No Road in Korea
The spectacle of talks going on at Panmunjom while fight- ing continues between the Communist and the United Nations forces has been a depressing enough feature of the Far Eastern scene for the past two years. The prospect of the addition of another tier of talks, between American representa- tives and Mr. Syngman Rhee, is intolerable. Yet the talks go on; there is no possibility of a satisfactdry conclusion to them, since no promise made by Mr. Rhee, however reason- able in appearance, can be trusted; and there is no sign of an alternative policy to take the place of interminable and pointless parley. Washington, despite a great deal of going and coming in military and diplomatic circles, seems to be quite, barren of ideas of how tc), break the deadlock, and the egregious Senators McCarthy and Knowland have managed to make the achievement of a clear American policy more distant than ever by saying that Mr. Rhee is right in preferring mass suicide to an armistice. There is the coldest of comfort in the facts that if the Communists themselves were to break off the armistice talks altogether they might heal the breach between the United Nations and Mr. Rhee, since there would then be nothing for it but to prepare for harder fighting, and that if Chinese troops were not tied up in Korea they might be making a nuisance of themselves elsewhere—say in Indo- China. In fact, the only settlement that even dimly suggests itself is one under which, first, the division of Korea would remain for an indefinite period, which could only end in the event of a reliable and amicable settlement throughout the Far East; second, troops would man the frontier continuously during that period to prevent any new aggression from the north; and, third, Mr. Rhee would be kept under control.
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