The Global Challenge We Face
Permit me to make it clear at the outset that I respect the non-partisan character of this audience. Secretary Dulles, moreover, has enough burdens without enduring politically inspired abuse as well. The "cruel and unusual punishment" of which he complained last year, however, is unusually light for an American Secretary of State.
Think back, if you will, 102 years. President John Quincy Adams and his Secretary of State Henry Clay had nominated envoys to a Congress of the American Nations at Panama. Debate in the Senate gave way to personal abuse. And the most personally abusive was the half-mad, half-genius Senator John Randolph of Roanoke. President Adams privately called him "that physical, moral and intellectual fragment of a man, with his mind overspread with stinking weeds and stinging nettles." In what is perhaps the most memorable and malignant sentence in the history of political calumny, Randolph denounced even the aged mother of Secretary of State Clay for bringing into the world "this being, so brilliant yet so corrupt, which, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, shines and stinks." This is an example of old-fashioned Senatorial courtesy which I should think might cheer the heart of John Foster Dulles.
But Secretary of State Henry Clay promptly challenged Randolph to a duel. At first Randolph declined, believing – as all of us do – that no Senator should be held accountable off the Senate Floor for what he says there. But ultimately he accepted. And on a spring morning in April, across the Potomac River in Virginia, the Executive and Legislative Branches met in mortal combat. Nothing in the Constitution covered the situation. To make a long story short, Clay's second shot succeeded only in piercing the Senator's peculiar white wrapper – while Randolph fired in the air. Then they met halfway and shook hands, Randolph saying jocularly, "You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay;" and Clay replying gravely "I am glad the debt is no greater."
There is a grave danger today, I am afraid, that less dramatic but more harmful personality and partisan disputes may blind both the Executive Branch and the Congress to the new and critical issues that demand our reexamination. There is a danger that our nation, and the leaders of both parties, will be committed to falling back on past programs and successes, despite new pressures and threats. For we are in a crisis. The Russian sputniks did not begin it. The American explorer did not end it.
There are disturbing signs that we as a nation are intellectually and emotionally unprepared for the long test of endurance we may face. One vivid example was the recent Army report on American prisoners in North Korea. Not only was there an alarmingly high rate of collaboration with the enemy, there was also a very spotty will to resist and survive. A third or more of the prisoners were guilty of at least minor acts of collaboration. An unprecedented high rate helped actively in Chinese propaganda, and in spying on their fellows. Leaving aside instances of brain-washing and brutal torture – of which there were considerably less than commonly imagined – we find a disturbing rate of easy yielding – to enemy commands, to fear and to a breakdown of self-discipline.
Comrades were abandoned on roadsides. Dysentery victims were rolled out into the snow to die. And there was little useful activity among the captives. Many even refused nourishing if unfamiliar foods like soya beans, preferring death or malnutrition.
Over 38% of the men captured died – the highest proportion of any war in our history. And there was not a single successful escape.
Of 229 Turkish prisoners, on the other hand, according to the Army report, all survived – though half were injured when taken captive. Not one collaborated in any significant way; and the whole group retained a remarkable sense of discipline.
There can be no doubt, then, that we must prepare not only American missiles for the current struggle – but American minds as well.
For our crisis is not a military crisis alone – our greatest threat is not one of nuclear attack. The defense budget may have captured the headlines. But the hard truth of the matter is that we stand in greater danger of losing out in our titanic competition with the Russians without a single missile ever being fired.
There are all kinds of new impulses in the world situation which our course of action must recognize. The frozen images we have inherited from ten years ago no longer suffice. For today several nations stand on the threshold of becoming nuclear powers; an economically united Europe is a real possibility since the establishment of Euratom and the embryo of the common market; nationalism has taken new shapes in the formation of the new federated states in the Arab world; and Africa is fast moving into self-consciousness.
Nothing better illustrates the new dimensions of our world than the Soviet economic challenge. In 1953 the U.S.S.R. first sent specialists and technicians to India and Afghanistan. This spearhead of ruble diplomacy has now become the main sword of Communist policy in the uncommitted and underdeveloped world. Sino-Soviet block agreements to provide assistance to the less developed countries total thus far nearly $2 billion – including up to $170 million in economic aid to Syria last October, and the recent promise of some $230 million for Egyptian economic development. Six vital countries – Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Egypt and Syria – account for 95% of Communist aid offered in the form of easy credits.
