The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THE struggle to ensure a community of interest with Japan will challenge American policy-making and propaganda. It will test all our diplomatic resources. Fortunately the country has in John Foster Dulles, who engineered the drafting of the treaty, a man of experience and patience and shrewdness. Mr. Dulles has done a remarkably fine job. It is a pity he is not amenable to the suggestion that he be the first Ambassador to Japan. The post needs a man of his authority and reputation.

The ratification of the treaty and the diplomacy attendant upon it will have wide repercussions in Asia. Our policy in Asia is still dualistic. Side by side with the effort to compose differences with the Chinese in Korea, there is an aid program to Chiang Kai-shek’s Formosa which would widen those differences. The relatively huge sum that Chiang will receive, mainly in military assistance, will disturb China’s neighbors, as well as bedevil our peace policy at Kaesong. One third of the aid to Asia is going to Formosa — a ratio which, many Asians say, will negate what we do for the Asians outside Formosa.

The Asians arc heartily out of sympathy with our pro-Chiang policy, which, furthermore, has created fissures between us and our Western allies. The French, for example, insist that our Central Intelligence agents fomented the attack on Yunnan province by Chinese Nationalist troops on the loose in Burma. They fear that this might provoke a Chinese Communist invasion of Indo-China. Is it part of our China policy to harry the Chinese Communists on the mainland? It looks like it; yet this does not square with war aims which have been declared to be limited to Korea.

Nor is it possible to see in these events any reconciliation with General Ridgway’s views on our long-term strategical aims vis-à-vis the Moscow— Peking axis. Certainly there is no backing in action to develop the Moscow—Peking split which General Ridgway says must be our national goal.

The misconceptions about our foreign policy which have been created by both McCarthyism and MacArthurism are probably impossible to dislodge. Nevertheless they should be sot forth. It is widely held that our China diplomats “lost” China by selling Chiang Kai-shek down the river at Yalta. Yet not one member of the China service was present at Yalta. It is contended that Stalin was the spearhead of the Chinese Communist conquest of China. On the contrary, Stalin in the initial stages of the conflict supported Chiang Kaishek. He then stayed on the sidelines, only coming to Communist support after the new regime had been set up.

No objective reader of the MacArthur testimony can avoid the conclusion that nobody lost China but Chiang Kai-shek himself. General Wedemeyer said the Communists could have been stopped at the Yangtze with broomsticks if there had been any will to resist on the part of the Nationalists.

Another misconception on the part of many people has to do with the word “victory” as General MacArthur applied it. War is supposed to lead to victory in the MacArthur lexicon. But historically that is untrue. War leads to settlement, and it is a battle that should result in victory, paving the way to ending or settling a war. Can we say, as we look around the world, that the last war was fought to victory? it was fought, thanks to the theory of unconditional surrender, to chaos. No more important misconception has arisen to mar the wise development of American policy than this misconception over victory.

Admiral Sherman’s achievements

That the quest for a new Chief of Naval Operations was called the “search for another Sherman” was indicative of the high regard in which Admiral Forrest P. Sherman was held. The quest was difficult. To be sure, we have a round dozen of highly competent admirals, some of whom — for instance, Admiral Radford — are brilliant. But Admiral Sherman was a man apart. And his successor, Admiral William M. Fechteler, a sea dog with the mark of destiny on him since his Annapolis days, will profit from Sherman’s handiwork. It is generally conceded that Fechteler, if not the inevitable choice, is a fine one. Radford left too many wounds in the unification fight to be acceptable.

When Admiral Sherman died, there was real unification at the vital spot, and that was the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Sherman was primarily responsible for it. No man did more to get the services together. He took over a rebellious Navy after Admiral Denfeld was relieved as Chief of Naval Operations, and it was little short of miraculous the way he restored morale and brought order out of chaos.

Admiral Sherman had a highly developed gift of persuasion. He could melt the passion and intransigence of contending men. His gentleness and balance made extremism look foolish. This gift could not have been so successfully used, of course, without gifts of the mind. Admiral Sherman had studied geopolitics when he became Chief of Naval Operations. He could talk Mackinder and Haushofer with the academicians. How necessary, now that the world is a battleground, is this new science of geopolitics.

