The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [168]
Tragedy deeper than a mistake was seen in the same year by an observer deeply concerned with the American relation to Asia. In his book Wanted: An Asian Policy, Edwin O. Reischauer, Far East specialist and future Ambassador to Japan, located the tragedy in the West’s having allowed Indochinese nationalism to become a Communist cause. This is what had come of American support of the French in “an extremely ineffective and ultimately hopeless defense of the status quo.” The result “shows how absurdly wrong we are to battle Asian nationalism instead of aiding it.”
Under Dulles’ relentlessly organizing hand, a conference to establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) met at Manila in September 1954. By involving only three Asian nations, and only two—Thailand and the Philippines—from Southeast Asia (the third was Pakistan), and only one contiguous to Indochina and none from Indochina itself, it lacked a certain authenticity from the start. The other members were Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Combatively as ever, Dulles informed the delegates that their purpose was to agree in advance on a response “so united, so strong and so well-placed” that any aggression against the treaty area would lose more than it could gain. Since the Asian members of the conference had no appreciable military power, and the others were either in no geographical position to deploy it or were already withdrawing from the area, and since the United States itself had reached no settled commitment of forces for the defense of Southeast Asia, the Secretary’s demand was an exercise in make-believe. In Article IV, the operative core of the treaty, he obtained a commitment by each member to “meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.” This was not exactly the ready sword Excalibur.
In a separate protocol, Dulles managed to bring the Associated States of Indochina under the protection of Article IV and to define its obligations, to his own satisfaction, as a “clear and definite agreement on the part of the signatories” to come to the aid of any member of the pact subjected to aggression. In real terms, as a delegate from the Defense Department, Vice-Admiral Davis, said, the treaty left Southeast Asia “no better prepared than before to cope with Communist aggression.”
In the meantime a new premier of South Vietnam had been installed who from the start to violent finish was an American client. Chosen not from within the country but from the circle of Vietnamese exiles outside, he was elevated by French and American manipulations in which France was a very reluctant partner. For the sake of motivating greater energy and self-reliance in South Vietnam, the United States was determined to remove the French presence apart from the unfortunate necessity of retaining France’s armed forces until a reliable Vietnamese army could be officered and trained to take their place. Under the Geneva arrangements, the French were obligated to supervise the armistice and the eventual elections, and for them it was hard not to assume that during the transition period their commercial and administrative and cultural ties could be maintained and developed toward a voluntary inclusion of Indochina in the French Union.
The United States wanted the contrary and found a player in Ngo Dinh Diem, an ardent nationalist of a Catholic mandarin family whose father had been a Lord Chamberlain at the Imperial Court of Annam. Diem had served as