CHAPTER V

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The Containment
Policy in Asia

WHEREAS the American containment policy in Europe and the Middle East was designed to cope with what were perceived as Stalin’s hostility and expansionist tendencies, American containment efforts in Asia were aimed mainly against behavior also perceived as hostile and threatening on the part of the People’s Republic of China, which was considered to be very closely allied with the Soviet Union.

The Origins of Sino-American Hostility

The United States was drawn into the Second World War largely because it refused, on account of its traditional friendship for China symbolized by the Open Door Policy and its desire to keep Southeast Asia in friendly hands, to concede Japan the freedom of action in China and Southeast Asia that Tokyo demanded. The support that the United States gave to Chiang Kai-shek’s government in connection with the American war effort against Japan created a considerable sense of commitment to the survival of that government, even though its shortcomings were recognized to be numerous and serious. Thus American support for Chiang Kai-shek turned fairly logically after V-J Day, although not without objections from some American officials and private citizens, into support for Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists. This policy, which took the form mainly of economic and military aid but not the commitment of American combat forces, was limited until mid-1946 by an active American effort to mediate between the Nationalists and the Communists, and for a year after that by an embargo on American arms shipments to the Nationalists, but it was nevertheless substantial. Although obviously not sufficient to save the Nationalists, who probably could not have been saved by any action that it would realistically speaking have been within the power of the United States to take, this support was quite sufficient to antagonize the Communists. Their ideology and their orientation toward Stalin at the height of his Cold War with the United States, as well as their felt need for a proclaimed external adversary against whom Chinese popular support could be mobilized, further biased the Communists against the United States. Some indications to the contrary notwithstanding, it is unlikely that anything the United States could realistically have done would have prevented the emergence of an adversary relationship with the Chinese Communists, who openly proclaimed their support for Stalin against not only Tito but the United States as early as November 1948.

Although discouraged by these indications and by the maltreatment of some American diplomats by the Communists in late 1949, in violation of their diplomatic immunity, the State Department hoped until about the beginning of 1950 that some sort of reasonable relationship could be worked out with the new Communist regime without a complete abandonment of the Nationalists, who had taken refuge on Taiwan. With this in mind, American support for Taiwan was limited to economic aid; President Truman announced on January 5, 1950 that the United States would not try to prevent the Communists from taking the island. This stand was not changed when Mao Tse-tung concluded an alliance with Stalin on February 14, 1950, even though that action startled American officialdom and contributed heavily to bringing it to the conclusion that China was now a Soviet satellite.

Domestic American politics also played an important role in the estrangement between Peking and Washington. Conservative Republicans began to accuse the Truman administration, quite unfairly, of having “lost” China, and in the spring of 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy offered as the explanation for the “loss” the allegation that the administration was riddled with Communists and Communist sympathizers. To this partisan furor a major contribution seems to have been made by the so-called China Lobby, a lavishly financed propaganda operation working on behalf of the Nationalists. It rapidly became a political impossibility for the State Department, which was the conservatives’ main target, to go on exploring the possibility of a relationship with Peking, especially in view of the Chinese Communists’ increasingly anti-American and pro-Soviet stance.

The North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950 appeared to a startled Washington as the opening gun of some Stalinist master plan for Asia of which his presumed satellites, the North Koreans themselves and the Chinese, were the active agents. This view tended to make the administration review its stand on Taiwan. Furthermore, the conservatives and the China Lobby were demanding American support and protection for the island. It seemed unlikely that the administration would get sufficient Congressional Republican support for military operations in defense of South Korea unless Taiwan was also brought under the American wing. On June 27, accordingly, President Truman not only began to commit American forces to Korea but announced that the United States would prevent military movements across the Taiwan Strait in either direction; since the Nationalists had no capability of attacking the mainland, this meant in effect simply that Taiwan was now under American protection. This step, which Peking promptly began to denounce as an American “occupation” of Taiwan, which it regards as Chinese territory, immediately became the most serious single political issue between the Chinese Communists and the United States. The undeclared Sino-American war in Korea was even more traumatic, but it was comparatively short-lived (October 1950-July 1953). Its main significance in this context was that it generated a strong belief on the part of the political public of each adversary that the other was its principal enemy and rival in Asia. The Chinese, as the weaker party in terms of strategic military power, acquired a strong sense of the United States as a serious threat to their security and even to their survival, not only on account of the Korean War but on account of the threatening military posture assumed by the United States in Asia at that time for the purpose of containing China.

