Vietnam: Peace on the 1954 Terms

Various voices, including the distinguished U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, have urged that in seeking an effective and reasonable settlement of the war in Vietnam “much [may] … be said for a return to the Geneva Accords of 1954, not just in their ‘essentials’ but in all their specifications.”

Close study of these Agreements leads to an opposite conclusion; neither the “essentials” nor the “specifications” of Geneva ’54 should be sought again. They were written in haste and ended in compromises with, and concessions to, the Communist powers. They add up to political folly. These Agreements aided Communist North Vietnam to initiate further struggle against South Vietnam and prevented any objective peace-keeping machinery from performing its assigned function. They also fed the Pathet Lao in Laos and helped to bring that country almost to ruin. (The Western solution as proposed in the Geneva 1962 Agreements for Laos — majority voting within the Control Commission, more careful definition of the controls, freedom of movement for the Commission with provisions for its movement— is better than that of 1954, but still not good enough. It has been effectively negated by the Pathet Lao military hold on the territory now legally assigned to it—territory contiguous to China and to North Vietnam which it has illegally held since and because of ambiguities in Geneva ’54.)

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Frank N. Trager

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Various voices, including the distinguished U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, have urged that in seeking an effective and reasonable settlement of the war in Vietnam “much [may] … be said for a return to the Geneva Accords of 1954, not just in their ‘essentials’ but in all their specifications.”

Close study of these Agreements leads to an opposite conclusion; neither the “essentials” nor the “specifications” of Geneva ’54 should be sought again. They were written in haste and ended in compromises with, and concessions to, the Communist powers. They add up to political folly. These Agreements aided Communist North Vietnam to initiate further struggle against South Vietnam and prevented any objective peace-keeping machinery from performing its assigned function. They also fed the Pathet Lao in Laos and helped to bring that country almost to ruin. (The Western solution as proposed in the Geneva 1962 Agreements for Laos — majority voting within the Control Commission, more careful definition of the controls, freedom of movement for the Commission with provisions for its movement— is better than that of 1954, but still not good enough. It has been effectively negated by the Pathet Lao military hold on the territory now legally assigned to it—territory contiguous to China and to North Vietnam which it has illegally held since and because of ambiguities in Geneva ’54.)