Evening star., 1953-05-08
Shape of THINGS to Come?

When the bill is presented for past errors
in the foreign policy of the free world, it is
always presented very suddenly with no chance
for comfortable payment, either in the form
of quick settlement or on easy terms. It is
as though history, which presents the bill, had
been watching all the time, observing the casual
errors the careless responsibility, the opti-
nistic hoping that all would come right in the
end with no real effort on the free worlds part.
1t does not, unfortunately, work that way;
it never has and it never will Now the bill
has been presented again in Southeast Asia,
and everybody is rushing about attempting to
scrape up the payment. But the payment will
not be found, either in a quick lump sum or
in easy installments. It will be long time
before the account is settled, and blood is the
ink with which the receipt will be marked paid.
OF course we are all doing what we can. The
United States Government is promising to hurry
up it's shipments of money and equipment-but
not men--to Laos and Thailand; there is talk
of appealing the matter to the United Nations;
exclamations of pain and horror are reverber-
ating through the capitals of the free world.
But resolutions and appeals and exclamations,
and even a few moth-eaten planes and guns,
are not the payment this bill demands This
bill has been outstanding long time, and
although all thinking men must have been at
least dmly aware that it would presently be
submitted, nothing has been prepared for 1t.
So Southeast Asia may fall-a Japanese
conquest repeated all over again, although this
time without any Pearl Harbor to solve our
moral dilemma and make it easy for us to go
to war All the Communists need to do is
avoid the overt attack upon us, and we prob
ably will sit here confused and arguing and
upset and bafflled and talkative while the
AFolo y,c,,1o
more fall to an enemy And after Malaga, as
the Ambassador of Thailand remarked the other
day, comes all of Asia; and after all of Asia
comes Australia and New Zealand and then
across the Pacific and beyond.
Today this is happening In Southeast Asia;
tomorrow it may we'll be happening in the
Middle East. In all these areas, we know we
are threatened, but we find ourselves uncertain
exactly how we should meet the threat So
we compromise on doing nothing. Presently
events move to climax and we find it is too
late to do anything. Then there is much out
ragged noise to mollify conscience and excuse
past error. But the enemy moves on, flowing
in his inexorable tide into new regions, and we
learn anew what we knew already, that nothing
can recapture the opportunity missed or the
decisive moment allowed to pass.
Perhaps something can be retrieved in
Southeast Asia; maybe little can be saved.
More probably nothing can, until such time
as we finally stop avoiding the logic of history
and come really to grips with the threat which
confronts US. This we will almost certainly
never do without open pressure from the enemy;
all we can hope is that it does not come too
late for US to recover our determination and
proceed without equivocation along the only
course of firmness and integrity which can save
the free world.