The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

PRESIDENT Johnson’s hope that he would be spared foreign crises for a while quickly evaporated as he was forced to concern himself with Panama, Guantanamo, foreign aid, French recognition of Communist China, new pressures for East-West trade, the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, De Gaulle’s campaign to neutralize Southeast Asia, and a variety of other problems overseas. Whatever a President’s training or interest, he is the only person in the American government who can make the hard decisions on foreign policy. He must be judged on his foreign-policy record.

Johnson’s critics have said that he lacks a feeling for foreign affairs, and that he approaches foreign problems, first, with his mind on the political consequences and, second, with the temperament of a legislative leader trying to bully his opponents into submission. These criticisms were made with respect to his handling of both the Panama and Guantanamo crises. In both cases, the President was determined to act forcefully and quickly. He thought that the country would be disappointed if he did not, and he was probably unduly influenced by the congressional demands for a tough line.

Senator Mansfield’s warning

The plain fact is, however, as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana told the Senate, that the United States’s record in Panama is far from perfect. The President obviously was responsible for the protection of American lives and property when rioting began. But he also had an obligation to devise a policy in keeping with the realities of the situation and not to strike a pose for the sake of domestic politics.

Milton S. Eisenhower warned in his book The Wine is Bitter that we could expect trouble unless we made reforms in our Panama policy. But no Administration in Washington has seriously faced up to the problem which Dr. Eisenhower clearly outlined in his book and which he forcefully presented to the government when his brother was President. As Mansfield told the Senate, the incidents that provoked this year’s crisis might have been anticipated. “ There have been periodic clashes in and around the Canal Zone going back almost to the beginning of the century, when the canal was built,” the Majority Leader said. “Such incidents are almost inevitable when a great and wealthy nation occupies a position of conspicuous privilege in an alien land characterized by great squalor and poverty.”

It is shocking that Americans can easily see the mistakes of colonialism in other parts of the world but not in this hemisphere. To charge Communism as the main culprit will, as Mansfield said, “only confound the confusion.” While many members of Congress passionately defended this nation’s rights in Panama “in perpetuity” and called on the President to teach the Panamanians a lesson, Mansfield warned Americans not to entrap themselves “in an emotional plot which was already becoming hackneyed in the days of Rudyard Kipling.”

“What this incident tells us in its stark tragedy, what it cries out to us to do is to get busy and to find as quickly as possible reasonable solutions to the conditions which precipitated the tragedy,” Mansfield said. He listed three basic factors: the position of “conspicuous privilege” which Americans enjoy in the zone; the “clash of emotional nationalism in a small country” with the “hardrock security requirements of a great power”; and the “overdependence of world shipping” on an “outdated and inadequate monopoly of transit facilities” between the two oceans.

Mansfield argued that it would be a serious mistake to construct another canal in Colombia or Nicaragua, because it would mean a duplication of the same problems we have in Panama. He said a canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec could be built by Mexico, which has the stability, manpower, and skills required. Mansfield suggested that capital could be provided by a consortium of maritime nations, but Mexico is not prepared to accept capital in this way.

Recent events emphasize more than ever the opportunity that was lost after World War IT to internationalize the world’s waterways. At the Potsdam Conference, Stalin vetoed President Truman’s attempt to start work on the idea. For months thereafter, Truman sought ways to interest world leaders in his proposal for international control of the Suez, Panama, and Kiel canals, the Bosporus, the Danube and Rhine rivers, Gibraltar, and other waterways. But the project was the victim of the cold war and the refusal of statesmen to alter old habits. Churchill expressed general interest in the Truman idea. But Stalin, according to Robert Murphy in his new book. Diplomat Among Warriors, abruptly rejected it with the Russian nyet.

Trade with the Communists

After the incident over the supply of water to the Guantánamo Naval Base, President Johnson appealed once more to friendly nations to curtail their trade with Cuba. He made a legitimate request consonant with American interests. We do not accept the principle of coexistence with Castro. We do accept it with the Soviet Union because we have no alternative, unless we wish to wage a religious crusade that can only end with the annihilation of one religion or the other. Our relations with Russia are based on the conviction that Soviet aggressiveness eventually will be tempered by the realities of world power and by Russia’s own self-interest.

Our dispute with those who trade with Castro is unrelated to the question of whether there should be trade with the bloc. While there is no official opposition to nonstrategic trade, there is a dispute between the United States and its allies over the terms of trade with the bloc. In the past, there has been general agreement that credits of five years should be the limit, but some credits have been extended for seven years. Now, Britain is prepared to sell chemical plants to Russia on fifteen-year credits. The Johnson Administration has argued unsuccessfully that loans for that long a period are a form of aid that should not be extended to the Soviets.

