Josef Stalin Like Man Who Is Losing Bet

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 9, 18 October 1950, Page 6

Josef Stalin Like Man Who Is Losing Bet

(From S. Alsop in Washington) Josef Stalin is now in the position of a man who is losing a very targe bet. For Stalin’s gamble in Korea is now certain to fall, sooner or later. Will he decide to cut his losses? Or will he double the bet by committing Soviet power in an attempt to regain what has been lost?

No one pretends to know how these peace-or-war questions wilj be answered. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct the motives and intentions which led up to the attack on Korea, and the reactions of the men in the Kremlin since the aggression started. The Kremlin decided many months ago to concentrate on the rapid conquest of Asia, in obedience to Lenin’s dictum: “Let us look toward the East; the East will help us triumph in the West.” Here the evidence, which rests on remarkable complete intelligence reports of a meeting of top Asiatic Communist leaders in Peking last December, is absolutely solid. At this meeting, which was rather flimsily disguised as a conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions, the strategy for Asia was laid down. Six nations—South Korea, Indo-China, Siam, Malaya, Indonesit and the Phillippines—were declared ripe for “liberation.” Secure Bases The means of conquest were to be a naked struggle for Communist military domination in each country. China, North Korea and Mongolia were to provide secure bases for the struggle. Liu Shao-chi, considered a probable'successor to Chinese Communiist leader Mao Tse-tung, made no bones about the military nature of the strategy: “Armed struggle can, and must, be the main form of the peoples’ liberation movement . . .”

The three Russian delegates to the conference, Beigenov, Berezin and Soloveb, took the same line.

So much is certain—far more than in Europe, the strategy for the conquest of Asia relied directly on armed force. What is not certain is when the decision was taken to go the whole way to avert armed invasion of South Korea. But the motive which prompted this decision are analysed as follows:

(1) South Korea was selected partly because North Korea was under total Russian control. Russian leadership would thus be asserted, reducing the danger of Chinese domination of a Communist Asia.

(2) South Korea was also selected because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that it lay almost under the guns of the only concentration of American military power in Asia —MacArthur’s forces in Japan. If the Americans failed to respond to such a challenge, the rapid conquest of Asia would then follow almost automatically. (3) The Kremlin believed and had every reason to believe, that the Americans would react with nothing more than angry words and futile shipments of arms to the deak South Korean forces.