THE FOLLY OF OUR FORMOSA POLICY

...The attitude of the Administration is that nothing will be done to extricate ourselves from this position during periods of quiet, and that nothing can be done about it in times of crisis...

...In attempting to explain American involvement in the defense of the offshore islands President Eisenhower pointed out that the islands had assumed far greater strategic importance in recent years because a third of Chiang's forces were stationed there...

...But there is no magic in mere talk...

...If we can see and act on such an approach as creative bargaining at its best, we can take a giant stride forward toward achieving peace in what is doubtless the most important and potentially most explosive area in the world today...

...There was nothing in the President's address, and nothing in the countless comments by Dulles, to indicate that we are prepared in any way to abandon the childish myths which make up our policy toward Communist China...

...newsmen asked...

...The Administration cannot hope to achieve peace off the China coast unless it is prepared to break away from its inflexible attitude toward the Communist regime in China and hold out affirmative proposals for settlement...

...Negotiation will get us nowhere unless we approach the bargaining table with a willingness to recognize the government with which we are negotiating...

...By summer of this year he had committed one-third of his entire military establishment to the defense of these utterly useless islands...

...marines on Lebanon without taking Congress or the country into his confidence...

...Later when official American opinion switched on the subject, Chiang refused to go along with the change...

...The President's attempt to equate Quemoy with the Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia in Hitler's time was downright misleading...

...Communist China's offer to negotiate, which came in the midst of its ruthless and unprovoked shelling of Quemoy, was snatched up with unprecedented alacrity by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles because even they sensed they were blundering into a hopeless and perilous trap...

...Reston was right when he wrote that Congress, the press, and the people were silent in the face of new outbreaks of Administration brinkmanship, but a few days later it became increasingly clear that at least an articulate minority in the nation was gravely concerned that the Dulles-Eisenhower policies might plunge the United States into war...

...Eisenhower took to the air to explain his position to the country, but there was nothing in the script prepared for the President which departed in the slightest degree from the sullen intransigence of his Secretary of State...

...The situation today in the so-called offshore islands of China is not only that the President can personally commit the nation to war against Communist China to defend these islands, but that even the President's hand may be forced by the decisions or actions of another government...

...The most recent example, of course, is Iraq, where a revolutionary group shot its way to office over the bodies of that country's rulers, and we recognized the new government within a fortnight...

...Eisenhower, on Dulles' say-so, risked war in the Middle East by landing U.S...

...But Dulles, anxious to clothe the "unleashing" of Chiang with some semblance of reality, exerted great pressure on the Nationalist regime in Formosa to fortify the offshore islands...

...Had the President looked it up since then...

...We insist we will not recognize this government because it came to power by violence, but it is a fact of history that we have done precisely this on scores of occasions...

...Either the Nationalists or the Communists, or both, can at any moment —this is one of them—precipitate us into a war or back down...

...The Dulles-Eisenhower policy in the Far East has been a compound of fraud and folly from the beginning...

...The fatal weakness in our approach is our truculent refusal to recognize the fact that Communist China exists...

...It seems inconceivable to us that there can be any hope for lasting peace in the Far East until we put aside the fiction that Communist China does not exist...

...The President was on sounder ground when, like Dulles, he called on Communist China to renounce violence in seeking its aims, but he made no comparable effort to plead with Chiang to abandon his openly expressed commitment to a policy of continuing violence...

...It might be possible then to hammer out a negotiated settlement under which the Chinese Communists would renounce the use of force in exchange for admission to the United Nations, liquidation of Chiang's occupation of the offshore islands, and the neutralization of Formosa as a ward of the United Nations...

...Czechoslovakia was a free, independent nation with no design to conquer or destroy Germany...

...The net result of our fumbling diplomacy has been to put Dictator Chiang in the position where he can and does dictate American policy in the Formosa Straits...

...Eisenhower's address to the nation to indicate that we would not continue to dance to the tune called by the Nationalist warlord on Formosa, however deeply it involved us in military hostilities with the Communist world...

...The truth is that in the case of China, it is not the manner of the Communists coming to power, or their subsequent behavior, that keeps us from recognizing that regime after nine years of holding office...

...His answer was that he did not know...

...Conversation will prove fruitless unless we have something to say beyond the dreary negatives that characterized the 73 talks we had with the Chinese Communists until negotiations were broken off at our insistence...

...It was then that Mr...

...He did not go on to make it clear that the heavy concentration of Formosan troops on Quemoy and Matsu was our idea to begin with, nor did he take the American people into his confidence on the extent to which Chiang is now using this situation to attempt to blackmail the United States into riskHerblock In The Washington Post "We Have to Go Along to Save Face" ing the war he wants us to wage against Communist China...

...commanders in the Formosa Straits were or were not authorized to use atomic weapons against the Chinese Communists in defense of their command...

...Quemoy, on the other hand, is geographically a part of the coastline of mainland China and is occupied by a regime whose overriding ambition is to conquer and destroy the government of that mainland...

