Foreign Relations: Encirclement in Asia

For three decades without cease, Asia has been racked by war and revolution. Last week, on top of the conflict in Viet Nam and Indonesia’s “confron tation” with Malaysia, yet another war smoldered in Asia as India and Pakistan wrestled for control of long-disputed Kashmir (see THE WORLD).

Neither nation, fortunately, had enough petroleum, spare parts or ammunition for a protracted, all-out war.

As one of the chief sources of weapons for both sides, the U.S. immediately decided to cut off their supplies. But there were still plenty of opportunities for troublemakers to fan the flames by pouring in arms—and a shrill chorus of support for Pakistan suggested that such accomplished chaos lovers as Red China and Indonesia might do just that.

The Line-Up. For the U.S., the war offered no easy choices. Since World War II, Washington has lavished some $4 billion in military and economic aid on India in hopes of building it into an Asian showcase for democracy on China’s border. As for Pakistan, it was among the most trusted friends of the U.S. until Washington began sending India arms in the wake of Red China’s 1962 invasion. And, though Pakistan’s resentment led to an increasingly warm flirtation with Red China, it is still the only member—aside from Britain—of both the SEATO and CENTO alliances that anchor the Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern outposts of the free world’s collective security system. As principal architect of that system, the U.S. is loath to see Pakistan wreck it by withdrawing in anger—particularly at a time when Charles de Gaulle threatens to wreck NATO.

Britain, unhappy over a war between the Commonwealth’s two most populous members, followed Washington’s example and stopped its $50 million a year in military aid to India (it sends no arms to Pakistan); but it could do no more.* Moscow was equally helpless. Unwilling to endanger Russia’s ties with India, and fearful of pushing Pakistan even closer to Peking, Communist Premier Aleksei Kosygin appealed to both to “stop the tanks and silence the guns.”

Other nations were less embarrassed about taking sides. Grateful for Pakistan’s moral support in its dispute with Greece over Cyprus, Turkey lined up with its fellow Islamic state. Iran also supported Pakistan. In every Pakistani paper there were photo spreads of President Ayub Khan flanked on one side by the Shah of Iran and China’s Chou Enlai, on the other by Indonesia’s Sukarno and Turkey’s President Güsel. “These are our friends,” read the caption in one paper. “They support us,” said another. So far, at least, the support has been strictly vocal.

Scorn for Suasion. In a rare show of unity—and with no other recourse—Washington, London and Moscow all threw their weight behind a United Nations effort to arrange a ceasefire. With a unanimous Security Council vote behind him, U.N. Secretary-General U Thant hurried off to the Indian sub continent, where his homilies were greeted with outright scorn. After two days of fruitless meetings in Rawalpindi, a Pakistani official said: “Thant’s visit is like a Boy Scout blowing his whistle, tweet, tweet, and telling us to be good. We have been good long enough.” And for all its years of lip service to the U.N. and world peace, the Indian government was hardly more receptive to Thant’s proposals.

Next to intervene was Pope Paul VI, who stirred a flurry of approbation by announcing that he will fly to New York next month to address the U.N. on peace (see RELIGION). Though the Vatican can exert no physical or political power—as Stalin gibed: “How many divisions does he have?”—its influence over the minds of men in the past, and in Europe, has amounted to the moral equivalent of armed force. The question now is how much moral suasion can be brought to bear on a dispute between Pakistan’s Moslems and India’s Hindus—peoples whose antagonisms, like so many of Asia’s enmities (TIME Essay, April 9), are rooted in centuries of mistrust.

“People’s Wars.” In contrast to Western efforts to damp the fires, Red China was gleefully pouring fuel on them. Cheering on Pakistan, Peking accused India of “aggression,” aroused fears that it might repeat its 1962 invasion of India. The Chinese thus effectively immobilized at least half a dozen of India’s 20 army divisions, which remained grimly in place along the northern border.

Despite Peking’s eagerness to see India take a shellacking, the war hardly fits China’s devoutly held Leninist belief in an inevitable clash between Com munism and the “capitalist-imperialist” West. Here were two former colonial states, both Asian and both underdeveloped, at each other’s throats. Yet Communist China tirelessly reiterates that it is precisely such nations—the “have nots” of Asia, Africa and Latin America—that must eventually encircle the West and destroy it in a worldwide holocaust of “people’s wars.” Time and again, Peking has shown its readiness to provoke such wars and to support them to the death—the death, that is, of every last Pakistani, Vietnamese, Malayan, Algerian or Cuban.

