Bangkok. “The countries of Southeast Asia need a collective-security system, whether they like it or not,” retiring SEATO Secretary General Jesus Vargas told me in his spacious headquarters overlooking traffic-clogged Sriayuthaya Road in Bangkok. “As I said when your President Nixon visited Peking: the Chinese Communists are not going to stop their nuclear build-up and they are not going to stop their assistance to the Communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia. Because of this there is no alternative to SEATO.”
But SEATO’s critics remain unconvinced. They say technical and community-development assistance require mechanisms untainted by the cold war animosities of the Dulles era. As for SEATO’s military and counterinsurgency roles—these the critics also disparage, particularly, it is said, in light of the Nixon policy of “multiple parity,” in which the practical interests of a few major power blocs (the U.S., USSR, Red China, Japan and the European community) preclude further anti-Communist alliance systems. Mr. Gough Whitlam, who, if the Labor Party wins the elections later this year, will become Australia’s prime minister, late in June termed SEATO “moribund,” even as SEATO ministers were
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