Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- the policy of the United States to continue to exert maximum efforts to obtain agreements to provide the United Nations with armed forces as contemplated in the Charter and agreements to achieve universal control of weapons of mass destruction and universal regulation and reduction of armaments, including armed forces, under adequate safeguards to protect complying nations against violation and evasion.
- "The Congress hereby expresses itself as favoring the creation by the free countries and the free peoples of the Far East of a joint organization, consistent with the Charter of the United Nations, to establish a program of self-help and mutual cooperation designed to develop their economic and social well-being, to safeguard basic rights and liberties and to protect their security and independence.
- "The Congress recognizes that economic recovery is essential to international peace and security and must be given clear priority. The Congress also recognizes that the increased confidence of free peoples in their ability to resist direct or indirect aggression and to maintain internal security will advance such recovery and support political stability."13
- f. Precursor Pacts in Asia
With the Nationalist evacuation to Formosa in November, 1949, an urgent situation developed in Asia that in ways paralleled the conditions that prompted formation of NATO. The rise of Mao's Peoples Republic of China (PRC) seemed to project the monolithic power of Soviet communism to the eastern shores of Asia, menacing the relatively small nations along China's periphery like the Russians threatened Western Europe. The Chinese parroted the Kremlin's aggressive announcements, participated in the assault on South Korea, and provided aid to Ho Chi Minh in Southeast Asia.
U.S. counteraction was forthcoming. By 1951, in an effort to bolster the defensive capabilities of the area, the U.S. had become a partner in five separate defense treaties in the region. Four bilateral arrangements linked the U.S. with Japan, South Korea, Nationalist China, and the Philippines, forming an arc around, the periphery of Communist China. In addition, the ANZUS Treaty was signed in 1951, and the Five-Power Staff Agency (composed of Australia, New Zealand, France, UK, and US) was formed in 1953 "to facilitate coordination on problems in Southeast Asia." In 1954, John Foster Dulles recalled that:
- "When I went out to the Pacific area in 1950 to begin the negotiations which resulted in the Japanese Peace Treaty and a series of security treaties, the original hope had been that we could have a fairly broad collective security arrangement. As it happened, it was not possible to do at that time, and we were content perforce with a series of treaties...But those treaties themselves indicated that we did not regard them as an end, but only as a beginning..."14
