Another aspect of our policy is the Foreign Aid program. To it, in the
last fourteen years, we have committed over eighty billions of American
treasure--in grants, loans, material, and technical assistance. I
will not develop here what every thinking American knows about this
Gargantuan expenditure--that it has had dire consequences, not only
for the American taxpayer, but for the American economy; that it has
been characterized by waste and extravagance both overseas and in the
agencies that administer it; and that it has created a vast reservoir
of anti-Americanism among proud peoples who, however irrationally,
resent dependence on a foreign dole. I would rather put the question,
Has the Foreign Aid program, for all of its drawbacks, made a
compensating contribution toward winning the Cold War?
And this test, let me say parenthetically, is the only one under which
the Foreign Aid program can be justified. It cannot, that is to say, be
defended as a charity. The American government does not have the right,
much less the obligation, to try to promote the economic and social
welfare of foreign peoples. Of course, all of us are interested in
combating poverty and disease wherever it exists. _But the Constitution
does not empower our government to undertake that job in foreign
countries_, no matter how worthwhile it might be. Therefore, except as
it can be shown to promote America’s national interests, the Foreign
Aid program is unconstitutional.
It can be argued, but not proved, that American aid helped prevent
Western Europe from going Communist after the Second World War. It is
true, for example, that the Communist parties in France and Italy were
somewhat weaker after economic recovery than before it. But it does
not follow that recovery _caused_ the reduction in Communist strength,
or that American aid caused the recovery. It is also true, let us
remember, that West Germany recovered economically at a far faster rate
than France or Italy, and received comparatively little American aid.
It also can be argued that American military aid has made the
difference between friendly countries having the power to fight off
or discourage Communist aggression, and not having that power. Here,
however, we must distinguish between friendly countries that were
_not_ able to build their own military forces, and those that were.
Greece, Turkey, Free China, South Korea and South Vietnam needed our
help. Other countries, England and France, for example, were able to
maintain military forces with their own resources. For many years now,
our allies in Western Europe have devoted smaller portions of their
national budgets to military forces than we have. The result is that
the American people, in the name of _military_ aid, have been giving an
_economic_ handout to these nations; we have permitted them to transfer
to their domestic economy funds which, in justice, should have been
used in the common defense effort.
Now let us note a significant fact. In each of the situations we have
mentioned so far--situations where some evidence exists that Foreign
Aid has promoted American interests--there is a common denominator:
_in every case, the recipient government was already committed to our
side_. We _may_ have made these nations, on balance, stronger and more
constant allies, though even that is debatable. But we did not cause
them to alter their basic political commitments. This brings us to
the rest of the Foreign Aid program--and to the great fallacy that
underlies it.
Increasingly, our foreign aid goes not to our friends, but to professed
neutrals--and even to professed enemies. We furnish this aid under the
theory that we can buy the allegiance of foreign peoples--or at least
discourage them from “going Communist”--by making them economically
prosperous. This has been called the “stomach theory of Communism,” and
it implies that a man’s politics are determined by the amount of food
in his belly.
Everything we have learned from experience, and from our observation
of the nature of man, refutes this theory. A man’s politics are,
primarily, the product of his mind. Material wealth can help him
further his political goals, but it will not change them. The fact that
some poor, illiterate people have “gone Communist” does not prove that
poverty caused them to do so any more than the fact that Alfred K. and
Martha D. Stern are Communists proves that great wealth and a good
education make people go Communist. Let us remember that Communism is
a political movement, and that its weapons are primarily political.
The movement’s effectiveness depends on small cadres of political
activists, and these cadres are, typically, composed of literate
and well-fed people. We are not going to change the minds of such
political activists, or impede their agitation of the masses by a “war
on poverty,” however worthy such an effort might be on humanitarian
grounds.
It thus makes little sense to try to promote anti-Communism by giving
money to governments that are not anti-Communist, that are, indeed, far
more inclined to the Soviet-type society than to a free one. And let
us remember that the foreign policies of many of the allegedly neutral
nations that receive our aid are not “neutral” at all. Is Sukarno’s
Indonesia neutral when it encourages Red Chinese aggression? Or Nehru’s
India when it censures the Western effort to recover Suez but refuses
to censure the Soviet invasion of Hungary? Or Nasser’s United Arab
Republic which equips its armed forces with Communist weapons and
Communist personnel? Is American aid likely to make these nations less
pro-Communist? Has it?
But let us, for the moment, concede the validity of the “stomach
theory,” and ask a further question: Is our foreign aid program the
kind that will bring prosperity to underdeveloped countries? We
Americans believe--and we can cite one hundred and fifty years of
experience to support the belief--that the way to build a strong
economy is to encourage the free play of economic forces: free capital,
free labor, a free market. Yet every one of the “neutral” countries we
are aiding is committed to a system of State Socialism. Our present
policy of government-to-government aid strengthens Socialism in those
countries. We are not only perpetuating the inefficiency and waste that
always attends government-controlled economies; by strengthening the
hand of those governments, we are making it more difficult for free
enterprise to take hold. For this reason alone, we should eliminate
all government-to-government capital assistance and encourage the
substitution of American private investment.
Our present Foreign Aid program, in sum, is not only ill-administered,
but ill-conceived. It has not, in the majority of cases, made the free
world stronger; it has made America weaker; and it has created in minds
the world over an image of a nation that puts prime reliance, not on
spiritual and human values, but on the material things that are the
stock-in-trade of Communist propaganda. To this extent we have adopted
Communist doctrine.
In the future, if our methods are to be in tune with our true
objectives, we will confine foreign aid to military and technical
assistance to those nations that need it and that are committed to a
common goal of defeating world Communism.