...Since Chiang's single purpose is war against Communist China, it must be obvious that by basing much of our Far Eastern policy on our alliance with him, we are trapping ourselves into a course that can only involve us in war...

...Eisenhower hadn't had an opportunity to find out if an admiral on the scene could, on his own initiative, involve the United States in a nuclear holocaust...

...Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, with whose foreign policy views we have clashed frequently, summed up the situation when he said: "We seem to be drifting, either dazed or indifferent, toward war with China, a war without friends or allies, and over issues which the Administration has not presented to the people, and which are not worth a single American life...

...It may be only coincidental that the President was heavily engaged in golfing and fishing during the period he could find no time to determine whether his commanders in the Pacific could trigger this country into atomic warfare without asking for approval from Washington...

...It is rather the fact that this is a Communist regime, and the further fact that our government, whether administered by Democrats or Republicans, has made impossible and self-defeating commitments to Chiang Kai-shek...

...Days later, at a news conference, Press Secretary James Hagerty was reminded that the President hadn't been sure about this all-important discretion for commanders at the scene...

...Thore is every indication that the Administration is playing its reckless game to avoid a settlement rather than seek one...

...Consider the fact that some three and a half years ago Congress—the House by a vote of 410 to 3 and the Senate by a vote of 85 to 3—authorized the President to go to war over Quemoy and Matsu, if he saw fit, and to use atomic weapons there at his own discretion—which pretty much means Dulles...

...The United States will fight if necessary to prevent Communist conquest of Quemoy and Matsu, the President said in effect as he embraced and even went beyond the position of his Secretary of State...

...There were, to be sure, phrases proclaiming peaceful purpose, but they were all but lost in a drumfire of belligerent rejection of "appeasement" and a reckless determination to support Chiang Kai-shek's warlike position whatever the consequence...

...But negotiation, as he suggested earlier, cannot succeed if we insist on going to the bargaining table in a mood to demand our own way on every issue...

...Hagerty replied that Mr...

...Instead, it has been edging steadily toward war in the Formosa Straits— a war that could commit us to years of fighting the 600,000,000 people of China over the vast stretches of that country...

...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Folly of Our Formosa Policy fT^he current negotiations over the ¦¦- sanguinary struggle in the Formosa Straits hold out a measure of hope that the major antagonists, the United States and Communist China, may yet reach a live-and-let-live agreement in that troubled area of the world...

...Far more shocking, in a way, is his own ignorance of some of the most vital facts of life in his role as commander-in-chief...

...The President struck the only hopeful note of his talk when he discussed the possibility of negotiated settlement with the Chinese Communists, and failing that, the prospect that the United Nations might exert a "peaceful influence...

...Apparently, also, the President and Secretary Dulles, with or without military advice, will make the decisions for us, surrounded by secrecy designed to keep everyone guessing...

...He was asked at a press conference, for example, if U.S...

...both seem determined to have their own way regardless of the consequences...

...Our government has most unwisely maneuvered itself, with the help of Chiang Kai-shek, into a situation of which it has lost control...

...In fact, there was nothing in Mr...

...The hope is there, but it is a frail and forlorn flower because neither side seems interested in the genuine give-and-take of creative bargaining...

...At that time Quemoy, a ten-mile sandbar less than four miles off the coast of China in the middle of Amoy Bay, and the Matsu Islands, some ten miles from the coast, were regarded by Chiang Kai-shek as indefensible and expendable...

...This is an attitude which ought not to be tolerated...

...Nobody can possibly doubt that Chiang's goal is war...

...he has publicly proclaimed his determination to invade the mainland and make war against the Red regime...

...In its first year of power the Administration proclaimed the policy of "unleashing" Chiang Kai-shek, which turned out to mean nothing...

...given, too, the equally melancholy fact that the man who makes his decisions in foreign policy for him, Secretary of State Dulles, seems dedicated to the brink-of-war approach, it is frightening to consider how much power they wield—power to embark the United States in all-out war without consulting anyone...

...This it has shown no intention of doing...

...Correspondents with excellent pipelines to the Pentagon report that without exception our military experts consider the offshore islands of no importance at all in the defense of Formosa and equally valueless as beach-heads for Chiang's long-dreamed-of invasion of the Chinese mainland...

...Eisenhower's concealment of the truth is not his only sin in the current crisis...

...Many times during the past half century revolutionists in Latin America, some of them bandit dictators, seized power by violence at noon and were recognized by the United States government by nightfall...

...Given the fact of the President's hopeless inadequacy in times of crisis...

...Consider, too, that Mr...

...As James Reston put it in the New York Times: "Nowadays, Secretary of State Dulles can commit the United States to oppose aggression [wage war] right up against the southern border of the Soviet Union along the whole breadth of the Middle East, and the President can send the Seventh Fleet within artillery range of the China coast, and scarcely a question is raised by Congress, the press, or the people...

...If we are not prepared to negotiate in this framework, the prospects for peace will fade...