City v. Country. Peking recently reaffirmed this view in perhaps its most bellicose language yet. In a major policy statement printed by every major newspaper on the mainland, beetle-browed Defense Minister Lin Piao-one of the top seven men in Red China’s hierarchy—called for worldwide subversion to destroy the U.S. and its allies. Recalling Mao Tse-tung’s guerrilla strategy of enlisting the rural peasantry against city-based governments, Lin declared: “If North America and Western Europe can be called the cities of the world, then Asia, Africa and Latin America are the rural areas. The contemporary world revolution presents a picture of the encirclement of cities.”

Blood is cheap. “The war of annihilation is the fundamental guiding principle of our operations,” insisted Lin, and “the sacrifice of a small number of people in revolutionary wars” is necessary. And when China’s bosses talk about “a small number of people,” they mean more than a few hundred. It was Mao, after all, who once said that China could accept the slaughter of half its people in a nuclear war, for more than 300 million would survive.

Lin Piao’s lamest argument was that a successful “people’s war”—Viet Nam, for example—could be measured by “the number of U.S. imperialist forces that can be pinned down and depleted.” In fact, though there will be 125,000 American fighting men in Viet Nam this week, they are not “pinned down.” China would like nothing better than U.S. withdrawal from the country, where there are already signs that its presence has the Viet Cong badly off balance.

Indeed, the singular bloodthirstiness of Lin’s article sobered many Americans who have explained China’s attempts to subvert nations such as South Viet Nam and Laos as an understandable exercise of power in its logical sphere of influence. Lin Piao’s summons to all the peoples of the world to dismember the U.S. “piece by piece, some striking at its head and others at its feet,” was a definitive admission that the Chinese Communists would like to make the whole world their sphere of influence. Lin’s line and his cocksure manner reminded Walter Lippmann, for one, of “the way Marx talked” and “the way Hitler talked when he announced that his Reich would last for a thousand years.”

A Common Strategy. In the face of China’s undisguised thirst for power, it was more clear than ever that the U.S. had no choice but to assume an equally active role in attempting to deal with the war in Kashmir—or with disputes elsewhere in Asia, for that matter. In the U.S. generally, the tide of opinion is flowing strongly behind Lyndon Johnson’s position that only by a resolute and successful stand in Viet Nam can the U.S. keep an aggressive, expansionist China within its only undeniable sphere of influence—China itself. That view won prestigious support last week when former U.S. Disarmament Negotiator Arthur H. Dean announced the establishment of a Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia.-Its aims: to support the President’s proposals “to bring about a viable peace in Viet Nam” and thereafter “to enlist economic aid for the entire area.”

Thus the war in Viet Nam and the fight for Kashmir are anything but isolated, local issues; they are both integral parts of a worldwide struggle, with Asia the immediate cockpit. Nor has Russia by any means resigned from the struggle, despite its current co-straddling of the fence with the U.S. The differences between the Communist powers, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk noted last week, “are about how to get on with their world revolution,” not about whether there ought to be one. Added Rusk: “Some in the Communist world appear to realize the prohibitive costs of nuclear war. Some may not. But the strategy of trying to win control of Asia, Africa and Latin America—thus encircling and strangling the Atlantic world—is common to all.”

U.S. foreign policy, which for most of the postwar era has focused on Europe, still has to adjust fully to the encircling revolution in Asia. The U.S. has yet to extend to the Far East the hard and fast guarantees of collective security that made NATO so potent a deterrent. And, as anti-American outbursts in Paris, Pakistan and Indonesia demonstrated last week, it is not always easy to keep allies, let alone to find them. Yet, at a time when Asia’s Communists are only too plainly making common cause, it is up to the Johnson Administration to make ringingly clear that the U.S. will not only provide arms for its allies, but will support the aspirations of any nation in Asia for freedom and a better life.

*London’s Daily Express thought that perhaps it could. Bannered the Express: SHOULD THE QUEEN APPEAL? Sure, snickered a British Foreign Office man. “We’ll drop her by parachute—silk parachute, of course.”

-Among its founding members: ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson, ex-World Bank President Eugene Black, Educator James Bryant Conant, ex-Treasury Secretary (under Kennedy and Johnson) C. Douglas Dillon, ex-Defense Secretary (under Eisenhower) Thomas S. Gates, Princeton President Robert F. Goheen, M.I.T. Chairman James R. Killian Jr., ex-Ambassadors John J. McCloy and Robert D. Murphy, Banker David Rockefeller.