Defusing the Crisis in Cambodia

FOR a few days last week, it looked as if Cambodia might become another South Viet Nam. Communist insurgent forces, armed and led by the North Vietnamese, were besieging the Cambodian capital, Phnom-Penh. U.S. B-52s bombed through the night around Phnom-Penh, hoping to hold off the enemy and prop up the shaky, dictatorial regime of President Lon Nol. General Alexander Haig Jr., U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff and former deputy to Henry Kissinger, was sent on a fast fact-finding tour of Indochina. While high Washington officials called the situation "abysmal" and "awful," President Nixon went off to ponder at Camp David -usually the prelude to an important announcement. Congressional Democrats fretted that the U.S. was about to bog down in still another quagmire.

That has not happened yet -and probably will never happen. General Haig returned with a relaxed pronouncement: "The situation is very complex," he said, "but it is not as drastic as it has been described." The President came down from Camp David with nothing dramatic to announce. At a meeting of the National Security Council, the subject of Cambodia did not even come up, and Nixon did not bother to debrief Haig until the meeting was over.

Teetering. For the President, Cambodia remains more of a diplomatic than a military problem, despite the heavy U.S. bombing. As long as Phnom-Penh holds out with U.S. air support, Nixon can live with the situation and hope for the best. The U.S. told Hanoi again that the Communist drive in Cambodia is in clear breach of the Paris accords, which call for a cease-fire in that beautiful but battered country. If the offensive in Cambodia continues, the U.S. will not give North Viet Nam the postwar reconstruction aid that has been promised. The North Vietnamese are unlikely to be much moved by that threat. Still, they can never be sure what Nixon may do -short of recommitting U.S. ground troops to Indochina. Defense Secretary Elliot Richardson has made it clear that, if sufficiently provoked, the U.S. will send the bombers over North Viet Nam again. It is also possible that South Vietnamese troops might go to the aid of Lon Nol.

All last week, the White House remained in direct contact by cable with Peking and Moscow. The President urged Chinese and Soviet leaders to pressure Hanoi to end the Cambodian offensive. But they can only do so much. They are competing for influence in postwar North Viet Nam, and they do not want to alienate Hanoi. On the other hand, they do not want to damage their improving relations with the U.S. by encouraging the North Vietnamese. It is a delicate diplomatic balancing act that could easily collapse, but for the moment all parties were still teetering on the high wire.

At the same time, the White House is trying to shore up the Lon Nol regime (see THE WORLD). But there are limits to U.S. intervention. The White House has no intention of repeating the kind of action that led to the bloody overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Viet Nam. One possibility is a return to power of deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk. No one wants this more than Sihanouk, who just arrived back in Peking after a month-long visit to insurgent-held areas in Cambodia, where he tried to drum up support among the various factions. So far, the U.S. has rejected the idea of bringing back Sihanouk.

In South Viet Nam, meanwhile, the war that had supposedly ended was still going on. The North Vietnamese continue to pour in men and supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and they have as much firepower in the South as they did when they launched last spring's offensive. Every day they blow up bridges, lob hand grenades and pepper various government-held positions with small-arms fire.

The Communists are not especially careful about their targets. They fired on two helicopters carrying members of the International Commission of Control and Supervision. One was downed, killing nine people, among them a Canadian. Even before this happened, the frustrated Canadian government had served notice that it would pull out of the four-nation peace-keeping mission by the end of June unless a cease-fire occurs in fact as well as theory.

In Saigon, the North and South Vietnamese are barely civil to each other. The Paris accords call for "consultations in a spirit of national reconciliation and concord, mutual respect and mutual non-elimination." But, no less than the Communists, President Nguyen Van Thieu, who returned to Saigon last week from a trip abroad, still prefers to pursue a policy of elimination. So far he has shown far more political strength than anyone had thought he would immediately after the ceasefire. He has made only a pretense of moving toward joint political arrangements with the Communists, feeling no pressure to do so. He keeps the Viet Cong delegation isolated in their spartan compound at Tan Son Nhut, located in Saigon. He orders as many as 80 air strikes a day in Tay Ninh and Binh Long provinces north of Saigon near the Cambodian border, where the Communists are believed to have heavy equipment. Throughout South Viet Nam, Thieu's artillery thud away with out letup. "The South Vietnamese are unloading ship after ship of 105-mm. and 155-mm. artillery shells," says an ICCS member in Danang. "And God knows they need it. They shoot off that much on Sundays alone."

Nixon has fewer options than before in Indochina. The U.S. is only one of several players with waning influence over events. Neither the American public nor the Communist powers will allow the President much freedom of action. This puts all the more emphasis on quiet diplomacy, a craft in which Nixon is skilled. How to maintain the Cambodian balancing act, how to achieve something between victory and defeat remain his mission in Indochina.

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