Recessional

FAREWELL, FAR EAST, headlined the London Evening Standard. In the Daily Express, Labor M.P. Desmond Donnelly called the government's plan "the most stark military withdrawal since the Roman legions were recalled from Britain." With a mingled sense of nostalgia and relief, Britain announced that it will gradually rid itself of the most burdensome vestige of its venerable but faded oriental empire. In a long-expected move, the government issued a Defense Ministry White Paper calling for withdrawal of all 80,000 British troops and civilians from Singapore and Malaysia by the mid-1970s.

The phasing out of British forces east of Suez will be part of an overall military reduction outside Europe that Britain says should save it a badly needed $216 million a year. But the decision represents as much a hello to Europe as a farewell to the Far East, since it is in large part a concession to Charles de Gaulle, who demands that Britain give up some of its far-flung responsibilities and draw closer to Europe as a condition of entering the Common Market.

Defense Minister Denis Healey envisions an eventual cut of one-fourth of Britain's 417,360-man military force, including the already announced withdrawal next year from the troubled colony of Aden in South Arabia. The most dramatic aspect of the pullback will be the dismantling of Britain's mammoth naval base at Singapore, whose strategic location near the Malacca Strait has long enabled Britain to police Far Eastern sea-lanes. (Singapore has neither the ships nor the money to use the base itself, and made it clear that the U.S. Navy would not be welcome.) Britain still plans to keep a 9,000-man garrison in beleaguered Hong Kong.

Defense Minister Healey said that Britain would honor its obligations to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization but that the forces pledged to SEATO would be altered in "nature and size." Warning against the assumption that "we will never again have to use our forces in the Far East," Healey said that in the next decade new air craft will enable Britain to move men into the area faster and in much larger numbers than now. Britain plans to base recently purchased U.S. F-111 jet fighter-bombers both in Singapore and in Australia. So far, there is no change in its plan to establish "staging bases" with the U.S. on tiny atolls such as Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It is, however, giving up much of its remaining naval striking power; it plans to retire its four remaining aircraft carriers by the mid-1970s.

Troubled Allies. The planned withdrawal is as much due to Britain's strict austerity drive--initiated a year ago--as it is to De Gaulle. The British are having a hard time trying to wipe out their foreign-trade deficit and shore up the pound, which last week was shakier than it has been for a year, partly because of trade losses stemming from the war in the Middle East. Thus, the $384 million that Britain paid last year for the upkeep of bases outside Europe looked like a luxury. Healey intends to cut this figure to about $168 million by the mid-1970s.

Whatever their sympathies for Britain's financial plight, her allies in the Far East were troubled by the new policy. The U.S., Australia and New Zealand are worried that they will have to assume the obligations that Britain is abandoning. President Johnson seems to believe that the British can be dissuaded from a headlong retreat. He said that he was "very hopeful that the British would maintain their interest in that part of the world." Secretary of State Rusk publicly regretted Britain's decision, but he warned pointedly that aggressors in Asia "should take no comfort" from the pullout.

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