Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- obligations of Article IV only in respect to Communist aggression. For this reason, the United States attached an 'understanding' to the Treaty in this sense. All other participants accepted the Treaty with the U.S. 'understanding.'"33
In the "understanding" the U.S. further complicated the matter by changing "aggression by means of armed attack" of Article IV to "aggression and armed attack"; in the same sentence, the understanding uses "aggression or armed attack" to refer to paragraph 2 of Article IV, which in fact is worded "threatened in any way other than by armed attack." The admixture of terms accentuates one of the major difficulties of the alliance: the governments of the SEATO treaty area were threatened by a complicated variety of destructive movements that might be called aggression against a member state. The appellation could be fitted in anywhere between "armed attack" and "fact or situation which might endanger the peace." The U.S. insistence on this point of "understanding" was probably superfluous. The latitude that the U.S. wanted already was built into the treaty, in Article IV. The emphatic nature of such an appendix to the treaty may have been calculated as a way to call the attention of the world to a powerful U.S. stand against further encroachments of communism. Such a call would have been consistent with the U.S. feeling of a necessity to re-establish a psychological position in the face of the "defeats" of Geneva. Nevertheless, the confirmation of U.S. single-mindedness that made a communist threat the only valid call for immediate response narrowed SEATO at its inception.
- h. The Vietnam–Laos–Cambodia Protocol
The final item of the SEATO Treaty is a "protocol," which states unanimous agreement among the members to include Cambodia, Laos, and "the free territory under the jurisdiction of the State of Vietnam" under the protection of Articles III and IV of the Treaty. In other words, these countries, without actually becoming members of the pact, would be entitled to "economic measures including technical assistance" and also to defense against any attack, overt or not, from without or within. The U.S. had wanted to include these countries in SEATO, but membership might have seemed legally a contravention of the Geneva Agreements. At Geneva, Laos had not signed any agreement prejudicial to such a pact, but the Laotian Government, on the final day of that conference, had made the following declaration:
- "The Royal Government of Laos will never join in any agreement with other states if this agreement includes the obligation for the Royal Government of Laos to participate in a military alliance not in conformity with the principles of the United Nations or with the principles of the [Geneva] Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities..."34
South Vietnam, on the other hand, was coextensive with one of the "zones" described in Article 19 of the armistice, which specifies:
