COLD WAR: The Two Masks

The news from the world’s diplomatic jousting grounds last week had all the unsettling quality of a hailstorm on a sunny day. In Europe, Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev, each in his own fashion, made a display of moderation in anticipation of their forthcoming exchange of visits. But in Washington representatives of the SEATO powers were gravely considering the most serious military threat their alliance had ever faced, and in Rio de Janeiro U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold cut short a Latin American tour to fly back to New York for an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council. While Moscow burbled of a “thaw in the cold war,” new Communist aggression in Laos had plunged Asia into a crisis that, unchecked, might broaden, Korea-style, into a major conflict.

What lay behind the two masks that Communism presented to the world last week? Some guessed that it was part of a global carrot-and-stick exercise, a maneuver planned in Moscow to befuddle the West and destroy its sense of strategic purpose. But many Western diplomats and intelligence agencies believed it more likely that Mao’s troublemaking had purely Chinese roots.

Old Obsession. Peking’s probes into India, according to this theory, were primarily designed to seal off rebellious Tibet from outside influences, specifically to prevent any more Tibetans from escaping to India and to exclude the Indian pilgrims and traders who have long been the chief source of news from the Roof of the World. In the process, Peking was also reinforcing its claim to fringe areas of India that Chinese maps have for many years shown as part of China.

In Laos, where the year-old government of Premier Phoui Sananikone has taken an ever firmer pro-Western stance, Peking by this theory was driven by the same motive that prompted its intervention in the Korean war: an obsession with the need for friendly, or, at worst, safely neutral buffer states on all its borders. With luck the Chinese could hope to topple Phoui’s government and force a more sympathetic regime into power; more modestly, they could almost certainly count on occupying Laos’ northern provinces, thus creating a “sanitized” zone on China’s southern frontier.

Timeworn Device. When he sparked the attacks on India and Laos, Mao Tse-tung was clearly aware that he was casting a thundercloud over the Khrushchev-Eisenhower meetings. Equally clearly, that suited him fine. Fact is that Peking does not like the prospect, however slim, of a major relaxation of the tensions between Russia and the West. For Mao still requires the cold fear of war hanging over the heads of his 650 million subjects to help force the harsh realities of the Communist revolution down their throats. Peasant resistance to Mao’s rural communes, though chiefly passive, has reached proportions alarming to Peking: food, coal, steel and industrial production are sagging far below earlier boastful figures. And for all his claims that Red China is moving into an entirely new phase of human development, Mao has found no other way to whip up his unenthusiastic masses than the timeworn device employed by every despot since the world began: border troubles, troop movements, and the bogeyman of foreign attack.

So far, Russia’s Khrushchev has treated Mao’s troublemaking with something like the deliberate deafness of a dowager ignoring an irate truck driver. Moscow’s controlled press has given dutiful but extremely restrained support to Peking’s goals in Laos; it has discreetly refrained from discussing the incursions into India at all. But at last week’s end, Khrushchev announced that the day after he gets back to Moscow from the U.S., he will fly to Peking. When he gets there, he will either have to talk turkey to Mao or write off whatever hope he has of selling himself to the U.S. as a man of peace and friendship. For so long as Peking continues to disturb the peace of the world, the West is unlikely to be very impressed by Moscow’s mask of moderation.