Our efforts to help other new or developing nations, and to strengthen
their stand for freedom, have also made progress. A newly unified Agency
for International Development is reorienting our foreign assistance to
emphasize long-term development loans instead of grants, more economic aid
instead of military, individual plans to meet the individual needs of the
nations, and new standards on what they must do to marshal their own
resources.
A newly conceived Peace Corps is winning friends and helping people in
fourteen countries--supplying trained and dedicated young men and women, to
give these new nations a hand in building a society, and a glimpse of the
best that is in our country. If there is a problem here, it is that we
cannot supply the spontaneous and mounting demand.
A newly-expanded Food for Peace Program is feeding the hungry of many
lands with the abundance of our productive farms--providing lunches for
children in school, wages for economic development, relief for the victims
of flood and famine, and a better diet for millions whose daily bread is
their chief concern.
These programs help people; and, by helping people, they help freedom. The
views of their governments may sometimes be very different from ours--but
events in Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe teach us never to
write off any nation as lost to the Communists. That is the lesson of our
time. We support the independence of those newer or weaker states whose
history, geography, economy or lack of power impels them to remain outside
"entangling alliances"--as we did for more than a century. For the
independence of nations is a bar to the Communists' "grand design"--it is
the basis of our own.
In the past year, for example, we have urged a neutral and independent
Laos--regained there a common policy with our major allies--and insisted
that a cease-fire precede negotiations. While a workable formula for
supervising its independence is still to be achieved, both the spread
of war--which might have involved this country also--and a Communist
occupation have thus far been prevented.
A satisfactory settlement in Laos would also help to achieve and safeguard
the peace in Viet-Nam--where the foe is increasing his tactics of
terror--where our own efforts have been stepped up--and where the local
government has initiated new programs and reforms to broaden the base of
resistance. The systematic aggression now bleeding that country is not a
"war of liberation"--for Viet-Nam is already free. It is a war of attempted
subjugation--and it will be resisted.