Containment and Isolation

The predominant official and public American view of Peking for about a decade after 1950 was that it was expansionist, both by its own nature and by virtue of its presumed status as a Soviet satellite. Being expansionist, it must be contained militarily and to the extent possible isolated politically, in this view.

Beginning in 1950, the United States expanded the military bases it already had in Japan (notably Okinawa) and the Philippines into a vast network that included bases and powerful combat forces in South Korea, and ultimately Indochina and Thailand as well. The main adversary against whom these forces were arrayed was of course Communist China.

Parallel with the presence of American forces in the Far East and the Western Pacific, a series of military alliances and similar pacts was negotiated by the United States with friendly Asian governments (Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of China, and the Philippines) during the last few years of the Truman administration and the first few years of the Eisenhower administration. In addition, SEATO was brought into being by Secretary Dulles in 1954 as a collective security organization embracing the United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. Its main single purpose, at least in official American eyes, was to give Thailand some protection against possible Chinese attack or subversion. SEATO lacks NATO’s joint command structure and has become increasingly ineffective as the image of a Chinese military threat to Southeast Asia has faded. The bilateral pacts lack the automatic quality of the NATO treaty; at Congressional insistence, the United States can act to meet threats to its Asian allies only in accordance with its own “constitutional processes.” Accordingly, American military activities have had to be conducted to a large extent under various executive orders and agreements and Congressional resolutions, rather than pursuant to formal treaty rights and obligations. The two major relevant Congressional resolutions are the Formosa Resolution, which was adopted in 1955, had become a dead letter by about 1970, and authorized the President not only to defend Taiwan if attacked but to commit American forces to the defense of the Nationalist-held offshore islands (mainly Quemoy, opposite Amoy), if in his judgment a Communist attack on them was part of an attack on Taiwan itself; and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which was adopted in August 1964, repealed in 1970, and authorized the President to employ American forces in Indochina more or less as he saw fit.

Partly, although by no means exclusively, in connection with its effort to contain China, the United States became involved in the 1950s in economic aid programs for practically every non-Communist Asian country. There were also large military aid programs for the Republic of Korea, the Republic of China, and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), as well as smaller ones for Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. The size of the individual programs was not made public. In addition, these countries, except for relatively prosperous Japan, received substantial amounts of a special type of economic aid known as defense support, much of which consisted of consumer goods, and the announced purpose of which was to help them support higher defense budgets than would have been possible otherwise and to combat inflation by “mopping up excess purchasing power.” The actual effect was often to encourage inflation and increase the political power of authoritarian governments and military elites. The latter tendency was generally regarded by the United States as an inevitable byproduct of the entire containment policy, one of whose strategies was strengthening “indigenous forces” on the principle (to use one of the Eisenhower administration’s slogans) of “Let Asians fight Asians.”

Parallel with containment went a far-reaching American effort to isolate the People’s Republic of China from even peaceful external contacts to the extent possible, in the hope of “hastening its passing” (Dulles’s phrase) in favor of the Nationalist regime, which continued to enjoy American diplomatic recognition and political support, as well as aid and protection. The United States did not permit the Nationalists to try a major attack on the mainland, however. The United States accordingly withheld diplomatic recognition from Peking and urged other countries to do the same, although with gradually diminishing success. The United States worked hard and continually, and until 1971 successfully, to keep Peking out of the United Nations and the Nationalists in. American influence was largely responsible for the passage by the United Nations General Assembly in February 1951 of a resolution condemning Peking as an aggressor in Korea, and in May of the same year of a resolution urging all members of the United Nations to avoid exporting strategic commodities (i.e., items considered to have military significance) to mainland China. The United States went farther and embargoed all trade with mainland China after 1949; it also persuaded its major allies, until about 1957, to apply a broader definition of the term “strategic” in the case of exports to China than was applied in the case of exports to the Soviet Union, the discrepancy being referred to in bureaucratic terminology as the “China differential.”

