The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

AT THE very moment when the Communist monolith is proving to be anything but monolithic, the Atlantic alliance is fragmented by increasingly severe economic differences as well as political disagreements and military arguments. This should be the time for the nations of the West to move closer together, yet the very opposite is the case in many respects. And because of American dissatisfaction over allied roles in the common military defense and in aid to the underdeveloped world, because of General de Gaulle’s seeming obstinacy in both defense and foreign policy, Washington observers see the danger of a rising tide of neo-isolationism. In short, one thing feeds on another, and in this process the economic factors are highly important.

America’s foreign trade has been growing, but not fast enough to match the expenditures in military and economic aid and the outflow of capital plus the expenditures of American tourists. Last year the net deficit was $2.2 billion, and Treasury Secretary Dillon started this year with optimism that the trade deficit would decline. But the first quarter loss was at an annual rate of $3.2 billion, and the expected second quarter rate is around $3.6 billion. Last year’s short-term capital outflow totaled $507 million.

The loss on economic aid has been declining as the “Buy America” regulation has been applied to require the recipients of American aid to use most of it to pay for purchases only in the United States. Still, the gold drain, the eventual result of the net deficit in international transactions, continues. And the Administration’s latest move, a proposal to put a sales tax of up to 15 percent on American purchases of foreign stocks and bonds, sent many a foreign stock market into momentary panic and produced cries of help from such important American allies as Canada and Japan.

The Pentagon has squeezed here and there and trimmed as well, but it is up against the hard cost of maintaining 600,000 men overseas. There has been some secret soul-searching on whether or not the number of men in Korea or Germany could be safely cut, but each mention of such a move raises a howl in the affected country. De Gaulle’s determination to go his own way in the costly nuclear arms race has added a measure of frustration and brought some calls, especially in the Senate, for offering him nuclear aid so he can build a force which, along with the British one, would permit the retirement from Europe of American forces. This prospect, of course, is strongly resisted by the Kennedy Administration.

But the continuing gold loss, complicated by the continuing domestic budget deficits, probably is adding new pressures to cut even military expenses overseas. There has been talk in Washington of schemes to revamp the free world’s monetary systems, just as there has been in Britain and elsewhere. But while President Kennedy has expressed some interest in such ideas, he has taken a “let’s study further” attitude.

The noise over chickens

The trade problem with the Common Market is beginning to appear as though it will make things worse before they get better. The “chicken war” is only a minor if vastly publicized affair. Actually, chicken exports amount to a mere fraction of one percent of American sales in the Common Market area. Chickens constitute a relatively new export, chiefly to West Germany, growing out of the amazing proficiency of American breeders. The same techniques can and will be used in Europe. But the noise over the chickens arises in large part from the fact that exports have come from the states of such key legislators as Senators Fulbright of Arkansas and Russell of Georgia.

It is argued by American trade experts in Washington that what is far more important than the chicken war is the possible loss of other farm exports to Europe, especially feed grains. Overlooked in De Gaulle’s July press conference was his clear determination to make France the granary of Europe. If the other Common Market countries go along with him, then the prospects are dim indeed for hard-currency farm exports from the United States, and the dollar deficit will continue to mount. In that case, some stiff cuts in American military commitments abroad will become more pressing, or else we will have to limit the dollar expenditures of our citizens abroad.

Uncertainties over the coming Kennedy round of trade talks only add to this unpleasant picture. Foreign trade may be much less important to the United States than to other major industrial nations, but it is growing more important each year, especially in an economy still far from making full use of its existing industrial machine or expanding fast enough to produce jobs for the millions streaming into the labor market.

It is an unhappy fact that the lessening of EastWest tensions since the Cuban crisis a year ago seems to have brought to the surface a mass of problems and pressures within the Western alliance. Some will have to be lived with, chiefly those involving frontal Franco-American disagreements; but others are subject at least to mitigation by constant, day-to-day effort at working levels of government. No spectacular solutions are in sight.

The test-ban treaty

Fourteen years ago this October, a deputy undersecretary of state said in a speech, “Basically, what we need is not a new ‘agreement’ but performance on the agreements we already have [with the Soviet Union]; not an additional piece of parchment to sign, but execution of the promises already made.” That official’s name was Dean Rusk. In August he went before the Senate to argue for ratification of a new agreement, this one the limited nuclear-test-ban treaty.

Changes in the positions of public officials are not unusual. What is striking is that feeling of hope which motivates American society, the belief that somehow a way can be found by negotiation rather than by war to resolve, or at least to alleviate, the great issues which divide the Communist world from the democratic world. There has been vast distrust so long between the two countries which dominate the two worlds that senators can easily be forgiven for being suspicious about a new agreement with the Kremlin. Yet few were able to escape a feeling that in casting a vote the Senate was indeed making the choice which Bernard Baruch described so vividly when he presented the first plan to control the atom: “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.”

