Formosa in 1951 (now Taiwan) was at the heart of intense international debate and strategic calculations. Charlton Ogburn from the State Department’s China desk reported a significant viewpoint from Indonesian UN Ambassador Soedjatmoko, who argued that U.S. policies regarding Formosa were dangerously pushing the world towards a larger conflict. Soedjatmoko suggested that a concession to the Chinese Communists over Formosa might be a pragmatic step to avoid further escalation in Asia.
This view was countered by Ogburn, who expressed alarm over the idea, emphasizing concerns about the broader implications of such a concession, including potential threats to Indochina and beyond. Pakistani Ambassador O. A. Baig also criticized the U.S. stance, comparing the situation to a hypothetical scenario where European powers would have restricted early American expansion. Despite these perspectives, U.S. officials like Dean Rusk argued that the American approach was necessary to combat what they saw as a larger pattern of Communist aggression, reflecting a broader strategic stance rather than a local issue.
Charlton Ogburn of the State Department’s China desk reported that the Indonesian ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Soedjatmoko, had argued that there was a “widespread feeling in the UN that the world is being carried into a general war because of the policies of the U.S. towards Formosa and indicated that he himself is of that opinion.”
In response, Ogburn recounted, “I then asked if he was certain that he would recommend that we acquiesce in a turnover of Formosa to the Chinese Communists and reconcile ourselves to a settlement of Indochina between the French and Ho Chi Minh. Mr. S. replied that he was quite willing to be quoted and that this was what he recom-mended.” Ogborn told Soedjatmoko that he had been “shocked” to hear India’s ambassador in Washington, Madame Pandit, say that the Chinese Communists were “not aggressive” and that “they had been provoked by events on their borders.”
Soedjatmoko, too, was surprised, since his embassy’s rule was that no one was to speak out on China and the Korean question; still, he added, if they did, they would all undoubtedly agree with Madame Pandit. Ogburn tried a final argument. “I said I was convinced that if we should turn over Formosa to the Chinese Communists as the price of some kind of settlement of Korea that the next thing we knew the price of reaching a settlement with the Chinese Communists would be turning over Indochina to them, then Thailand, then Burma, then Malaya.” Soedjatmoko disagreed: “In that event, the Communists would not be Chinese, but Vietnamese who would have every interest in preventing China’s penetration of Indochina”.
The Pakistani ambassador, 0. A. Baig, was equally blunt. “The people of Asia,” he told Dean Rusk and U. Alexis Johnson, “consider that, by taking unilateral action to prevent Formosa falling to the hands of the Chinese Communists, the United States took the first overt act against the Chinese and, therefore, the Chinese intervention in Korea is not entirely unjustified.”
It was puzzling, he noted, that whereas Korea was considered a UN matter, the United States had acted unilaterally over Taiwan. Could not the United States see that as the situation was “comparable to the American Revolution and the U.S. should consider its intervention in Formosa in the light of the attitude it would have taken if Is European power would have declared a cordon sanitaire around a portion of the United States to have prevented consolidation of the gains of the American revolution”?
Rusk, in response, invoked the basic American ideological and strategic rationale: US. actions must be “considered in the pattern of overall Communist aggression rather than a local Korean or Asian problem”; Chinese intervention could not be viewed as “having been provoked by the U.S. policy toward Formosa, but rather as a part of the pattern of Communist aggression and, therefore, indivisible from any aggression any-where.” The issue was communism. “Whatever policy China’s national interest may dictate,” Rusk concluded, “the experience with Communist satellites in Europe has shown that once a country came under Communist domination, it was thereafter difficult for it to act except at the dictates of Moscow…
Footnote: I have been unable to track the source of this quote but have verified the quoted speakers.
