South Vietnam: Detente and Reconciliation
| Autor: | Dennis J. Duncanson |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1973 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | International Affairs. 49:554-566 |
| ISSN: | 1468-2346 0020-5850 |
| Popis: | OIUTH VIETNAMESE people have cause to feel that they are under greater pressure from the communist world now that detente is the order of the day than they ever were at the height of the cold war in the 1950s. Agitation to persuade the intellectual public of countries with open societies of the inherent wickedness of those Vietnamese who resist the communists actually increased after President Nixon's undertaking to withdraw American combat forces from Indochina; coordinated on principles similar to those some of us recall as the hallmark of the League against Imperialism in the 1920s and 1930s, the antiSaigon campaligns continue today after American withdrawal is complete, no whit abated in either frequency or virulence. The broadcasts of Radios Moscow and Peking preclude the possibility that the campaigns are started otherwise than with the blessings of Kremlin and Great Within. Detente is often reckoned to have begun with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and has since moved down to control of conventional weapons; yet it evidently proved impossible for Dr. Kissinger to negotiate, on a more modest plane still, a limitation on the supply of conventional weapons to the two belligerents in Indochina-either impossible because Peking and Moscow declined, or futile because he knew in advance that they would not honour eventual undertakings, and, thanks to land frontiers and closed societies, could get away with extensive breaches of any. It is true that a limitation of a kind is written into the January ceasefire; but the relevant clause merely bans the introduction into South Vietnam of fresh munitions, beyond what is needed for replacement-it says nothing about introducing them into North Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia, whose frontiers with South Vietnam are all entrusted by another clause in the ceasefire, irreversibly, to the charge of the communist forces. Members of the International Control Commission endeavouring, in fulfilment of duties under a third clause, to gain some idea what movement was taking place across those frontiers have paid for their foolhardiness with their lives, unmourned by any outcry. One is reminded of Chinese condemnations of Britain for bad faith in the 1830s in declining to ban the export of opium from Bengal; that measures to prevent importation alone were bound to be ineffectual |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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