Washington’s principal argument is that Khrushchev faces a series of problems and that we should not make his choices any easier for him. But since Britain was blocked from the Common Market it naturally has turned more and more to the East for markets. Both the Conservative government and the Labor Party favor trade with the Communists, including China, in all but clearly strategic items.

Britain has had a counterargument to every argument Washington has made. We say that to grant long-term credits now takes some pressure off the Kremlin to reduce its arms budget. The British reply that there is no reason to believe outside pressures of this kind can affect arms spending. Indeed, they say that trade may make it possible for Khrushchev to counteract the Kremlin’s hard-liners and devote more resources to consumer needs.

The United States set forth almost the same argument when it defended the decision to sell wheat to the Communist bloc. President Kennedy believed that to block the sale of wheat would make it more difficult to carry on negotiations on other projects designed to alleviate tensions.

A drop in the bucket

Both London and Washington agree that Khrushchev faces major internal problems, one of which concerns the apportionment of resources between military and civilian needs. Another is the issue of economic liberalization — how far to go to provide new incentives to promote agricultural and industrial growth. While Western policy should do what it can to promote liberalization and larger allocations to the civilian economy, we should recognize the limits of our ability to influence the Kremlin in this respect. If all trade with Russia were cut off, the Kremlin, which has practiced autarky for forty years, would be inconvenienced but not immobilized. If all restrictions were removed, trade still would not expand much.

In 1962, for example, Soviet nonbloc imports totaled $1.8 billion; exports totaled $2.1 billion. That is a total foreign trade of less than $4 billion for a country with a gross national product of more than $250 billion. Our wheat sales may total 2.5 million tons, a marginal amount when one considers that Russia produces more than 100 million tons of wheat and feed grains annually.

Report on Washington

For a long time Washington has been afraid that the East and not the West would profit from EastWest trade. The attitude shows a disturbing Jack of confidence in our business ability as well as in our ability to influence others in trade and cultural contacts. There must be many in the Kremlin who have even greater fears about these contacts. They do not want to become dependent upon foreign sources of supply.

Undersecretary of State George Ball is right in arguing that the West ought to have a common policy regarding trade with the Communist bloc. But he has expected most of the concessions to be made by nations that are more dependent on trade than the United States. Our friends in Europe regard our policy as sterile and negative, and they have served notice that they will not be bound by it.

The battle over foreign aid

As a practical man who for years watched Congress try to dismantle the foreign-aid program, President Johnson made an attempt to find a way out of the increasingly bitter and unproductive annual row on Capitol Hill. But his first attempts failed, and he has been criticized for his apparent willingness to compromise with some of the program’s most ardent enemies and for his eagerness to cut the request for funds.

In the opinion of many persons here who have watched the sad history of the aid program, what is needed, far more than restudy and reorganization, is a period of calm to permit the Agency for International Development to function under normal circumstances. It has not been able to do that because it has been on the political griddle. In 1963 Congress finally voted the aid appropriation during Christmas week, nearly six months after the fiscal year began.

AID Director David E. Bell proved to be a competent administrator when he was budget director. It is impossible to see whether he is a good aid administrator because he has never really worked at the job; most of his time last year was spent before either the Clay Committee or Congress, and he was trapped in the same routine when the President named the Ball Committee to study foreign-aid administration.

President de Gaulle boasted at his January 31 news conference that France gave a higher percentage of its income in foreign aid than any other country. As America’s gross national product increases, it is reducing its aid program. The President’s request for appropriations this year is the smallest on record. When Congress finally voted the aid funds in December, the appropriation was 31 percent below President Kennedy’s modified request. To limit the President’s freedom of action. Congress cut the contingency fund from a requested $300 million to $50 million. It had granted $250 million the year before. In signing the appropriation bill, President Johnson defiantly said that he would violate the law if necessary to aid a free government which might be established in Cuba. The bill which he was signing contained many new restrictive amendments, including one forbidding the President to aid Cuba until that country compensates Americans whose property was seized.

Mood of the Capital

Washington has seldom been so seriously concerned over its relations with an ally as it is this year over the challenge from President de Gaulle. His actions have disturbed Washington deeply. Even more upsetting has been his attitude of general hostility. His decision to recognize Red China was a slap in the face because he had given contrary assurances. His continued advocacy of neutralism in Southeast Asia seemed to be a deliberate attempt to embarrass the United States in South Vietnam.

But none of his actions caused quite the despair that has been engendered by his repeated expressions of contempt for the United States, for the Anglo-Saxons, and for the concept of alliance. Instead of an ally seeking to resolve differences and to work for the common good, he appears in the role, as official Washington sees him, of a challenger who delights in taunting his antagonist.