851G.00/11–3049: Airgram
The Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Douglas) to the Secretary of State
[Received December 2—9:03 a. m.]
A–2252. Reference is made to the Embassy’s A–2063, November 9, 1949, giving the substance of recommendations made by the Singapore [Page 101] Conference in regard to Indochina. This airgram was drafted on the basis of a-conversation with Mr. E. H. Scott, Head of the South-East Asia Department of the Foreign Office.
In a subsequent conversation, Mr. Scott referred to the hope expressed by the members of the Conference at Singapore that Secretary of State Acheson might make a public statement to the effect that in the event of a Communist attack on Indochina the United States would fulfil its duties under the Charter of the United Nations. (Apparently Mr. Bevin would concurrently make a similar public statement). Mr. Scott expressed the informal view that this aspect of the Singapore Conference recommendations at any rate would probably not be acted upon for, as he pointed out, such a stand with regard to Indochina would doubtless elicit from other Governments in an even weaker military position than the French in Indochina (Portugal with respect to Macao, or Thailand, for example) a request for a similar stand with regard to an attack across their frontier. The China–Burma frontier, he recalled, had never even been formally delimited in its entirety. It was his opinion that a guarantee of the frontiers of all the southern neighbors of China might prove to be an overwhelmingly impossible undertaking.