• U.S.

Foreign Relations: Second Thoughts

2 minute read
TIME

Only two months ago, when he signed the foreign aid bill, President Kennedy made it clear that Communist and pro-Communist nations would no longer be considered for U.S. handouts on the same basis as nations of the free world. By last week the Kennedy Administration seemed to be having second thoughts. Items: >The State Department announced the authorization of a $133 million loan to proCommunist, anti-Western President Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. The funds, which will pay for more than one-third of Ghana’s huge Volta River hydroelectric and aluminum plant project (the rest will be provided by the World Bank, Britain and the Ghanaian government), were tentatively allocated last summer, then pigeonholed in the face of Nkrumah’s flirtation with Moscow, along with his totalitarian persecution of political opponents at home.

> After a six-months delay, the U.S. granted permission for Yugoslavia to buy 500,000 tons of surplus wheat and 30,000 tons of edible oils at cut-rate prices. Marshal Tito, the Communist dictator of hungry Yugoslavia, originally requested twice that amount after Yugoslavian wheat harvests turned out poorly: then Tito proceeded to denounce the U.S. at the Belgrade conference of “neutralist” nations (TIME, Sept. 15). The half-a-loaf grant was made in the hope that Tito, however hostile to the U.S., might still be useful as a Communist leader who can operate independently of Moscow when he has a mind to.

> Communist Poland, another starveling Communist satrapy, was granted permission to buy $44.6 million worth of surplus agricultural commodities. In September the U.S. had turned its back on the Polish request. The reasoning behind the about-face: though the signs indicate that Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka is drawing increasingly close to Moscow, it is still worth a gamble to keep the option of dissidence open to him.

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