Between Friends

The U.S. stood in a perilous position as the high-riding Chinese Communists took their seats at the U.N. Security Council this week. The visitors from Peiping had a good chance of driving a wedge between the U.S. and its allies. What Communism would lose by arms in Korea, the Reds were out to recover by blackmail.

At Lake Success, appeasement was in the air. The British were in a mood to make a deal, and their phrase for it was "buffer state." Their hope was that the Chinese Reds could be persuaded to withdraw peacefully to the Manchurian border, provided that a large adjoining strip of North Korea was made into a neutral zone, administered, presumably, by the United Nations.

Appeal. It was the kind of solution that had a strong appeal to a large number of U.N. members, among them some nations that have long been stout U.S. allies. They stood in dread of how Soviet Russia would react if & when Douglas MacArthur drove to the Yalu River, finally stood arrayed 80 miles west of Vladivostok and 185 miles east of Port Arthur.

The fallacy of the buffer state was the fallacy of any settlement arrived at by agreement with the Communists; the agreement was good only as long as it suited an aggressor to keep it. In the Sudetenland and at Munich, the world had had just such a lesson.

So far Dean Acheson's State Department was standing fast against a deal with the Chinese Reds. The U.S. (despite some timid souls in high places, including the Pentagon) was still pledged to destroy all Communist forces in Korea and drive all the way to the Manchurian frontier.

Attack. In Korea General MacArthur took the bull by the horns and threw seven divisions into an all-out drive to clear North Korea. The Chinese met the U.N. offensive with a heavy counterattack (see WAR IN ASIA). If Mao Tse-tung hoped to blackmail the U.S. and U.N. into giving him i) U.N. membership, 2) Formosa, he had to maintain a strong position in Korea for at least the next two or three weeks while his delegation was negotiating at Lake Success. The cue for U.S. delegates in the U.N. was to play for time, enter into no negotiations with the Chinese, and do what it could to persuade its lagging and anxious allies.

The peril of the U.S. position was that in the U.N. it could never act alone. It had to deal with its friends, as well as its enemies. The question for the moment was whether MacArthur could take the rest of North Korea before the conciliators gave it away--and threw away the prestige which the U.N. had recently won in Asia.

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