LAOS: The Alarmed View

A tableau at Vientiane airport last week demonstrated a classic example of the U.S. quandary in dealing with neutrals (see box). U.S. Assistant Secretary of State J. Graham Parsons flew into the Laotian capital and was met by a single protocol officer and a handful of U.S. newsmen. Next day, Soviet Ambassador Aleksandr Abramov stepped from his plane to be greeted by a U.S.-trained honor guard and a line of kneeling girls in sarongs who offered him silver bowls heaped with flowers. Also amiably on hand to greet the Russian: slim Captain Kong Le, Laos’ current hero, whose military coup in August overturned the pro-Western government and brought to power neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma. Captain Kong Le is so politically innocent that he had to ask a Western journalist what was meant by “neutralismo.”

In the past five years, the U.S. has poured $300 million in military and economic aid into primitive, soporific Laos to prop up a succession of anti-Communist governments and to help fend off the skulking guerrillas of the Communist Pathet Lao. About all that remains of that policy and all those millions is anti-Communist General Phoumi Nosavan, who is nursing his pride in southern Laos after taking a shellacking from Kong Le’s para troopers.

Diplomat Parsons reportedly warned Premier Souvanna that there would be no resumption of U.S. military aid if he persisted in bringing the Pathet Lao into a coalition government. Shrugged the Premier: “If the U.S. doesn’t like our neutrality, we will have to seek aid elsewhere.” Parsons reminded the Premier that the Communists “are not interested in neutral governments, only in having Communist governments.”

Laos is exactly the kind of case where the U.S. can view neutrality only with alarm. It is on the frontier of the free world. It has a big Communist movement, which can be and is supplied from neighboring Communist states, Red China and North Viet Nam. Its own government has little real popular backing (no government has in backward Laos, where there are few roads or telephones and no national newspaper). It is not strong enough or sophisticated enough to resist if Communists should worm their way into the Cabinet and attempt a Putsch.

If Laos’ fall affected no one but itself, it might not matter. But on the tense border between Communism and the free world, only the strong can be truly neutral. The U.S. worry about Laos was not over its neutrality but its strength.