The main exception to the containment-with-isolation policy was a series of Sino-American talks at the ambassadorial level that began in 1955, first at Geneva and then (after 1958) at Warsaw. From time to time these talks achieved useful results, such as a mutual release of civilian prisoners and the maintenance of communication during crises (notably those of 1958 and 1962 in the Taiwan Strait, and the escalated war in Vietnam after 1965). The possibility of Sino-American trade and travel was discussed; until about 1957 the Chinese side was more forthcoming on this question, but after that the reverse was usually true, because the Great Leap Forward induced a mood of overall militancy whereas the United States government came under pressure to allow American correspondents to go to China. The State Department issued passports valid for travel to China to about thirty correspondents, but Peking refused (except in one case) to grant them visas. There was a virtual deadlock on the critical question of Taiwan; the American side demanded a “renunciation of force” by Peking with respect to the island, whereas the Chinese side rejected this demand and insisted that the United States abandon its military protection of Taiwan.

The Trend toward Containment
without Isolation

During the 1960s the idea of containing possible Chinese military expansion at the expense of American allies or interests in Asia continued to find favor with official American opinion and with most sectors of American public opinion except for radicals. Peking’s attack on India in 1962 seemed to demonstrate the need for a continuation of the containment policy. American military intervention in Vietnam was officially rationalized to a considerable extent on the ground that it was an indispensable act of containment of China, inasmuch as Hanoi was considered, although incorrectly, a virtual satellite of Peking. The Chinese were known to be the more militantly anti-American of the parties to the Sino-Soviet dispute, whose existence was generally conceded by official Washington after 1962.

On the other hand, Peking’s militancy or apparent militancy made many American liberals believe that it would be dangerous to continue the effort to isolate China, for whose attitude increased international contact was held to be the best or even the only cure. Chinese resentment at American policies was advanced as an argument in favor of the thesis, which turned out to be too alarmist, that the two powers were on a “collision course” over Vietnam. Furthermore, isolation was not working very well; Peking’s external political and economic relations had continued to expand in spite of it, and in the matter of China policy it seemed to be the United States that was in danger of becoming isolated. American public attitudes toward China were tending to mellow with the passage of time since the Korean War, the main aspect of Peking’s external behavior that affected the American people as a whole. On the other hand, there remained an articulate core of conservative opinion that still strongly opposed any changes in the containment-with-isolation policy.

For the latter reason, and because of the narrowness of his electoral victory, President Kennedy felt it advisable to be very cautious about any changes in China policy, although some of his subordinates proposed relaxing the ban on trade with and travel to mainland China (over and above the travel by correspondents already authorized). Chinese behavior during this period, some aspects of which have already been noted, did little to change his mind. In 1961, at a time of food shortages in China, he offered to sell Peking grain, only to be rudely rebuffed. Nevertheless, he made it clear in June 1962 that the United States would not support a Nationalist attack on the mainland if one occurred. In December 1963, the month after Kennedy’s assassination, Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman made a speech indicating that the United States government regarded the Communist regime in China as more or less permanent and hoped for better relations with it as the passage of time eroded its militancy.

By the spring of 1966, concern over the possibility of a Sino-American war over Vietnam had become fairly acute in both Washington and Peking. One result was a kind of tacit agreement, worked out at Warsaw in mid-March, to the effect that neither side would escalate the existing level of its involvement in Vietnam to the direct disadvantage of the other; as long as China did not intervene in the war the United States would not attack it, and vice versa. At the same time, liberal concern over the possibility of a Sino-American clash found an important expression in the shape of hearings on China conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under the chairmanship of Senator J. William Fuibright. The first witness, Professor A. Doak Barnett, proposed the principle of “containment without isolation” for American China policy; the phrase was echoed by Vice President Humphrey shortly afterward, and in July President Johnson spoke publicly in favor of “reconciliation” with mainland China. These developments seriously alarmed Moscow, which began to be nervous about the possibility of Sino-American “collusion” at Soviet expense. Soviet policy itself was to bring about something like this result a few years later, by virtually driving China into the arms of the United States.

In spite of all this, apart from the avoidance of war over Vietnam the idea of modifying American China policy was not translated into action during the Johnson administration. Preoccupation with Vietnam tended to blot out possible initiatives in other aspects of foreign policy. In spite of a continuing decline in the effectiveness and credibility of isolation, containment remained the actual official policy.