Particularly is knowledge of geopolitics part of the armor of the Joint Chiefs. For, as was obvious during the MacArthur hearings, the Joint Chiefs have become the vital organ in our policy-making. It is what Hanson W. Baldwin calls “undue power.” It is “in part attributable to the vacuum of political leadership in the field of policy into which the Joint Chiefs moved.” No more vital change is at work in our government.

It is time, therefore, that some of the public attention that used to be given to the State Department should be transferred to the Joint Chiefs. The latter are no longer, thanks to Admiral Sherman, a plural concept. That is to say, one should write: The Joint Chiefs satys or it. They are an organ. Not fill Admiral Sherman went to work would the Joint Chiefs agree to a single representative on the staff of the National Security Council. Now there is one. And, understandably, he is a Navy man, though the Navy, always blue-water minded, has hitherto thought of a general staff as an excrescence.

Franco and American bases

It was Admiral Sherman who initiated and at the time of his death was carrying through the aid-toFranco policy. This has created a good deal of controversy. When Sherman left America for Spain, his purpose was enveloped in secrecy. But the reasons for his mission can be deduced from the circumstances of our strategical requirements.

All the armed services fell in with the Sherman plan. The Navy needs bases to make the Mediterranean an American lake. Mediterranean strategy owes its beginning to Secretary Forrestal, but he thought primarily in terms of the eastern Mediterranean. When he put the Sixth Fleet there, he established a half-complete design. At the eastern approach there were a number of bastions, notably Turkey. But there was no safeguard at the western entry, and this was the prime reason for Sherman’s preoccupation with Spain.

The Air Force is even more baseminded than the Navy. Indeed, the crack is that the sky men, particularly in the strategical air force, would like to set up bases right under Stalin’s mustache. There is still dissension about this addiction. The way to alienate peoples, say some, is to put “little Americas” in foreign countries, and some notion of the resentment can be gathered over the disputes which arise even at home — for instance, in New Hampshire — over the location of air bases. But both servicemen and their civilian department heads are the more anxious to establish more and more bases abroad because of experience with the B-36.

Spain would not be a taking-off place in the bombing designs of the Air Force. It is required as a return base for bombers based upon the eastern periphery of the Soviet Union.

That leaves the Army, with its defense system based upon European soil, where General Eisenhower is seeking to create a North Atlantic army. The going is difficult. The impediment, as General Eisenhower has explained, is that the Europeans insist upon clinging to their national sovereignly. Even the French, who are most ardent in their advocacy of a European army, are slow and hesitant. It is felt that they advanced the idea of a European army more as a way of frustrating German armament than as a goal.

There can be no doubt that our negotiations with Spain are related to the procrastination in Europe’s defense. If must be regarded as a form of strategical reinsurance by our military authorities. If the Elbe strategy fails, then there will be the Pyrenees to fall back on. This is clearly seen in the pained comment from Europe on the Spanish development. It can no longer be said that this reaction was merely formal.

Whether, in consequence, the arrangement with Franco is premature, as the Pentagon plan to rearm the Germans was, is an open question. In these as in other matters a balance of advantage has to be sought. In this quest one is left to wonder what part the State Department played, but the feeling is that the decision was made in the Pentagon.

Mood of the Capital

The mood of the Capital is obsessed with the fortunes of General Eisenhower. It is freely staled that one of these fine days the General will offer himself as a candidate for the Republican nomination. Exhaustive research indicates no basis for this statement. Those who know the General well are agreed upon two points: first, that he still holds that a military man should not be voted into the highest office in the land; and second, t hat he would not resist a draft.

This restatement of intentions is putting his supporters in something of a dilemma. Should they go ahead with an organization? Or should they simply try to get him on state tickets or, alternatively, try to line up ‟favorite sons”? There can be no doubt there is a widespread interest in the candidature. In 1948 General Ike was a politicians’ choice, but nowadays, as he sees it, he has a popular Following.

Certainly Eisenhower’s influence is strong with Congress. There are few dissentients any more from the idea of the Eisenhower army in Europe and the necessity for providing that army with the financial sinews.

On the controls front, the Congress will apparently be content with the attenuated controls till there is another crisis. It is the anti-Truman feeling that is responsible for weakened controls, just as it is the antiAcheson feeling that is responsible for the campaign to strip the State Department of administration powers over foreign aid.