But even countries allied with the West have been offered Soviet aid – such as Iran, Turkey, and Iceland. Russia has offered to supply Brazil with everything it needs for the development of its oil resources. Argentina has accepted a Kremlin invitation to send an economic mission to Moscow. The newly independent nations of Africa are also receiving attractive aid and trade offers. Russia has huge gold reserves and great flexibility in trade policies.
This economic threat, in my opinion, is greater than any military danger. For, though we live in a seemingly prosperous world, the economic decline, the political chaos, and the ideological disillusionment upon which Communism breeds and spreads are all on the increase. The astounding, explosive growth of the world's population, expected to double in this century, is centered largely on those nations of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America least able to support it. Mexico, for example, will double its population during the next twenty-three years, largely because it has decreased its death rate in the last decade by an astonishing 43%. To feed each day's increase in world population requires that we find 150 square miles of new arable land every day. To feed one year's gain alone would require a new farm as large as the state of Illinois.
As a result, in the midst of this age of prosperity and abundance, the standard of living for much of the world is actually declining. In the world community of nations, the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Per capita income in the United States may have climbed to some $2,000 a year for every man, woman, and child – but it is $110 a year in Egypt, $54 in India, and $25 a year in Libya. The world may be enjoying more prosperity than ever before – but strange as it may seem, it has also never seen so much poverty in all its history.
Into the disorder and distress caused by these trends march Messrs. Khrushchev and company. They arrive able to conclude arrangements for foreign aid and trade without respecting the wishes of Congressional Committees, consumers, and taxpayers. They have purchased commodities they did not need from wavering nations. They have sold expensive equipment at a loss to an uncommitted state.
The Russians have not failed to develop a new sense of national purpose. They realize only too well that knowledge and intellectual achievement are among the valuable commodities of export and magnets of appeal. I do not know whether the Battle of Waterloo was actually won on the playing fields of Eton. But it is no exaggeration to say that the struggle in which we are now engaged may well be won or lost in the classrooms of America.
While we rush to devote our efforts to matching their space satellites, they may go on to score other spectacular breakthroughs. We may see a Soviet cyclotron bigger than any in the free world. We may see a communist Atomic-powered merchant vessel or airplane. At the Brussels World's Fair, we may even be surpassed in such American specialties as electronic computers and automation. Or the Soviets may next gain worldwide prestige through some stunning success in the mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the inside of the earth and the inside of men's minds.
More important, while we in the United States are unable to produce enough engineers and scientists to meet our own needs, more than two thousand Communist technicians are working today in nineteen underdeveloped countries. Increased millions of these skilled technicians, Premier Bulganin told the Communist Party Congress, are Russia's "Gold reserve."
Nor are other subjects unimportant – for example, foreign languages.
Up to one million scientific articles are published every year in languages other than English. Recently, several of our industrial laboratories spent five years and over $200,000 conducting studies of the design of electrical circuits. When they finished, they discovered that this very work had already been done and described in a Soviet journal before their own studies had even started.
In Russia, on the other hand, about 90% of all serious scientific books in any language are purchased and studied. There are more than 41 thousand teachers of English in Russia today. The Soviet ten-year school curriculum includes for every student six compulsory years of foreign language, from the fifth grade on – and English is the most popular choice.
But the basic responsibility rests with you on the local level. It is within your power to see that your local schools no longer produce mathematical illiterates – or students who can identify all the wives of Henry the Eighth, but not the countries bordering Afghanistan – or scholars whose education has been so specialized as to exclude them from participation in current events – men like Lord John Russell, of whom Queen Victoria once remarked that he would be a better man if he knew a third subject – but he was interested in nothing but the Constitution of 1688 and himself. Civilization, according to the old saying, "is a race between education and catastrophe." It is up to you to determine the winner.
