Choosing Your Friends
HAD it not been for the ill-starred flight of the U2, President Eisenhower would now be visiting the Soviet Union—and receiving, no doubt, a friendlier welcome than he looks like getting in Japan. Not that the violent Japanese reactions to his visit are the result solely of failure at the Summit, but recent events have lent power to the elbow of Mr. Kishi's political opponents and the critics of the American treaty (not all of whom are Communists, by any means), and revived all the anti-Americanism and all the pacifism of the one country in the world that has suffered atomic attack—and at American hands. Nor is it only Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the American hydrogen-bomb test in the Bikini area in 1954, and the fear and anger that followed the discovery that the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel was suffering from radiation sickness, are freshly remembered now that Marshal Malin- ovsky has threatened the bases from which the Americans send up their espionage flights.
Once Mr. Hagerty was airborne in his heli- copter, President Eisenhower was bound to stick to his Japanese programme. But he would have been well advised to have put it off before that —as soon as the Summit was seen to have failed. Unfortunately, the Americans have never under- stood the ambivalent attitude of the most liberal Japanese towards them or why the Japanese should differ from the West Germans, whose patterns of behaviour were nothing like so out- raged by the occupying American forces as those of the Japanese, and who have not had atomic bombs dropped on them from American aircraft. By pointing to country after peripheral country —to Japan after Turkey after Korea—the Rus- sians are able to demonstrate to the uncommitted spectators that those who uphold the Western alliance are at best reactionaries and at worst bloody ruffians. These are victories in the diplo- matic war. If the United States is to fight back, it must brush up its diplomacy; try harder to understand the psychology of smaller nations; and choose its friends among them—and within them—a little more judiciously.
Previous page
