonstrations, labor-union activities and the public attitudes of local officials...

...And even if he did understand them, how could such a man retain any degree of sympathy for Asian political and economic aspirations...

...Our well-publicized public personalities, who usually rant against "socialism," represent Americans as being even more foreign to Asia's moods and ideologies than we really are...

...We hope we can hold them off for a few years, until Russia and China themselves explode into civil war...

...Such a point of view would mark a new low in sloppy thinking about the problem of Communism...

...Asians are convinced, and with some reason, that our aid programs are motivated by a desire to make their countries miniature copies of the United States...

...However distorted this attitude might be, it must be reckoned with in the formation of American policy...

...The general fear and apprehension of the materialist West has been localized in, and aroused by, America...

...The struggle in Asia cuts across social groups...

...These VIP reporters hurry back to the political battles, armed with glowing but shockingly shallow reports on an Asia from which they were quite insulated...

...Presumably, our aid program is geared to convince the recipients that they, too, can gain success in the capitalistic pattern without adopting any Communist share-the-wealth schemes...

...The frightening ghost which we must face with all the bravery and honesty we can muster is the real possibility that our society can provide no short-term, immediately useful answer to the demands of Asia...

...Greater trade with Red China is developing in Japan, India, Indonesia and Burma...

...Informed Asians interpreted this as obvious proof that America's aid would be used to prevent the development in Asia of truly independent economic structures...

...The Stalinists seem to offer an enlightened socialism, and few Asians note that totalitarianism and the cruelest form of materialistic social fragmentation come with the Stalinist brand of socialism...

...Socialism," as an economic term, represents the normal, expected influence through which the economic life of the future is to be enriched...

...We falsely assume that Communism is a sincere humanitarian venture and that its prime motivation is the urge to construct a truly equalitarian social structure...

...In a very real sense, the amount of American weapons going to Asia bears a direct relationship to the shortcomings of American political and diplomatic leadership...

...But we must also make some successful effort toward winning the minds and directing the emotions of Asians...