THE U.S. AND VIETNAM AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN ASIA BEING REASSESSED

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31319, 15 March 1967, Page 12

THE U.S. AND VIETNAM AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN ASIA BEING REASSESSED

(By

MARGARET JONES.

Washington correspondent of the "Sydney Morning Herald”)

(Reprinted from the "Sudnev Morning Herald" by arrangement) As Robert Kennedy scrambled to his feet in the Senate to make his stand on Vietnam, one was reminded irresistibly of group therapy, or of soul-searching at a Moral Rearmament house party.

It was, in any case, an extraordinary spectacle; the junior senator from New York, fingering his carefully shaggy new haircut, looking —as someone said sourly—younger than the Senate pages, is more like a student in need of fattening up than a 41-year-old father of nine.

The Press Gallery was packed, though most of us had elegant advance copies of the speech and could have stayed away. Here and there was even a rarely-seen news bureau chief, come down from his ivory tower for the event. Sign Sought What the press was looking for was a sign that the Kennedy camp had decided finally to break with the Administration, declare war on Lyndon Johnson, and run Robert, next Kennedy in line, for the Democratic nomination in 1968.

Most people think this sign did not manifest itself, though there are a few dissenters; it all depends on what morning paper you read. What we did listen to was an apparently genuine examination of conscience on behalf of American liberalism, not only on the war in Vietnam, but also on the United States role in Asia in general. The speech was more questioning than arrogant. It confirmed, however, suspicions aroused over the last few weeks that a whole new political theory is emerging which sees America as globally overextended, obsessed with a missionary urge to convert the world to democracy, and pursuing a dangerous “big brother” course in Asia.

“Domino” Theory This “new thought” is diametrically opposed to the “old thought” of Lyndon Johnson and his advisers, who subscribe to the “domino” theory and believe it the duty of powerful nations to protect their weaker brothers. President Johnson in particular is devoted to his con cept of a new Asia co-pros-perity sphere. He sees backward Asian nations protected from aggression by American might, enabled by a massive intake of American money and technology to become strong and self-reliant members of a world commonwealth. Robert Kennedy’s speech was preceded by several weeks of sensitively placed “new thought” policy statements, which all seemed to bear the print of the same corporate mind, though they

did not necessarily have any overt connexion with the Kennedys. Several were brought out in carefully stage-man-aged sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, is a natural-born “new thought man.”

Historian’s “Heresy” The first clarion note was sounded before the committee of the dean of American historians. Professor Henry Steele Commager, of Amherst College. Professor Commager took the heretical stand that the United States 1 as over-extended itself as a world Power because it has a “moralistic obsession” with communism. In a statement that must have made the President shudder, Commager said the United States did not have the material, intellectual or moral resources to be at once an American, European and Asian Power. “It is not our duty to keep peace throughout the world, to put down aggression wherever it starts up, to stop the advance of communism or other isms of which we may not approve,” Commager said, adding that Americans seemed to have a mistaken idea they had a special responsibility to spread the blessing of liberty, democracy and equality to other peoples of the earth.

To round off the heresy, Commager said calmly that the war in Vietnam was nothing but an expensive rearguard action. South-east Asia was legitimately within Communist China’s sphere of influence, just as the Western Hemisphere was within America’s.

While the reverberations were still clinging, a former Ambassador to Paris and an avowed Kennedy man. Gen-

eral James Gavin, took the stand to advise America it was time to get out of Vietnam, so it could turn its attention to relations with Europe, now badly in need of repair. Like Robert Kennedy, Gavin wants an immediate stop to the bombing and joint negotiations with the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh, whom he says is now his “own man” and not a Peking puppet. A former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Edwin Reischauer. now a Harvard professor, shook up established thought patterns even more thoroughly when he said last week that if the U.S. had not interfered. North and South Vietnam would probably now be a unified country with a mild. Tito-type Communist regiflie, hostile to China and friendly to the West. Robert Kennedy’s Senate speech came as a postscript to all this. He brooded long upon the apocalyptic horror of the Vietnam war, on the “vacant moment of amazed fear” as innocents die for a cause they do not understand. He is a politician and not a professor, so he does not openly preach heresies. But there were interesting echoes of more radical views in his speech. Kennedy advocates help for Asia through international agencies, but strongly urges that political systems are strictly internal matters. He sees the Communists taking part in the future government of South Vietnam, and wants the South Vietnamese Government to start talking to the. National Liberation Front (the political arm of the Viet Cong), at once.

“No Tool Of Peking” Like Reischauer, he seems to envisage a peaceful and anti-Chinese North Vietnam, living on good terms with the South, adding that no Communist State can any longer be assumed to be the automatic tool of Peking or Moscow. This is a flat contradiction of the Administration’s “domino” theory. According to the latest polls, 67 per cent of Americans still support bombing the North, so it is reasonable to be sure most of the nation would find the “new theory” of Kennedy and/or the radicals antipathetic.