U.S. POLICY IN ASIA

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27403, 16 July 1954, Page 11

U.S. POLICY IN ASIA

“Must Block Communism” (Rec. 7 p.m.) WASHINGTON, July 14. President Eisenhower today asserted direct United States responsibility for blocking communism in South-east Asia, tying this to the necessity of keeping Japan out of Communist control. Mr Eisenhower spoke at a press conference about the time that the Secretary of State (Mr Dulles) was agreeing in Paris to restore high-level United States representation at the Genev. conference. The President was asked whether the problems of South-east Asia were the problems of France (for IndoChina) and of Britain (for Malaya), or whether they were the problems of the whole Western world. He said emphatically that he considered such problems to be completely global in nature.

How could the free world, Mr Eisenhower asked, see Japan go Communist? When one had the answer to that question, he said, then one said that the question was—how to keep Japan out of Communist control. Thereupon, he said, the whole range of Far Eastern questions became one which the Western world could not ignore. Mr Eisenhower was asked why Mr Dulles had made his hurried, trip to Paris. He answered that Mr Dulles went to see whether there was a common front on the Indo-China problem with Britain and France so that higher level participation by the United States in the Geneva conference would be helpful rather than hurtful.

This appeared io mean, said the American Associated Press, that Mr Dulles wanted to find out whether- Mr Mendes-France’s “minimum position on an agreement was one which the United States could at least live with. Otherwise, United States officials thought that the presence of such an official as Mr Bedell Smith might make a United States declaration of disavowal spectacular and therefore hurtful to the Western cause.”