The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THE explosion in Korea aroused Washington from its heckling about Asia. Our aims toward Japan were based upon the eradication of Japan as a power in Asia. This was achieved. 1 he object of our new Far Eastern policy is to revive Japanese power.

In the Pacific war, we fought for unconditional surrender. General MacArthur looked to a future for Japan as the “Switzerland of Asia.”To ensure that end, he pushed through a constitution under which the Japanese pledged themselves never to have an army and a navy again. In addition, the arms industry was so thoroughly dismantled that the Japanese police have not yet got the requisite weapons for keeping internal order.

No longer is there any difference between General MacArthur and Washington on the future of Japan. They talk about the Co-prosperity Sphere in Asia under the auspices of a rejuvenated Japan. Of course the new Co-prosperity Sphere is not to be militarized as of old; nevertheless it is a power sphere that the American leaders have in mind: in a strategic sense, only the power of Japan can help America restore a balance in Asia with the power of Russia.

Economically the real beginning of Point Pour in Southeast Asia is the resuscitation of the commercial power of Japan. In the old days the Japanese sold cheap consumers’ goods to the Asiatics in return for food and raw materials, and the trade was financed by the well-developed commercial banking system of Japan. This commercial Japan is due for restoration. The revival of Japan to a position of influence in Asia underlies the approach to Japan of the American peacemakers.

But the task of putting Humpty Dumpty together again is more easily set than accomplished. It means more than a reversal of war policy, A new place in the sun must be found for the 80 million virile and enterprising Japanese.

The that failed

At the war’s end we took a gigantic gamble on a new order in Asia without Japan. The wishful thinkers imagined there would be no vacuum of authority. British, Dutch, and French colonies would be set free, China would be enabled to stand on its own feet, Russia would bo peaceful. Above all, the Asians would function in harmony under the Foiled Nations. It is because these hopes have turned to ashes that there is a reorientation of Far Eastern policy.

The “twisted intellectuals” in the State Department have been getting all the blame for 1 his disastrous gamble. But that is a palpable injustice. The historian will put the responsibility upon those who were in charge of the military conduct of the war with Japan. President Roosevelt in wartime relied on military advisers for his diplomacy in Asia. What determined the courting of Russia to enter the Pacific coalition was a wrong estimate of the military situation with respect to Japan. Japan, we now know, was as good as through when the Allied leaders met at Yalta — certainly before the atom bomb was dropped.

This correspondent once asked Mr. Churchill why Russia was invited in. He responded brusquely, “Ask your military leaders,” and it turned out that at Yalta the American military said that Japan would last eighteen months after the conquest of Germany. So the Russians were asked to abrogate their neutrality pact with Japan. History has no record of a more unnecessary bribe; nothing could have induced the Russians to keep out of a war which promised a reshuffle of power.

F.D.R. was his own State Department. He took no Far Eastern experts from the State Department to Yalta. The head of the Far Eastern Division did not even hear about the Manchurian deal for three months after Yalta. The theory pursued at the White House and by Navy intelligence was that, experts, or old China hands, were not trusted advisers about the future of Asia.

This was the case at Cairo as well as at Yalta. Roosevelt took one State Department expert with him to Cairo, but only as an interpreter, and he was sent home when F.D.R. found that Mme. Chiang had more than enough English for his purposes.

China: America’s master illusion

Another Washington hope that went up in smoke was that China would come out of the war strengthened and unified. Wishful thinking went to the extent of making China a great power in the United Nations. Mr. Churchill is said to have called this “America’s master illusion.”

Never have we had a greater lesson of the folly of elevating a fiction into a fact. China in the past has given only an appearance of unity, in the shape first of foreign-run services and then of a Foreign Office adroit and adept in throwing dust in foreign eyes— with the aid of Western missionaries and sentimentalists and, latterly, of an organized propaganda lobby as influential as any lobby since the Anti-Saloon League.