How do we meet this challenge? I suggest we keep two thoughts uppermost in our minds:
First, we cannot make foreign aid the vehicle of a popularity contest or a cut-price proposition. The fact is that, under the best conditions, we cannot compete with the Russians in barter arrangements, interest rates, and price adjustments.
In short, let us adopt a foreign economic policy which stands on its own feet. The Russians can prod us and even illustrate some techniques of assistance – but we cannot and need not compete measure for measure, move for move.
Secondly, let us not be overcome by despair at the hopelessness of the task. For the truth of the matter is that we have hardly begun to test our mettle in helping underdeveloped peoples. The vast majority of our aid during the last twelve years has been in military grants. The great proportion of our economic assistance has gone to Western Europe and Japan. Only seven underdeveloped countries have each received more than $1/2 billion in grants and loans in all 12 years combined: Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Formosa, Korea, the Philippines and Indo-China. Each of these was either engaged in war or war rehabilitation. Each was of prime military importance.
To India, on the other hand, we have given about $1 per head. In the Middle East, far from pouring billions of dollars into the treasuries of oil-rich Arab monarchs, we have given a total of military, economic, and technical assistance to the eight Arab States, since the very beginning of the aid program, that is less than 1/20th the amount spent on Formosa alone.
What steps, then, do we take. It seems to me the following are of prime importance:
1. First, we should begin to shift the balance of this year's foreign aid program from military to economic aid. Military arms and alliances offer few, if any, solutions to the problems of economic stagnation. On the contrary, they may only throw things further out of balance. Military assistance may sometimes be necessary. But we should avoid making this the pivot of action whenever possible. The arms race in the Middle East, the festering lesion between India and Pakistan, the painful paralysis in North Africa all illustrate the dangers of equating friendship with military alliances or "voting the Western ticket."
2. Secondly, in areas where military assistance is necessary over the long pull, it might serve a second purpose – local capital development. A strong tradition within our own Army is that of engineering. Traditionally only the top graduates of West Point have been eligible for the Corps of Engineers. Could not our military assistance programs induce somewhat the same bent among local troops in underdeveloped nations? In Laos, for example, village development has been taken over by the military. If we could get more local soldiers to work on irrigation works, housing, bridges – somewhat like our own CCC in the 1930's – then our large commitment in military aid might harvest some more lasting and constructive benefit.
3. Third, in economic assistance, we must expand the small beginnings made last year in establishing the International Development Fund. This revolving fund recognizes the longer cycle of economic development. It recognizes the need for more rational and more flexible planning. It can get us away from the fruitless project-by-project, year-by-year, country-by-country approach which has mostly governed our aid. Its capitalization must be increased; its life must be extended on a long-term basis. This is the most flexible tool in our entire foreign aid program. Yet we have given it too few funds, too short a lease, and too little support. Today our assistance program is much in the position of a surgeon who opens up the patient's stomach without any definite plans for sewing it up again.
Fourth, our economic aid policies to the world's newest nations must not be imprisoned by our Western alliances – and I refer specifically to Tunisia. Tunisia's Bourguiba is a man who has earnestly sought to merge the future of North Africa with that of the West. He has persistently rejected large Soviet offers of economic and military assistance. But 40 percent of the Tunisian labor force is unemployed. The government faces a budgetary gap of close to $100 million. He sees a large American loan go to France at a time when a large proportion of the French budget is going into the war against Algeria, and just ten days before French planes attack Sakiet. He sees American aid going to those Mid-East countries that hover between the United States and the USSR. But he – the first Mid-East leader to endorse the Eisenhower Doctrine – cannot obtain even $15 million a year in American assistance. We are leaving him no alternative but to turn to Cairo or even Moscow for aid.
But the situation in North Africa is not merely an economic problem. Whatever the legal and political niceties may be, it has assumed international proportions. The war in Algeria is sapping France economically. It is inhibiting a useful French contribution to NATO. It is implicating our own country more deeply every day – not only because our arms are used to suppress rebels, but also because our funds make it possible for the French to continue. Western relations with Tunisia and Morocco cannot help but deteriorate further under this strain.
