Editorial:
EDITORIAL KNOWLAND AND EISENHOWER SENATOR KNOWLAND deserves credit for challenging Administration foreign policy and thus opening a debate which must bring clearer understanding of our objectives...
...This adventure, which Secretary Dulles wisely rejected, would antagonize most of the non-Communist world without guaranteeing the release of our men...
...If the President's policy is to succeed, such programs must be developed at once...
...EDITORIAL KNOWLAND AND EISENHOWER SENATOR KNOWLAND deserves credit for challenging Administration foreign policy and thus opening a debate which must bring clearer understanding of our objectives in the global struggle...
...Indo-China showed that the West's responsible leaders would not lightly risk the fantastic consequences of atomic action...
...Dulles put it, "resorting to war action...
...Whether the atomic stalemate already exists or whether it will arrive in 1958, the problem of Communist piecemeal aggression and subversion has been with us for some time and will continue with us...
...Knowland believes the stalemate would embolden the Soviets to new combinations of pressure and subversion which would nibble away Asia and Europe while we stood helpless, deprived of our only effective weapon...
...Secretary Dulles has properly referred this to the United Nations...
...When the Chinese Communists threatened certain Nationalist-held islands, both Secretary Dulles and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (General Ridgway dissenting) recommended bombing the Chinese mainland...
...The captured Americans were on a UN mission in Korea...
...The President is acting on the belief that the 1958 deadline is as spurious as the previous ones...
...Whatever the UN does, Peking's primary purpose--goading America into action which would split the democratic world--has already been frustrated...
...He is convinced that the relationship between air-atomic power and Soviet adventurism is not direct and causal, as Senator Knowland believes, but subtle and complicated by a myriad of political and social factors...
...we will be unable to retaliate atomically against Soviet aggression without incurring the destruction of most of the free world...
...We faced it in Greece and Korea by a combination of political and conventional military means, in Iran by diplomacy, in Berlin by democratic vigor...
...These two incidents reflected a much larger discussion which Mr...
...In three years, says Senator Knowland, the Communist bloc will have enough air and atomic power to create an "atomic stalemate...
...Their acts in both periods can be explained in political terms...
...Knowland aired in his impressive Senate speech last month...
...More than a year ago, he remarked that he was sick and tired of the "deadline" approach to world Communism, with its successive forecasts of a "year of peak danger" to the United States...
...On the other hand, there is no doubt that Peking has been brazenly provocative...
...we have been facing it in Western Europe by political and economic means...
...Senator Knowland and others believe that world peace and American security have been maintained primarily by our preponderance in air and atomic power...
...If one accepts the premises and the hermetically-sealed logic of this argument, our only course is to provoke a showdown (World War III) while we still have air-atomic predominance...
...The Soviets overran Eastern Europe and China during the period of American atomic monopoly...
...to do so now would plainly be, as Mr...
...still later, it was supposed to be 1955, when the Soviets would develop nuclear weapons in plenty...
...Churchill are concerned...
...later, it was supposed to be 1952, when the Soviet armed forces would be strong enough to march to the Channel...
...The infinite complexities of Asia, on which the Communists are now concentrating, require short- and long-range programs of infinite variety, aimed at strengthening and uniting the precarious Asian democracies...
...This was the second time this fall when the Administration rejected rash counsel...
...The President accepts neither Senator Knowland's premises nor his logic...
...In each case, the Soviets developed their strength faster than expected, but doom did not materialize...
...they concluded truces in Korea and Indo-China at a time when they were developing hydrogen bombs and intercontinental bombers...
...Indo-China also taught us something else which Senator Knowland ignores--namely, that no amount of real or threatened military shock treatment can eradicate the cancer of political weakness...
...We did not impose a blockade during the Korean War...
...President Eisenhower personally vetoed this project, which he understood to involve an all-out war against Chinese Communism--a war for which we were politically and militarily unprepared...
...But President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles deserve even greater credit for withstanding their Senate leader's challenge and for reasserting a policy based on the long-range quest of peace through the building of democratic strength...
...Major attention is currently being given to Senator Knowland's call to blockade Communist China in reprisal for the jailing of 13 Americans...
...Once, the year of doom was supposed to be 1950, when it was thought Russia would have the atomic bomb...
...As for the "atomic stalemate," it already exists as far as President Eisenhower and Mr...
Vol. 37 • December 1954 • No. 49
