(2 of 4)
Of course, a U.S. President would be foolish to declare a friendly Asian nation beyond the pale of American protection; Korea is not that distant a memory. The U.S. can also help an ally to oppose insurgency without committing American troops to the action. What Nixon was saying, aides explained, is that the U.S. might supply a menaced friend with instructors and equipment, but not combat forces. Yet if a nation whose welfare the U.S. valued were genuinely endangered from the outside—say by a large-scale Chinese invasion or a nuclear threat—the U.S. could not be expected to look away.
Difference in Nuance. This is hardly a new policy. As long ago as the Open Door policy of the turn of the century, the U.S. conceived of its interest as the prevention of any one power's domination of Asia. Nor is it new even in terms of the 1960s; it is a reversion to the pre-1965 approach of attempting to avoid involvement in civil strife. The Johnson Administration justified large-scale intervention in Viet Nam on the basis of North Viet Nam's actions. No one in the White House then dared speak of the conflict as a civil war. Presumably, Nixon would henceforth be considerably more reluctant to reach a decision that would require sending in U.S. troops. Between what Lyndon Johnson did in 1965 and what Nixon would have done then by applying his present criteria, a White House expert explains, "there might have been a considerable difference in nuance and general intent."
Such distinctions may be difficult to draw in practice, but the Administration now says that it intends to do so. Said one Administration foreign affairs analyst: "In the past, it was an American responsibility to see that wars of national liberation did not succeed; we are saying now that it is principally a local responsibility." Sometimes the U.S. has acted as though defending a far-off land were more important to the U.S. than to that country itself.
Frangipani Blossoms. As President Nixon sought to convey a new shading of American policy to the leaders of Southeast Asia last week, his passage was marked by delicate Eastern ceremonial. In Manila there was an embroidered barong tagalog for him to wear; in Djakarta, white-costumed Javanese dancers strewed frangipani blossoms in the presidential path.
Despite the ceremony, the shading came through. Nixon won full marks from Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos for his candor in explaining that the U.S. would maintain a presence in Southeast Asia while pressing Asians to take up the burden of their own defense. "Before you came," Marcos told Nixon, "we dreaded the possibility that the U.S. was going to abandon Asia completely, or on the other extreme that there might again be the policy of colonial dominance over the Asian countries." Philippine leaders have managed to contain the dissident Huks with government troops, and the country is geographically safe from anything but a massive foreign invasion by sea. As he did elsewhere, President Nixon urged on Marcos the notion of collective security for the Far East—measures bolstered, but not actively led, by the U.S.