It is easy to say that this is none of our affair – but it is no longer safe or right or accurate to do so. This inflamed controversy must be treated, not choked, within NATO or the UN. To be sure, this may cause some discomfort to our leaders. It may bring some hostility from our friends. But a true partnership cannot imply that each ally will support every policy of every member – wherever it leads, anywhere in the world.
The current crisis over North Africa points up yet another paradox of our world position. Increasingly, the slogans and appeals of the Communist left and the belligerent right have merged against the United States. In England the cry is raised against American bases, in Germany for reunification at any price; in many other countries against all bomb tests; in France against American "imperialism." Today the extreme forces in France have a common chorus.
Perhaps as one who has opposed our government's position in North Africa I can remind our French friends that our official position has been consistently interpreted throughout the world as one of support for the French. Our three votes in the UN on the Algerian question in 1955, 1956 and 1957 all supported the French position. Ambassador Dillon, in the spring of 1956, made a well-publicized declaration, supported by the White House, that we recognize the legitimacy of the French position in Algeria and its special position in the rest of North Africa. This statement has been re-echoed since by both the President and Secretary Dulles and by the new American ambassador in Paris.
If evidence were needed that the US has made little effort to reverse France's course in North Africa, it was provided this February by the quick negotiation of a large $650 million loan to France as a brake for France's economic decline – caused very largely by the heavy financial drain of the Algerian war. We are now witnessing the results of a policy of verbal neutralism which has gained us no friends in France and lost us many friends in the uncommitted world.
French voices are now accusing us of seeking to supplant and exploit France's economy in North Africa. Yet American investment in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco has hardly changed since Tunisia and Morocco gained their independence. In 1950 total American investments were about $15 million. Today they run no higher than $20 million and constitute less than 1 percent of the investment base in North Africa.
Now that the Good Offices mission of the United States has been repudiated by the popular representatives of the French people on such false grounds, we have no alternative but to state frankly and fully our interests in achieving a settlement in North Africa which includes a timetable for self-determination by the people of Algeria. There is still some chance of making the Mediterranean a bridge and not a moat between the West and Arab world, but the opportunities are ebbing very fast.
Fifth: Let me discuss specifically the case of India.
The key to a democratic Asia is India. Its economy today is suspended in delicate balance between danger and potentiality – much as Europe's was in 1947. The Indian economy has reached a crucial and precarious point of success or failure.
Senator Cooper and I have recently proposed three measures with respect to India. First, a series of administrative steps this year which would further ease the Indian dollar problem in the short run. Second, a Congressional statement of American interest in the success of the Indian industrialization effort, paralleling the Congressional action in 1947 which served as a framework within which the Marshall Plan arrangements were negotiated. Third, that the United States Government explore with the OEEC governments of Europe, Japan, and other potential contributors, the possibility of setting up a special group which would establish the longer range Indian requirements for loans and outline a (consortium) arrangement which would assure India that it could proceed in good heart with its second Five Year Plan.
We are caught up with many urgent matters – the recasting of our military strategies and systems, the problem of dealing with the economic recession, and our many standing commitments.
Why, then, do many of us believe that the course of action we have outlined cannot wait and that the United States and the other industrialized nations of the Free World must now wrest from the democratic process the course of action which would guarantee the success of the monumental adventure now going forward in India?
Our view stems from a judgment about the state of things in India and a judgment about the state of the Free World alliance.
India has successfully pointed the way to progressive economic development; it has achieved a steady rate of growth, established the firm beginning of an economic base, maintained an economy in which the private sector plays a large and expanding role, and avoided an excess of governmental regimentation and controls. In India democracy has prevailed in the face of heavy obstacles. The national and per capita incomes have risen despite a continuing rise in population, and education has spread. Two national elections have been held on the basis of universal suffrage. The parliamentary framework is no mirage. It is sustained by capable political leadership and a first-rate civil service. A spirit of democratic compromise has permeated the political system.
In 1956 India completed its first Five Year Plan. During that time national income rose by nearly 18% about 5% beyond target. Quite apart from its intrinsic achievements, this Plan, with its emphasis on agriculture, helped to generate a mood of national confidence, which began to reach back into the villages where most Indians live. It diverted energies away from colonial grievances and into the task of national self-development on a truly national basis.
