Asia After Korea
By JU-LES MENKEN
IN East and South-east Asia as elsewhere throughout the world, the key to Communist policy is poWer. This does not mean that other factors are negligible; their importance, indeed, is obvious and great. But it does create unfamiliar and intractable difficulties of interpretation for those outside the inner councils of the Krenilin or Peking who are concerned with the meaning of Communist words and actions. As a historian of Soviet policy Mr. Beloff has naturally encountered these difficulties in his new book.* His efforts to deal with them are not wholly satisfactory. At one level, it is true—the formal and external level of events and Soviet comment on them—Mr: Beloff handles his narrative in the main with his accustomed competence. But at the deeper level of interpretation he unfortunately fails. In part this is due to his insistence on " properly substantiated answers "- properly substantiated, that is, by the canons which professional historians normally apply in other fields. Of course there are no such answers; the profoundly conspiratorial character and techniques of World Communism exclude them from the outset. For the rest, Mr. Beloff's failure flows largely from his disregard of the key of power without which there can be no true understanding of Soviet and Communist world policy, nor any hope of dealing with the problems/ and dangers which they present.
Asia has long occupied a special place in the Communist strategy of power. From Lenin onwards Communists have looked to its millions as a source of strength for themselves and of weakness for their enemies. The Communist conquest of China, one of the supreme revolutions of history, completed the first stage along the Communist road of aggression in Asia. A Communist victory in Korea would have achieved the second stage. But the prolonged struggle in Korea, despite Communist propaganda representing it as a victory, in fact ended in stale- mate; and the masters of Communist policy have drawn the appropriate conclusions. '
From the Communist standpoint the main lesson taught by Korea is twofold; that existing Communist strength in Asia is insufficient, but that Communist major strategy there is sound and promising. Moscow's original plans rested in part on * Soviet Policy in the Far East, 1944-1951. By Max Beloff. Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. (Oxford University Press, 21s.)
American statements that Korea lacked strategic importance for the United States. Had American conduct conformed to American words, the Soviet-trained and Soviet-equipped North Korean army would easily have overrun the weak South Korean police force, which was all that Washington had left behind to defend one of the strategically critical areas of the earth. With American (and United Nations) intervention, Communist forces in Korea had also to be increased if Moscow's aggression was not to fail swiftly and ignominiously. For many reasons-- not least among them the need to conceal the directing Soviet hand—the only usable reinforcements were Chinese. When they were thrown into battle just three years ago, victory again appeared within the Communist grasp. But once more the Communist leaders miscalculated; the ChineSe were fought to a standstill; and since Washington would not authorise a counter-offensive (the prospects of which in the spring or early summer of 1951 were good, as General Van Fleet, then Commander-in-Chief in Korea, has shown),' the only possible outcome was to acknowledge, tacitly but con- clusively, that in such conditions neither side could win.
For Communist China Korea nevertheless represents' an unchallengeable gain. On the debit side must be placed the economic burdens and heavy human losses of the war, which subjected the Peking regime to severe strain, and if continued or increased by defeat in the field might lave weakened it gravely. Since the United Nations never drove their possible advantage home, the credit side is much larger. In Korea for the first time—but assuredly not for the last—Peking has stood shoulder to shoulder with Moscow in an external enter- prise from which both had prospects of major gain. Communist China entered the Korean war with poorly armed forces trained only in the techniques of second-class warfare against the feeble armies of the moribund Kuomintang; she has emerged with a reorganised army some 24 million strong equipped with Soviet heavy weapons (including tanks and field artillery) and with a trained and modernised air force large enough to con- stitute a new strategic threat to naval forces off the mainland of East Asia. Her security troops, now about a million strong, have also been reorganised, and are powerful enough to put down any threat to the regime which the near future may bring. The new Five-Year Plan, despite difficulties and revisions at the outset, should carry a long way China's development of the heavy industries (including heavy engineering) which are the foundation of modern war; and the recent Soviet-Chinese economic agreement, though obviously concluded under conditions humiliating to Mao Tse-tung, ensures Soviet help, both in training and equipment, which will speed up this development. Already Communist China is capable of supply- ing many of her requirements in small-arms and small-arms ammunition; her present plans should establish an industry capable of producing a range of heavy arms (excluding, how- ever, aircraft, for the time being) such as no other non-Soviet country on the mainland of Asia can manufacture. Con- currently, the end of hostilities in Korea will permit a redeploy- ment of troops for which many of the necessary roads and railways have already been, or are in process of being, built. The mere appearance of these troops on the frontiers would create most grave problems for her neighbours. The whole development now in prospect threatens to transform the entire balance of power in East, South-east, and South Asia.
In the remaining areas of Asia which are crucial to Com- munist strategy, other weapons in the Communist armoury can be brought into play. In Korea the reorganisation of North Korean armed forces is already under way. In Japan, still by far the strongest industrial nation east of Suez, infiltra- tion into the trade unions and subversive propaganda among students and in other circles will continue; while as much as possible will be made of Japanese discontents over the existing ban on trade with China, and every effort will be pressed to develop friction between Japan and the West. In Indo-China Soviet and Chinese aid to the Viet Minh rebels will continue —subject always to the outcome of the campaigning season which has just begun; while political ferments in Viet Nam and Cambodia will be further exploited. For the present, Indonesia and the Philippines offer smaller possibilities; but New Delhi is unlikely to be allowed to forget that Chinese Communist forces now stand along the Tibetan border, that Communist infiltration among the frontier hill-tribes and in Assam continues, or that the technique developed by Mao Tse-tung—under which so-called Soviet areas are established as bases from which lightly armed forces can conduct systematic guerrilla activities aimed at larger conquest—is susceptible of application in other countries than China.
It is against this background that the political conference which is shortly to meet at Panmunjom* will assemble. The Western negotiators will have to play their cards with out- standing skill. Not least among their difficulties will be a clamour for concessions to the Communists from well-meaning people in the West who ignore the realities of Communist China and misconceive the relations which really exist between Moscow and Peking. Whatever may happen at Panmunjom, the main decisions determining the future course of events in Asia will not be taken there. Those decisions will be made in Peking and Moscow, in Tokyo and New Delhi and Saigon, in Paris and London and Washington. They will be decisions which help or harm the free world to the extent that they consolidate or weaken the non-Communist regimes in Asia, and above all in the degree to which they increase or diminish the margin of armed strength—at present dangerously small— which the West can dispose of.
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