First Published:
??? Reproduced in Russia, China and the West 1953-1966 (1970)
Transcribed: Martin Fahlgren
HTML Markup: Martin Fahlgren, 2025
When Molotov made his report on the Geneva conference in the inner councils of the Kremlin, he may have summed it up as follows: 'We have given up, Comrades, many of the local advantages we held in Indo-China, but we hope to have gained one general advantage for the Soviet bloc: the armistice in Indo-China will promote the international detente for which we have been striving since Stalin's death.'
It is indeed in the context of broad international strategy that the communist attitude over Indo-China ought to be seen. The armistice signed in Geneva makes little or no sense from the viewpoint of the Vietminh alone. It does not in any way correspond to the local balance of strength which has been much more favourable to the Vietminh than are the terms of the armistice. True enough, Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues have now ceased to be 'rebels' and have become an internationally recognized government; the troops of Southern Vietnam are in retreat; and the French expeditionary force is about to evacuate towns, harbours, strongpoints, and outposts. But what the Vietminh obtain is, by common consent of all observers, only part of the ripe fruit of their recent political and military victories. If the struggle had continued, Ho Chi Minh's armies might, in a few sweeping offensives, have conquered the whole of Indo-China as Mao Tse-tung's armies conquered the whole of China. Mao Tse-tung's victory of 1949 came as a surprise to Moscow; but neither Moscow nor Peking had had any doubt about Ho CM Minh's ability to bring the whole of Indo-China under his control. It must have taken them some effort to persuade Ho Chi Minh to stop half-way, and some people in Ho Chi Minh's entourage and in the rank and file of his armies may well resent the Geneva 'betrayal'.
It will be remembered that at one point during the civil war in China Stalin tried to curb Mao Tse-tung and to persuade him that he should not march into Nanking and Canton. Mao Tse-tung was strong and independent enough to ignore Stalin's advice. Ho Chi Minh, however, could not pursue the war against Molotov's and Chou En-lai's advice. He has had to accept the demarcation line on the seventeenth parallel; and he has had to agree to a postponement of elections for two years, during which the popularity of his party may well decline from its present peak. He has had to withdraw from Laos and Cambodia and to recognize France's right to move her military forces into both these states, a right hitherto fiercely denounced. He has even had to guarantee solemnly the inviolability of French property and French interests throughout the area where his writ runs.
From any communist viewpoint these are major concessions. Why were they made? In Geneva neither Molotov nor Chou En-lai explained their motives. Yet their motives are not far to seek. They have made these concessions in expectation of greater diplomatic settlements elsewhere. Since Western diplomacy has disdainfully declined any sort of 'global bargaining' there was no talk or suggestion of this, even—so we are told—during the long, private conversations between ministers at Geneva. However, this does not alter the fact that global bargaining has been inherent in the situation, or at any rate in Molotov's view of the situation. He has been willing to observe the etiquette of non-bargaining, if Western diplomacy whimsically insists on it, but he has distinguished etiquette from the substance of things. Tacitly and implicitly he has been engaged in global bargaining all these months, bargaining space against time, and positions in Asia against positions in Europe.
This is apparent even from the terms of the Geneva agreements. Under these no South East Asia Treaty Organization, sponsored by the United States or by the United States and Britain, can cover Southern Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia. No American military base may be established in any part of Indo-China, although the areas south of the seventeenth parallel and Laos remain a zone of French military influence. Indirectly France herself is committed to keep aloof from any American military initiative in that part of Asia. The fact that Indo-China remains barred to American military power is likely to affect the mood of some other South-East Asian nations. It is bound to confirm India in its attitude of neutrality.
The leaders of the Soviet bloc may well calculate that, if they succeed in the neutralization of South-East Asia, then the whole of the Middle East will also prefer to keep aloof from military entanglements. One of the repercussions of the cease-fire in Indo-China may be to weaken or even eventually to destroy the American-built military 'bridge' joining Pakistan with Turkey.
In Geneva the Soviet bloc has been sufficiently strong to be able, for the first time, to set up something like a neutral zone between itself and the military power of the United States. It now becomes the purpose of the Soviet bloc to interpose between itself and the Atlantic bloc a vast and more or less continuous buffer zone in both Asia and Europe. Molotov's successful essay in the neutralization of most of Indo-China is to be followed by analogous essays elsewhere; the other end of the buffer zone, which stretches from the Gulf of Tonking, should lie between the Oder and the Rhine.
The idea of 'peaceful coexistence between different systems' is now apparently being re-interpreted in Moscow and Peking; and it is giving rise to a diplomatic and political conception more specific than that which prevailed in. Stalin's days. Peaceful coexistence is now held to require first that antagonistic regimes should in fact stop fighting each other arms in hand, and, second, that they should, if possible, be well insulated from one another. It is in these two points that the evolution of Soviet diplomacy can best be seen. In Geneva Soviet diplomacy has now put its signature under the second armistice —the first being the Korean—concluded in the relatively short time since Stalin's death: Moscow has considered the two armistice agreements as preliminaries to peaceful coexistence and it sees a continuous zone of neutral states, stretching across Asia and Europe, as an essential condition and guarantee of peaceful coexistence. Molotov acted in line with this conception when, on the day after the neutralization of much of Indo-China, he confronted the Western Powers with a renewed proposal for the neutralization of Germany.
The idea of a Eurasian buffer zone may be too neat and tidy for practical diplomacy and politics. It presupposes not only the suspension of armed fighting but a truce in class and ideological warfare throughout the buffer zone. And, what is just as important, a buffer country must have internal unity and must be integrated in order to be able to keep its balance between the two power blocs. The Geneva conference, however, has produced the opposite of this—a new partition, Vietnam has now joined the ranks of Germany, Austria, and Korea, the countries split or broken up by the conflicting pull: of antagonistic powers. True, the Geneva agreement provide: for the holding of elections throughout Vietnam in 1956 and for consequent reunification. But after the experience of Korea and Germany the promise of reunification carries little conviction: it seems quite realistic to assume that Vietnam will remain partitioned long after 1956; and that once again le provisoire will prove the most lasting part of the settlement.
This then is the dangerous paradox confronting the Soviet bloc. Its diplomacy, apprehensive of the potentialities of war, tries to set up a Eurasian buffer zone only to discover that it is precisely inside that buffer area that lie the main storm centres of international politics. Korea, Germany, Austria, Indo-China as long as they are divided, provide an abundance of causes and pretexts for war and near-war....