The granting of independence to India preceded by only a short time the coming to power in China of the Communist regime. This was the great watershed in post-war Asia. China and India both began their First Five Year Plans at roughly the same time. Each country began with an economy in which almost 85% of the population was rural. Each country possesses a high resource potential and a relatively low ratio of agricultural cultivation per acre. Each system was actually in danger of running critically close to the minimum level of human well-being; in 1950 the per capita income in each country was below $50 – lower than 20 years before. India after 1948 had massive problems of population redistribution and economic dislocations as a result of the partition.
Yet India was able to create an environment for economic development. Without imposing the totalitarian direction that China required, India was able to take real strides forward, economically and politically.
India's Second Five Year Plan is now at the end of its second year. In contrast to the First Plan it stands in great peril. It may even collapse. If the Second Plan collapses, so may democratic India and the democratic hope in all of Asia. Should India fall prey to internal disorder or disillusionment among either its masses or leaders and become absorbed in the Communist system, the Free World would suffer an incalculable blow.
It is easy to dismiss India's needs with the assertion that she has launched a pretentious and impossibly large scheme calling for a scale of effort and cumulative capital infusion wholly beyond her capacity. Yet is this so? Hardly, when we consider that the Plan has a level of investment of less than $7 per year per head and when we lay it beside the contemporary effort at totalitarian planning being made by China. If the plan succeeds, India's rate of investment and savings will still be less than 10% of national income, compared with 20% in Russia, 15% in pre-war Japan and 12% in China. India, a country with a population twice that of all Western Europe and with 40% of all the free people of the uncommitted world, will still only have an investment capacity equal to that of Sweden with its population of 7 million.
India, moreover, has taken stern measures of economic self-discipline. In fact, the real question is whether the austerity measures may not soon reach the point of becoming self-defeating – by drying up too much private capital, debilitating the previously buoyant private sector by the rigidity of import controls, or sapping the incentives on which much of the Plan was predicated.
Can the Indian Government cut more deeply into the Plan without breaking the springs of its momentum? I do not think so, for a genuine program of economic development is a seamless web which cannot be pulled apart or rewoven from cheaper materials. The Indian economy has reached a level of complexity and maturity in which the various elements of the Plan are intermeshed. Steel and coal and transport and machinery are part of a single complex and all must grow together. Almost all industries depend on an economic energy transportation and machine base; education and housing are the muscle for a development effort. Without them there will be a husk without a kernel.
In short, further serious cuts or extended stretch-outs in the Plan would not "save" money. They would only veil and compound even greater costs in the future – or decree the eventual death sentence of the Plan and India's democratic experiment in Asia.
It is absolutely imperative that the Western nations and India summon their efforts to the achievement of the broad goals of the Second Plan. Continued slippage and a mood of "let-drift" will only leave India with a dismal economic performance and a climate of blighted expectations, the outcome of which has perhaps already been foreshadowed in the Indian state of Kerala and in Bombay, where educated but despairing citizens freely elected a Communist government.
But there is a second reason why we all should move now, within the Western alliance there are difficult unresolved problems raised by new weapons and strategies and by the residual colonial controversies. The Western alliance needs not only to reinvigorate its military program but must also find common enterprises which offer constructive alternatives to the vanishing colonial relationship with the new and emergent nations of the world. The type of proposal which we have made for cooperation towards India would, I believe, change the whole psychological relationship between the Western industrial states and the new nations and also help clear the Western partnership of recriminations and frustrations. Here that is offered a framework for common action which can further reinforce the creative impulses being felt in the development of Euratom, the Common market, and in West Africa. Here there is a beginning and a method for giving fresh vigor to the creative concept of the British Commonwealth and the Colombo Plan.
It is proper to ask: what are the prospects for such initiative? No one can predict the legislative events of this Congress. Though the process has been too slow, there has been a slow shift in our foreign assistance programs away from military pacts and purely military support toward a recognition of the importance of economic development assistance for its own sake. The shift in the last two years has been about 15%. Nothing, in my judgment, would accelerate more the pace at which this essential transition in American thinking and policy occurs than the emergence of a joint effort among allies – beginning in India and spreading beyond to other nations with the will and capacity to make real economic progress.
