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A deal for the Communists to control some districts and compete in others would work only if the North VietNamese troops left the country. A massive stumbling block here is that nobody can conceive of an effective means to guarantee that the Northerners get out and stay out, or that the Viet Cong really halt their terror. That job is supposed to be done now by the three-nation International Control Commission (Canada, India, Poland), a leftover from the Geneva Conference of 1954. But the commission lacks the manpower, vehicles and—on the part of its Polish and Indian members—the will to do the task. Any future system of inspections and guarantees would have to involve many more nations, many more troops, trucks and planes, and a system of sanctions. Even with that, it would depend on a shaky combination of mutual good will and mutual blackmail between both sides in Viet Nam—and would remain a major problem.
The only real way to guarantee a peace acceptable from the U.S. point of view is the presence of some American troops for at least several years. Lately, the Communists have been fuzzing their old demand that the U.S. has to remove all its troops and dismantle its military alliance with South Viet Nam before any peace treaty is signed. At the Manila Conference of 1966, President Johnson pledged to withdraw U.S. troops within six months if "the other side withdraws its forces to the North, ceases infiltration and the level of violence thus subsides." The last phrase is enough of a hedge to provide quite a bit of leeway. The U.S. still has 50,000 troops in Korea, and is likely to keep at least twice as many in South Viet Nam for two to ten years.
Opportunity for Initiative
As for the issue of reunification, it is becoming less emotional and more negotiable than before. North Viet Nam still views it as a means to take over the less populous South (17 million people, v. 19 million in the North). But the Viet Cong seem less than eager to be swallowed by the North. Through their representatives in Paris, Algiers, Bratislava and even Hanoi, the V.C. have announced that reunification should take place step by step, over a period of five to 20 years. All this pleases Viet Nam's smaller, frightened neighbors, some of whom use the same maxim that Britons apply to Germany: they love the country so much that they like to see two of them. Of course the U.S. is in no hurry for reunification. The Viet Cong's de-emphasis of the question may be a political ploy, but the fact is that the V.C. are more moderate than Hanoi on many issues. While some Western experts feel that the differences between the two Communist factions are superficial, a growing number suspect that the split is basic and widening.
If a real or potential split exists, there is opportunity for U.S. diplomatic initiative to.exploit it. Vietnamese history is a long chronicle of conflict between the intense, driving