The Peace Push

IN a few days American and North Vietnamese diplomats will probably meet to take a cautious first step toward peace in South Vietnam. The scope of their discussions will be limited to arranging the end of American bombardment north of the 17th parallel. Once the raids are halted, both nations--and presumably their respective allies--will grapple with the more thorny problem of guaranteeing peace and stability in Indochina.

On March 31 President Johnson disclosed a restriction of the bombing raids inside North Vietnam, withdrew from the 1968 Presidential campaign, and hinted that the Vietcong could expect to obtain a share of the ruling power in postwar South Vietnam. Johnson's simultaneous announcement of the three decisions in one nationally broadecasted speech was the first indication to date that the American government had finally resolved to take the diplomatic--rather than punitive--route out of the mess in Vietnam. Undoubtedly the President realized that he had insufficient popular backing to continue the counter-productive escalation of the war. Since escalation was required to maintain a military stalemate the President had little strategic alternative but to move toward a diplomatic settlement.

For their part, the North Vietnamese seemed to agree that time had come to tamp down the fighting and attempt a negotiated settlement. Their April 3 proposal of diplomatic "contact" and the lifting of the siege around Khe Sanh suggest that Hanoi is willing to accommodate hopes inside America for reciprocal de-escalation as a prelude to peace talks.

Unfortunately, the task of cementing a durable peace in Indochina will be more arduous than deciding that talks per se are worthwhile. There is little reason to believe that the United States and North Vietnam agree on anything besides the current utility of initiating peace talks in the hope that a permanent case-fire can be arranged.

Both Washington and Hanoi not to mention the Vietcong, the Saigon regime, Peking, and Moscow--are fully aware that issues of real strategic and political importance will have to be resolved before the decades-old Indochina confilict can finally be considered ended.

EVEN if the U.S. unexpectedly agrees to the dissolution of the Thieu government and allows the subsequent establishment of a coalition heavily weighted in favor of the NLF, several other knots must be unraveled. In short, what some Americans have long considered a simple sell-out will not be sufficient to conclude the imbroglio in Vietnam.

For one thing, the United States, whatever concessions it makes to South Vietnam's Communists, is likely to insist on the military inviolability of frontiers throught-out Southeast Asia. Washington knows that the 1962 Laos agreement has been severely undermined by Hanoi's infiltration of troops and material along the Ho Chi Minh trail. More important, the State Department will probably feel compelled to vindicate the principle the President invoked in 1965 when he first sharply escalated the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. At that date, and with unswerving conviction ever since, the U.S. insisted that it only wanted the Communists to "leave their neighbors alone." In short, it seems improbable that the United States, no matter who occupies the White House, is likely to "sell out" Saigon without vindicating its belief that "aggression," if not "national liberation," must stop.

On this score, the past behavior of the North Vietnamese gives little cause for American optimism. And the Chinese, who participated in the Laos talks in 1962, will probably continue to resist America's mildest efforts to bring stability at last to Indochina. Thus, any agreement on frontiers produced by peace talks would have to be backed up by some sort of international guarantee--a historically fragile device.

Other issues will bedevil the peace makers. They will included guarantees of basic civil and political liberties to the "losers" inside South Vietnam; the dismantling of American military bases in South Vietnam; the extent of America's future military commitment to pro Western nations in Southeast Asia; and the initiation of regional economic cooperation--and internal political democracy--to eliminate the wretched social conditions which underlie the 27-year-old peasant revolt throughout Vietnam. Thus, if the United States intends to avoid a "fake" solution in Southeast Asia, its leader--whoever is elected to succeed President Johnson--must make the forthcoming peace talks squarely confront a vast panoply of long-standing problems, of which the current war is only the most recent expression.

Sadly, the performance of American diplomats anxious to end wars in this century is replete with subsequently catastrophic evasion and procrastination. Southeast Asia--and, more important, the United States--cannot now afford such a cavalier attitude toward the task of extracting a durable peace from the rubble of war.