Tempting Fruit

In the eyes of many Americans, the worst result of Berlin was the agreement to negotiate on Korea and Indo-China at the April conference in Geneva. In French eyes, this was the best result. Reporting last week to the National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Committee, Foreign Minister Georges Bidault said: "The situation in Europe is identical with what it was before ... but the results on Asia would in themselves justify the meeting of the four ministers." Proudly and perhaps unwisely, M. Bidault represented the Geneva agreement as a concession he had wrung from Dulles in return for Bidault's loyal and able help on the German problem.

Defense Minister Rene Pleven, who has been heading a fact-finding mission in Indo-China, left Saigon for Paris this week, and the prospect was that his group would recommend cease-fire negotiations with the Viet Minh Communists. Pleven, generally helpful and sympathetic to U.S. strategic aims, warned that the outcome at Geneva is "unpredictable," and he also said that France would go to the meeting "as a great nation without fear and reproaches, which did not want this war but does not surrender to violence and does not abandon her friends."

What can be negotiated in Indo-China? In the U.S. view, little except an abject surrender to the Communists. The country cannot be divided, like Korea, for the Viet Minh forces cannot be shut off by a tourniquet: they are in the blood stream. Moreover, the French hold the two important rice deltas, but the Hanoi delta is in the north and the Mekong delta is in the south, and the French could not give up Hanoi, as they must in any north-south division.

In a different sort of deal, if Ho Chi Minh were to get a share in the government, he would soon have all of Indo-China. The U.S. cannot confidently urge free elections in Viet Nam as it did in Korea, for it is not certain whom the Vietnamese would choose if confronted with a choice between Ho and Chief of State Bao Dai.

All this is well understood by General Henri Navarre and his hardheaded lieutenants in the war theater. They hold that the best outcome of Geneva would be an agreement by Red China to stop supplying the Viet Minh. Then, they say, "Ho Chi Minh would wither on the vine, like the guerrilla leader Markos in Greece." But what price would the Moscow-Peking axis exact for such a boon? If the enemy offered it at all, the price would be high. To which Paris replies, hopefully, that they detect an "appetite for negotiations" and signs of inner tiredness among the Viet Minh, too.

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