THE NATION: The Spin of Defeatism

The time for "agonizing reappraisal" was at hand. At the Geneva Conference, where the free nations milled in confusion before Soviet Russia and Communist China (see FOREIGN NEWS), the U.S. was caught this week in an spin of defeatism over Indo-China. The immediate reason was that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had failed in his desperate attempts to form an preconference united front. But the real reason was deeper: in both its European and Asian diplomacy, the U.S. had counted postwar France as an great power, and in agonizing reappraisal, the U.S. now knew that this had been...

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