In the case of the test-ban treaty, as in the case of all three post-war summit conferences, the timid have referred to fears of a national feeling of euphoria sweeping the United States. The American people, whom the politicians extol at election time for their evident good judgment, are pictured at every point of possible East-West agreement as about to be taken in. There is really little basis in fact for such a belief; certainly, as disappointment has so frequently succeeded the most limited hope, Americans have seemed to be resigned to a continuing cold war.

The debate over the test-ban treaty, both within and outside the Senate, showed that the cold war has gone on so long that it has left some very deep scars. The outcries of suspicion and distrust, the search for hidden gimmicks, the insistence of Senator Hickenlooper on finding out “who gets the advantage” all point up this fact. It is far more difficult to re-examine our attitudes than one might think.

Distrust of the Kremlin

Hence, the course of this new agreement between the two superpowers is likely to have considerable effect on our future attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Only recently has the general public come to accept the Sino-Soviet battle as having real substance rather than being some sort of sham battle designed to trick the Western world. Indeed, many are still skeptical.

This frame of mind, made evident during the test-ban discussion, adds to the already cautious approach by President Kennedy, Secretary Rusk, and other American officials toward subsequent negotiations with the Russians. Nikita Khrushchev’s idea of an East-West nonagression pact finds no more favor with the public than it does in most corners of the State Department. Steps which might help in preventing a surprise attack are examined with a view to finding some hidden Soviet motivation. Khrushchev’s proposal to set up a nuclear-free zone is viewed as an effort to push back American power or send home American troops.

There is very good reason to look at all Soviet proposals with a jaundiced eye. In years past most of them have been designed to divide the Western allies or to perpetuate the division of Europe. Yet there has been very little Western initiative in either the Eisenhower or Kennedy Administrations. But President Kennedy marshaled his forces to win Senate approval of the test ban as massively as he might have done had some agreement been under discussion to scrap half the nuclear arms on both sides.

The President and his top associates are driven by the compulsion that it is far more dangerous to do nothing. And they believe that the Soviet experience last fall in the Cuban crisis has led to some fundamental reassessment in the Kremlin. Therefore, they are determined at least to search out Khrushchev’s suggestions and to offer some alternatives, chiefly in the field of measures to prevent surprise attack.

This determination, however, is coupled with a general feeling in Washington that the Kremlin believes this is a period to go slow; that the Kremlin believes that in signing the test ban it has lowered world tensions and thus lowered the chance of war, and that that may be enough for a while. If this American assessment is correct, there will be much talk in the coming months between East and West, but without much to show for it in concrete terms.

Gold water’s chances

In his analysis of American political parties, Janies McGregor Burns in The Deadlock of Democracy argues that there are today four parties in the United States: the Presidential Democrats, the Presidential Republicans, the Congressional Democrats, and the Congressional Republicans. This is an analysis which, broadly speaking, is accepted in Washington. What makes it of more than academic interest at this time is the presidential boom for Arizona’s Republican Senator Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater fits the Burns description of a Congressional Republican, a man who puts local and state interests ahead of national interests, who wants more to be done by the states and the people and less by the federal government, and whose constituency is limited to one area or state. A Presidential Republican secs his constituency as the whole United States. It was the fate of Senator Robert A. Taft, a Congressional Republican, to lose out to such Presidential Republicans as Thomas E. Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower. The divisions are not so simple as Burns suggests, but they do exist.

Nine months before the GOP convention in San Francisco, Goldwater is the admitted front-runner. Will he be the first Congressional Republican to buck the tide and take the prize? And, perhaps even more important, if nominated, would he continue to be a Congressional Republican or would he evolve into a Presidential Republican?

Of all the issues affecting the choice of a GOP candidate, perhaps the most volatile is the civil rights crisis. The polls uniformly show that large numbers of white Americans feel the Negro is pushing too hard too fast and that President Kennedy is asking more than they would like on behalf of the Negro. Whether this will be the general attitude by election time next year will depend on the outcome of the civil rights battle in Congress and, above all, on the conduct of the militant Negroes‚ North and South, between now and election day. Goldwater stands to benefit by white disaffection with the Kennedy espousal of the Negro cause.

Mood of the Capital

In world affairs, Washington is hopeful. The Communist bloc is more divided than ever. The Kremlin has lowered East-West tensions. Things are not going well in the Atlantic alliance, but they have not reached a major crisis, either.

At home, the economy is moving, but not moving enough. Congress has been stalling; it is badly divided on many questions. The civil rights crisis is likely to get worse before it gets better. And on top of all this, another presidential election is now barely a year away. Politics is more and more in the air, coloring congressional votes and inhibiting foreign policy.