Threat to Australasia?

Australia and New Zealand, and specially Australia, have long been conscious of their privileged position on the edge of the huge and poverty stricken populations of Asia. Perhaps as the result of an unconscious guilt Complex they have feared and halfexpected a vast mass movement of millions of Asiatics, pictured as sweeping down almost as a horde of locusts to destroy their wealth, and fill up their empty spaces. There is nothing to suggest that this is a serious likelihood and indeed the evidence points the other way; the Japanese, the most aggressive of Asiatic races, have never managed to colonise their conquered territories, while Chinese migration has been brought about more by Western importation of indentured labour than by any deliberate policy on the part of the Chinese. Nevertheless, this fear of Asiatic invasion lurks at the back of the Australian, and even of New Zealand's national consciousness.

The question now is whether Communism will lead to an aggressiveness on the part of Asiatic nations which (except for Japan) I they did not previously betray. The American view is not perhaps so much that countries like Indo-China will themselves launch attacks on their non-Communist neighbours, as that Russia might use them as bases for the aggressive design she is assumed to have on the world It can only be said that if this is the Russian plan, she has been very slow in taking steps to implement It. The Russians on the other hand might be excused suspecting, on the evidence of present American policy, that it Is the American aim to establish bases in Indo-China, along with Japan, Korea and Formosa, and so round to Pakistan. Persia and Turkey, through Greece. Yugoslavia. Italy and Spain to West-Europe, and completing the circle in Norway. Iceland and Greenland. This is "containment." The Russian answer appears to be not so much an attempt to establish opposing bases, as an attempt to surround herself with a ring of satellite governments on her immediate borders, and especially at her most vulnerable point, the European frontier. She aims to provide for defence in depth. Beyond these perimeter defences she does little to help even such potential allies as the Chinese in Malaya—or for that matter, the natives of Kenya. South Africa or the Congo She relics perhaps, on the slow but Inevitable working of the Marxist interpretation of history.