India is the critical test – for strategic reasons and because most of the uncommitted world from Casablanca to the Celebes is watching India's progress against the parallel effort of China. The Russians are trying to repeat in other parts of Asia and Africa their takeover of China. They are counting on the Indian disenchantment with the inadequacy of Western assistance and democratic methods of planning and economic life.
In considering the economic future of India we shall do well to recall that India has passed into the time of economic takeoff and is launched upon an effort which will by the end of the century make her one of the big powers of the world with a population of three quarters of a billion and capable of harnessing all the resources of modern science, technology and destruction. No greater challenge exists in the future than the peaceful organization of a world society which includes not only the wealthy industrial states of America, Western Europe, Russia and Japan, but also powerful new industrial states in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. How these states emerge from their period of economic transition will not only color but quite likely cast the historic setting of the next several generations in Europe and in the United States.
Sixth and finally, we must be prepared to negotiate with the Russians. There are obvious dangers in negotiation – in raising the level of popular anticipations so high that they cannot be fulfilled, in opening yet another forum for Russian propaganda, in creating pressures for synthetic agreements. Negotiation by itself is no method by which the root differences between ourselves and the USSR can be removed; and the recent exchange of correspondence has shown how great are the differences on every key issue. It would be foolish to invest false hopes in a Summit meeting; and we could in no event approach such a meeting until we clearly define our positions, align them with present realities, and make conclusive tests of Russian intent.
But if negotiation has its perils, a refusal to negotiate is even more dangerous.
If we refuse to negotiate, we damage our prestige in those Western European and other nations whose favor we need for the location of our missile bases. If we refuse to negotiate, we alienate the uncommitted peoples. If we refuse to negotiate, other nations will reach the stage of nuclear powers – endangering our existence and possibly poisoning the air we breathe.
It may be that the West and Russia cannot reach common objectives or solutions. It is most unlikely that any general settlement can be established as a result of any Summit meeting. But let us remember that we are no longer the paramount power in arms, aid, trade, or appeal to the underdeveloped world. We are acting largely only in reflex to Soviet initiative. A Summit meeting might allow this nation for once to appeal to the world with constructive solutions and our own vision of the future. If we define our purposes clearly, there is no reason why a Summit conference must be a "Suckers Game."
For there are limited – but decisive – issues which can be discussed and negotiated in mutual interest:
First, the testing of nuclear weapons. We should be willing to reopen disarmament talks, without being too rigid about our single package proposal. Our inspection proposals may need to be recast in light of missile and satellite developments.
Second, we should be willing to discuss the Middle East. We cannot pretend that the Soviet Union does not exist there or that its influences are not being felt. No other area stands more in need of a real disarmament effort. The mutual advantages for gradual demilitarization and an arms embargo – rather than an explosive arms race – are unequalled. Already we have used the area for a pilot test of the United Nations Emergency Force; and this might well be supplemented by a similar international device to regulate arms traffic.
Third, there is a possibility of denuclearizing some zone in Central Europe. Though there is little chance of gaining a comprehensive settlement of all East and Central European questions now, it would not damage our interests and might earn far greater eventual reward if we negotiated a limited disarmament arrangement with the Soviet Union in Central Europe. We cannot adopt the position that we have no initiatives or alternatives in Central Europe. At the very least, we must modify our rigid position on German armament in such a way as to probe clearly the chances for relaxing the control over East Europe by the Soviet Union. Any mutual disengagement in Europe could only take place by slow evolutionary stages, but we must honestly consider and discuss the proposals which have been made for breaking the stalemate in Germany and East Europe.
These are some of my proposals to meet the global challenge we face. But the need is for action, not words.
There is no cause for either complacency or alarm. There is no doubt about our agenda – there is no doubt about its urgency. In the words of the first Queen Elizabeth: "Of them to whom much is committed, much is required." So let us not despair but act. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past – let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
Source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files, Box 900, "8th Annual Pittsburgh World Affairs forum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 18 April 1958." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.