The fact is that Chinese unification was as illusory as a peaceful Russia. The civil war was made inevitable by the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s “mandate from Heaven” no less than by Communist strength. The American military mission in China had no influence on events. it had none in Korea, either. In the case of Korea there were Russian ruthlessness and Russian thoroughness (o contend with; in China the country’s destiny could have been blocked only by military intervention on our part on a scale which the American people would not have tolerated.

The inquest into China dominated party politics for over twelve months prior to the rampage in Korea. Passions have been stirred so powerfully that facts and objective judgment are still obscured. But it is plain that in China and elsewhere in Asia we have been backing discredited Asiatic politicians and reactionary rule in a continental convulsion in which Communism is only an ingredient.

What the scapegoats in the State Department were trying to do in China at the end of the war in 1945 was to persuade Chiang Kai-shek that his survival depended on initiating reforms. It is wrong to suggest that they pioneered the effort to force him into a coalition with the Communists This was a Stilwell war policy adopted in order to apply maximum force against the Japanese, and was turned into a peace policy by General Hurley, who is now beating the air with the suggestion that the Slate Department and not he himself was the advocate of a Nationalist-Communist front in China.

It is only with difficulty that President Truman is getting Chiang Kai-shek off the American neck. Chiang still has powerful friends in Washington, and they are now lobbying for an alliance with Chiang to defeat the aggression in Korea. This would assuredly make a big war out of a little war. It would undermine the Truman effort to keep the conflict localized. It would rend the near-unanimity of the United Nations, particularly the support of Nehru’s India, which is hesitant about lining up with the United States solely out of fear of the Chiang zealots in Washington. It would fortify the Russian policy of sucking America into the mainland of Asia.

American policy is still tied to other discredited Asian politicians. Indo-China — whose independence was promised by Roosevelt — is an example. The decision to back Bao Dai was due to a combination of circumstances. There were the French, anxious to gel Americans to share this backbreaking burden in Southeast Asia. There were the demands at home that any kind of agitation calling itself Communism be stopped at all costs.

This latter attitude makes the enemy of your enemy your friend — a dangerous attitude and one that imperils the moral standing of America. That is why there is a tendency to slur over the incompetence and scandals of the Quirino administration in the Philippines and of the Syngman Rhee administration in Korea as well as the shortcomings of Bao Dai and of the French in Indo-China. In Indo-China we may yet realize that it is easier to get into a situation than to get out of it.

What we lost by heckling

In retrospect the six months before the invasion of Korea present on the civilian front a spectacle of the most outrageous politicking. Heckling was indulged in for the sake of heckling. Secretary Acheson had to spend most of his time in defending the State Department against a campaign of calumny scheduled to last till the November elections.

The inquisitions disabled the President in getting the right man in the right job, so that executive positions of great importance in emergency were left vacant for months at a time, as, for instance, those for guiding the Atomic Knergy Commission, the National Security Resources Board, Civil Defense.

Acheson’s budget had to be explained and re-explained. There were no funds and no time to combat the propaganda from Moscow preceding the invasion which culminated in the world-wide “Stockholm peace pledge.”This was aimed at reducing our only military advantage over the Soviet Union, the atomic bomb, by producing a sort of moral outlawry of the weapon. Yet the information services of the government were restricted by a budget appropriation actually less than that allocated by the British.

The President on his part thought less about a stand-by mobilization plan than about his Fair Deal and his politics. In all these respects, the United States was unready for the Korean challenge.

Mood of the Capital

The mood of the Capital is that there must be no return to the proKorean play-acting when the aggression has been repelled. There will be a tightening up of preparedness.

Already the shock has produced a sense of values in regard to the military establishment. It is making us all realize that from now on we must “live dangerously.”The kind of tall and overconfident talking with which Secretary Johnson sought to lull the nation seems to have been liquidated in a new sobriety.

Civil Defense is being reinvigorated. There will be more effort to make the United Nations into a living organism. In his message to the people on July 19 President Truman made it clear that the United States would meet its commitments under the UN.