Accommodations Wanted

While the Truman-Attlee talks were going on in Washington last week, Canada voiced its own Asian policy. On the surface it seemed to be even more conciliatory than Britain's. Canadian leaders evidently were deeply fearful that the West was skidding into a futile, ruinous war, but the alternative they offered looked strangely like peace at just about the price that Red China was likely to ask.

The Canadian policy was set forth in a more direct and specific form than the British position. As stated by External Affairs Chief Lester Bowles Pearson, and discussed privately by Ottawa officials, Canada's view ef the situation added up to this:

P: War with China is unthinkable; it would be a sinkhole of Western strength, a "trap" plotted in Moscow to divert the West from defense of Europe.

P: The West should seek a cease-fire in Korea, then try to bargain with Red Leader Mao Tse-tung for a working agreement with Asian Communism.

P: The West might still avert disaster through accelerated rearmament and more aid to have-not peoples, provided that Russia was not yet ready for total war.

Beyond this, Pearson had no specific proposals. He thought the Western tune could be played by ear around the conference table. But broadly Canada favored a settlement in which Mao would withdraw from Korea in return for Western concessions--presumably the admission of the Chinese Communists to the United Nations and abandonment of Formosa and Chiang Kaishek.

Said Pearson: "I know that the policy I suggest will be called 'appeasement' by some . . . Let us not be frightened by words." He argued that this would be no Munich because it would sacrifice nobody's freedom. Pearson's word for his program: "Accommodations."

For all of the diplomatic smoke and steam, there was no real doubt in Ottawa or elsewhere that Canada stood squarely with the U.S. if total war proved to be the fateful outcome. Almost as a token of this, when the U.S. ordered an embargo on trade with Communist China last week, the Dominion immediately followed suit.

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