Divided Allies: Strategic Cooperation Against the Communist Threat in the Asia-Pacific During the Early Cold War by Thomas K. Robb & David James Gill

Author:Thomas K. Robb & David James Gill [Robb, Thomas K. & Gill, David James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Political Science, History & Theory, Intergovernmental Organizations
ISBN: 9781501741869
Google: Ab2tDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell
Published: 2019-11-15T14:04:14+00:00

Collective Security

U.S. efforts to win international support began in earnest with Dulles delivering his “united action speech,” officially titled “The Threat of a Red Asia,” on March 29, 1954. He warned that “if Communist forces won uncontested control over Indochina or any substantial part thereof, they would surely resume the same pattern of aggression against other free peoples in the area…. The United States feels that that possibility should not be passively accepted but should be met by united action.”49 As Dulles had agreed with the president prior to delivering his speech, the language he used would clearly illustrate that the United States was not “appeasing” the People’s Republic of China. Instead, it would serve as a strong statement that emphasized to the press the commitment of the United States to “deeds” and not just “words.”50 Eisenhower supported Dulles’s efforts by emphasizing publicly the strategic importance of retaining Indochina in the Western camp. As the president told reporters, the loss of Indochina to Communism was “incalculable to the free world.”51

Washington’s attention turned toward London.52 On liaising with British officials, Dulles found that there was limited enthusiasm for united action in Indochina. They believed that intervention was likely to precipitate a war against the PRC in a similar fashion to events during the Korean War. Having brokered a cease-fire only a year earlier with North Korea, there was little enthusiasm in London for another major crisis.53 More alarming yet, the British believed that if any such war escalated, it would likely lead to Soviet intervention, which would escalate into a global conflagration and produce what Churchill feared the most: “an assault by hydrogen bombs” on the United Kingdom.54 As the prime minister remarked a year earlier, he had “lived seventy-eight years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia” and he therefore saw no reason to allow East-West disputes over such places to lead to global war.55 In a secret planning paper, however, British intelligence had called Indochina the “front line of the Cold War in South-East Asia.”56 Yet this conclusion did not necessitate a military response for the British cabinet. The British believed that such action was futile, as a war against the PRC would escalate quickly to involve the Soviet Union. London’s reaction to a New Zealand staff paper, which suggested that planning for a war solely against the PRC should begin, highlighted a clear reluctance to commit to military force.57

Although the British government was reluctant to support united action as currently proposed, it did welcome the opportunity to capitalize on U.S. proposals and pursue its interests in the region. As London informed Washington, it was open to creating an alliance of Asia-Pacific powers of a “more general and enduring nature,” which contradicted Dulles’s preference for a “temporary arrangement.”58 The British government saw these U.S. proposals for united action as a means of securing their long-term ambition of creating a broader alliance in the Asia-Pacific that included both British and U.S. participation and rectified their continuing exclusion from ANZUS and strategic planning in the region more generally.

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