To the Editor:

I tend to agree with Mr. Steel’s thoughts in his “The ‘Yellow Peril’ Revisited” [June], hoping that opinions such as these will bring about a more flexible policy on the part of the present administration.

I must ask, though, how far we are expected to go in encouraging nationalism among Asian countries? Must we put aside our opposing ideologies entirely? Mr. Steel is indeed stretching the point when he states:

. . . that the United States would not be fighting a war in Vietnam today, that it would not have dared become so deeply involved with its own troops, if China already possessed her own nuclear arsenal.

Does this mean that some countries must fall to Communism while we encourage this nationalism in others? This is indeed the nuclear blackmail about which we have heard before.

Some time in the future an atomic stalemate may be reached in Asia, but in the meantime let us not be so foolhardy as to abandon entirely our own anti-Communist view in hopes that maybe China is not the belligerent we think she is.

Howard W. Coleman
East Rutherford, New Jersey

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Mr. Steel writes:

We do not have to encourage nationalism in Asian countries; it is already a powerful force. But we should recognize that we cannot always channel it into anti-Communism, and we should show the same realism toward Asian Communism that we have now learned to show toward East European Communism. It is China’s weakness, I suggest, which has allowed President Johnson to try to impose an anti-Communist mold in Asia, even while abjuring it in Europe. If there is nuclear blackmail taking place in Asia, it is hardly the Chinese who are currently practicing it.