should have been anticipated in the differences among the original five
prime ministers who were the organisers – to some extent setting them-
selves up as an alternative set of Permanent Members (without formal veto
powers), but reflecting similar divisions that had frozen the dealings of
the original.
To Nehru, the intellectual, Cold War alignments required states and
their representatives to surrender their reason: ‘I am not prepared, even as
an individual, much less as the foreign minister of this country, to give
up my right of individual judgement to anybody else in other countries.’
And the Cold War was nothing if not crude: as a result of ‘this exhibition
of mutual abuse’ among the main protagonists, ‘we are being coarsened
and vulgarised all over the world’.^3 Nehru offered his ‘Five Principles’ as
an alternative to alignment: the alternative to backing ‘peaceful co-
existence’ based on ‘mutual respect’ was to support potential and actual
wars. Aligned Asian nations – those who felt threatened by Russia or by
communism, whether or not they used the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ – saw it
differently. Iran, still largely feudal and controlled by the Western powers,
feared its Russian neighbour and joined the Baghdad Pact of February
1955 (which became CENTO, the Central Treaty Organisation, after
1958) and the South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO); Pakistan
joined both, because, as its diplomats were prone frankly to put it,
Pakistan really wanted arms and political support against India on the
Kashmir issue. Thailand joined SEATO for fear of China and the
Vietnamese; the Philippines were a US ex-colony, still very much within
its sphere of influence and had little choice.
It was evident that what the USA really wanted was not Asian military
allies – their powers were insignificant – but military bases, in order to
surround the Eurasian land mass’s communists. Nehru opposed the new
military pacts in Asia as dangerous for world peace, creating tensions
in Asia and posing the risk of proxy wars being fought. The issue was
almost personalised into a conflict between Nehru and John Foster
Dulles; Nehru regarded Dulles as somewhat stupid, short-sighted and
crude, while Dulles regarded Nehru and non-alignment as immoral and
anti-American. The 1954 Geneva Agreement on Indo-China had been
unsatisfactory for the USA, and Dulles sought to repair the effects of that
defeat with SEATO. But to cordon off China and communist North
Vietnam required Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam to become SEATO
members; Laos and Cambodia preferred non-alignment. This was seen in218 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63