After some consultation around here, and a good deal of brooding, I offer the
attached analysis of the Chinese representation issue and its ramifications
into Southeast Asia and a good many other related subjects.
This is not a “solution” but an essay which tries to take a fresh look at a
tired old problem. I think it would be worthwhile to have a small seminar
with a very limited number of people, to discuss how we tackle our ChiRep
problem before we are dragged to unsatisfactory outcomes by some of our best
friends and allies.
Attachment3
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW: COMMUNIST CHINA AND THE UNITED
NATIONS
There is a good deal of talk these days about the erosion of support for
excluding the Chinese Communists from the United Nations, and
[Page 121]
about the related problem of
how to accomplish U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia. On both situations
we are in something of a box. This paper will argue that the same box
contains both problems; and while it is something of a Chinese puzzle,
we can escape from the box we are in.
I.
Erosion and Opportunity
Contrary to widespread belief, the central problem in the Far East is the
military and political behavior of the Chinese Communists, not our
military and political response to that behavior.
On the military side we are doing what we can to contain ChiCom power without expanding the
Southeast Asian war or unleashing the Chinese Nationalists for an
invasion of the Chinese mainland. We have created something close to a
stalemate around the whole periphery of Chinese power from Korea to
India. But the Viet Nam salient of that stalemate is precarious in the
extreme.
The ChiComs do not yet have reason to
believe they cannot win in Southeast Asia by applying patience,
pressure, and the principles of indirect aggression. They know how
fragile the Saigon government is—they are helping make it that way. And
they hear vocal elements in American politics proposing that we get out
of Vietnam, and get the United Nations in.
On the political side, the most recent soundings place the vote on
Chinese representation in the 19th General Assembly on the ragged edge
of losing by simple majority. Of our friends in this battle we can say
only, as Thurber said of his early colleagues at The
New Yorker, that “some of them helped, with left hand and
tongue in cheek.”
Canada, Italy and many others are impatient to get on some new track that
is not vulnerable to the political charge they are “ignoring” the
world’s most populous nation. The Africans are increasingly wobbly. The
French are increasingly unhelpful. Even so strong an opponent of ChiCom admission as Paul-Henri Spaak has
now told us this Assembly is the last time around for him in the face of
mounting public and parliamentary pressure at home.
If we make enough of an issue of it, the British and a few others who
recognize Peking will probably stick with us in insisting a two-thirds
majority is required to change the representation of China in the UN. But at best we can hope to hold the line
on the traditional basis only through the present General Assembly. If
the line up of power in the Far East remains about the way it is, and we
do not change our UN tactics, we face a
serious defeat on the issue in the 20th General Assembly.
Studying these facts, virtually every government in the world now
believes that we are gradually losing both the guerilla war in South
Viet Nam and the parliamentary trench war in the UN.
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And a growing number of governments now seem convinced (a) that there is
a better chance of taming the aggressive behavior of the ChiComs if they are admitted to the
UN and subjected to peaceful
persuasion in its precincts; and (b) that the rigid posture of the
United States is somehow preventing an accommodation with the ChiComs.
(The evidence that the ChiComs can be
tamed by the application of sweetness and light is wholly lacking. They
are still mobilizing on India’s northern border, stirring up the Pathet
Lao, subverting Cambodia, supporting the attack by North Viet Nam on
South Viet Nam, and threatening Formosa—and they are still at war with
the UN itself in Korea. They have
exploded a nuclear device and will doubtless now add nuclear blackmail
to their kit of tools.)
This picture of our friends and allies leaving the sinking ship of U.S.
policy is not overdrawn; but what it reveals is not their defection from
the anti-Communist cause, but their defection from our existing
policies. After all, most of the relevant political leaders in the world
do not favor Chinese Communist influence; they fear it. They do not want
Southeast Asia to become a peninsula of China; they just don’t believe
we can prevent that outcome in the way we are trying to prevent it. They
do not look forward to the day the Chinese enter the United Nations;
they merely regard it as historically inevitable.
In other words, what is eroding is not the opposition
to Communist China’s behavior, but the support of our traditional
tactics for dealing with it.
[Here follows Section II, “Military Firmness and Political Flexibility,”
and the first 9 pages of Section III, “Political Perspective.”]
Even to get started on this political escalator would require enormous
changes in the attitudes and ambitions of the Chinese Communists. In
steps 2 and 4, it would also require far-reaching changes in the
attitudes and ambitions of the Government of the Republic of China—in
return for the maintenance of its name and identity, and its control
over Formosa, it would be abandoning the “return to the Mainland,”
liquidation of its own Security Council veto, and acceptance of the
People’s Republic of China as, in effect, the senior one of the two
Chinas.
It is not likely that we will have to cross many of these difficult
bridges any time soon. Indeed, the danger of getting started down this
somewhat slippery road at all is made remote by the implacable hostility
of the Chinese Communist leadership. They will surely insist for quite a
while that they won’t come into the UN
unless Taipei is thrown out and Peking gets not only the China seat in
the General Assembly but the veto in the Security Council as well.
Moreover, the Chinese Communist leaders, who are still the veterans of
the Long March, have some reason to believe that their kind of toughness
pays off: French recognition, Western trade credits, Khrushchev’s fall
and the political fall out of their own nuclear test all bear
witness.
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But if we were to indicate to the world our willingness to move down a
peaceful road by negotiated steps at a negotiated speed (while
increasing our military pressure to demonstrate that we do not regard
fighting and talking as alternatives but as mutually reinforcing
policies), we would place on the Chinese Communists, where it belongs,
the onus for delaying its own acceptance into the community of nations
and the United Nations peace system.
Indeed, we should not at first have to do more than (a) insist that
changes in Chinese behavior are an essential to an accommodation of the
ChiComs on its relationship to
the UN; and (b) indicate that Laos and
the Nuclear Test Ban are the obvious places to start testing China’s
willingness to be in fact a part of the world community. Later, while
the ChiRep item is being discussed in
the 19th General Assembly, we could (c) indicate our willingness to join
in setting up a “study committee” on ChiRep, to report to the 20th General Assembly in 1964.
(Such a tactic was approved for possible use in last year’s General
Assembly, but was not used since we clearly had the votes to beat the
Albanian resolution on its merits.)
Clearly the traditional structure of the ChiRep issue, which has (remarkably) served us well for a
decade-and-a-half, is eaten away at its very foundations. Our major
allies, France and Britain, will not help us maintain it and most of our
other significant allies, from Italy and Belgium around to the
Philippines and Japan, are hanging on only for fear of what it would do
to their relationship with us if they were to let go.
Our cue, surely, is to find a way of mobilizing all of the world’s
nations that oppose the way the Chinese Communists are using their
power, in a new strategy that puts the primary stress on future
improvements in Chinese behavior.
