FOREIGN RELATIONS: Peaceful Crusade

As long as hunger and despair haunt hundreds of millions of people, said the President of the U.S. last week, in a far-seeing foreign-policy pronouncement, “peace and freedom will be in danger throughout the world. For wherever free men lose hope of progress, liberty will be weakened and the seeds of conflict will be sown. In working together to create that hope of progress, we raise barriers against tyranny and the war which tyranny breeds.”

In Seattle to address a meeting of the 18-nation Colombo Plan, set up by the British Commonwealth in 1950 to foster economic development in Asia, the President listed five fundamentals of his Administration’s widening foreign economic policy: 1) expanding international trade, 2) keeping up a program of Point Four-type technical assistance, 3) fostering increased overseas investment by U.S. private capital, 4) broadening the flow of “bankable” loans through such international channels as the World Bank. 5) enlarging the U.S.’s Development Loan Fund, which makes loans repayable in soft currencies.

Behind President Eisenhower’s pledge of a “great peaceful crusade” lay hardcurrency news: the Administration’s foreign-aid chief, Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon, is planning to ask the new Congress that convenes in January to appropriate $1 billion for the Development Loan Fund instead of this year’s $700 million. Atop that, Dillon will urge Congress to okay big increases in U.S. commitments to the World Bank and the currency-stabilizing International Monetary Fund. “The most important economic question facing the U.S.,” says Dillon, onetime Wall Street investment banker who served four years (1953-57) as Ambassador to France, “is whether the less developed countries will choose the Communist system or the Western system in their struggle against poverty. The verdict will depend largely on how much the industrialized countries of the West do to help the less developed countries achieve an adequate rate of economic growth.”

In a speech to the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles added new terms for the two systems of economic development: “strategy of consent” and “strategy of duress.” Pursuing the strategy of duress, he said, the rulers of Red China were creating a “vast slave state,” wiping out China’s traditional culture and values. “The inevitable waste product of economic development by duress,” said Dulles, “is the crushing of millions of free spirits and their hope for a truly richer life. The important byproduct of the strategy of consent is human dignity and greater political freedom and opportunity for individuals to rise in the free society.”