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On the Larger Battlefield? The corruption of many Chinese leaders is given as the reason why the U.S. cannot effectively "aid China" against the Communists. Against the background given by the Bolton report, corruption takes on a different look. It is not just an old Chinese custom, nor a piece of bad luck. It is the normal situation that the U.S. has to face in the three-fourths of the world which is industrially backward. That three-fourths, as the British and others have learned, cannot be kept indefinitely in a state of tutelage to Western ideas. It will move into the stream of nationalism, industrialism and progress. When it gets there, it flounders. The Communists then play a dual role. They increase the confusion and hold out a "packaged" hope of progress—their kind of progress.
This Communist program for backward countries was worked out in China. It is the great political invention of the 20th Century, far more deadly than Fascism, because it can be applied to nearly all the 1,400,000,000 people who are at present neither thoroughly democratized nor thoroughly communized. If the new weapon cannot be defeated in China, there is no reason to suppose it can be defeated anywhere in the three-fourths of the world upon whose support the struggle between Communism and the West depends.
In the Truman Doctrine the U.S. accepted responsibility in the world struggle against Communism. On the relatively easy battleground of Western Europe it is gaining, slowly and not surely. On the larger battleground it is losing.
A U.S. defense that rests solely on the few countries now industrially developed is today's defense, but not tomorrow's. Within ten years the Communists may have industrialized a large part of the now backward and demoralized world and turned it against us.
Our objective in China is not that of aiding our friends. It is to roll back Communism in order to save our own—and Chinese —necks. Our purpose is to give the Asians time to organize aid from Asia in the fight against totalitarianism.