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While Ford exaggerated the strategic importance of South Viet Nam and overplayed U.S. responsibility for Saigon's debacle, there was no question that the American image was at least temporarily damaged and that some U.S. allies were jittery. The Japanese government announced that it was reappraising its pro-Saigon policy and that its Foreign Minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, who will visit Washington this week, will ask Kissinger to reaffirm the U.S. nuclear protection of Japan. In South Korea, the nervous government of President Park Chung Hee seemed to accept the Kissinger linkage theory that events in one part of the world develop a momentum affecting events elsewhere. Park urged his nation to be more self-reliant. Said he: "Where adequate and independent means of self-defense are lacking, all agreements for collective security guarantee could prove only meaningless." But in Malaysia, government officials seemed unworried about future security, and Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew insisted calmly: "I don't believe in the domino theory." Philippine leaders felt confident that the U.S. would intervene with naval forces in the unlikely event that Communists ever invaded across the South China Sea.
In Western Europe, too, reaction was more relaxed. TIME has learned that Britain's Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, has sent Kissinger a letter reassuring him that England understands America's feelings about Southeast Asia, but also pointing out that other nations did not expect the U.S. "to do the impossible." Callaghan proposed that a conference of NATO Foreign Ministers next month be elevated to a summit meeting of heads of state to re-examine common problems and reaffirm Western unity at the highest level. The U.S. is expected to endorse the idea. British officials seem relieved that America may be ending what one calls its "hypnotic preoccupation" with Viet Nam.
The French could not resist pronouncing America's decline. Gloated Le Monde in its headline: WHAT PEACE? WHAT HONOR? A Le Point editorial warned: "This is what has become of the American giant. Let Europe beware. His paralysis is contagious." But one French diplomat expressed the predominant view of officials there that "American power has not collapsed."
Actually, what was imperiled by America's performance in South Viet Nam was not so much the nation's credibility as its aura of competence. The U.S. looked especially ineffectual in not anticipating just how weak its ally was. The swift collapse surprised U.S. intelligence officials. One of them admitted that in evaluating South Vietnamese military capability, "we obviously deluded ourselves." Added another intelligence officer: "When we looked below the surface, we did not like what we saw, so we turned away."
Whatever the U.S.'s failing, President Ford will have a chance to fashion a new start in a major foreign policy address Thursday to a joint session of Congress. A strong, clear presidential reappraisal of the full range of American commitments and priorities abroad has become both urgently necessary and exceedingly difficult. Ford and Kissinger are caught in a foreseeable trap created by their own pronouncements on how crucial Southeast Asia is to America's foreign policy.