What Money Can Buy

As the 85th Congress, in its final hours last week, passed a $3.3 billion foreign aid bill, many were the critics prepared as always to judge the wisdom and virtue of each congressional session by the sheer size of this key appropriation. Such people measure influence abroad by dollars spent, and were thus easy targets for those who regard foreign aid as simple bribery, and are angered every time a beneficiary does not toe the line.

But foreign aid has come a long way from the postwar days when the simple criterion was to reward friends and to deny foes. The money doled from the U.S. till last week, to an odd set of customers, still had the same general purpose as the weapon once known to Europeans as "the cavalry of St. George."* But on both sides of the cold war, foreign aid was now devoted to far more complex purposes.

The four Soviet submarines that appeared in the English Channel last week, apparently bound for Egypt, were a sharp reminder of an important Russian addendum to the original doctrine, i.e., help your enemy's enemies. Other powers were beginning to make their own distinctive contributions to the theory and practice of foreign aid. Items:

P: In Africa, General Charles de Gaulle sought to sell his new constitution to Africa by threatening to cut off economic aid to those who voted no.

P: West Germany planned to make $125 million in long-term credits available to Arab, Asian and Latin American nations. Helpful as this would be to the recipients, it was also designed to give West German exporters a competitive edge in some rapidly expanding markets.

P: In Indonesia, East German engineers, attempting to demonstrate that the Communist world has as much to offer technologically as the U.S., blandly explained that it was not their fault that the $8,000,000 cane-sugar refinery near Djokjakarta, which they had promised to finish by now, was still not in production. Pooh-poohing Indonesian charges that the mill's machinery had been designed to process beet rather than cane sugar, the East Germans huffily and indignantly complained that everything would have worked out fine had Indonesian contractors laid proper concrete foundations.

A Cry from the Heart. Ingenious as some of its imitators might be, the U.S. still stood pre-eminent in the art of aidmanship. It was getting resigned to expecting no gratitude, and to accepting anomalies. Recognizing that poverty always has its claims on the rich, the U.S. could observe, in Latin America and the Middle East, that poor nations often had some mighty extravagant spenders among them. Italy had its 2,000,000 unemployed --and its rich who escape honest taxation. Wealthy Actress Gina Lollobrigida made the headlines last week by reporting a taxable income of only $18,583 for 1957, but she was only the prettiest rather than the most flagrant practitioner of a well-established Italian habit.

In Karachi, the antigovernment newspaper Dawn, in no mood for gratitude, stumbled across a long buried government report criticizing the way more than 500 million U.S. dollars have been lavished on Pakistan in the past seven years. The Pakistanis complained that it cost $25,000 a year from these funds to install and maintain each U.S. technician and expert in Pakistan, and some were not worth it. They also objected to other terms of U.S. aid: whatever Pakistan purchases with U.S. aid funds, the items must meet U.S.-established standards regardless of where they are purchased; notice of all such purchases planned must first be given to the U.S. Office of Small Business, which sometimes obliges the Pakistanis to buy U.S. products even though the same items are available more cheaply elsewhere; in some cases, half the goods purchased must travel to Pakistan in U.S. bottoms.

A Bet on the Losers. Last week the U.S. was about to confer from $200 million to $300 million on Communist Yugoslavia to pay for projects on which the Russians had welshed. Reason: it did not expect to make Tito less a Communist, but considered a heretic inside the Communist camp a practical investment.

Eight Globemasters, full of U.S. small arms and military vehicles, put down at Djakarta airport in Indonesia last week. Thus ended an arms embargo which led the irritated Indonesian government to buy Soviet bloc MIG fighters. Reason for the change of heart: Washington was finally persuaded that in a crisis-torn nation of 85 million, the Indonesian army had shown itself resistant to Communist pressures and was therefore worth helping.

These intricate calculations were straightforwardness itself in comparison with the Middle East. There, the U.S. found itself in the strange, probably unavoidable position of backing horses which it knew to be losers. Items:

P: In Jordan, which has received some $230 million in U.S. and British aid since 1952, the U.S. was preparing to spend another $50 million in the next year to bolster up a nation that had little reason for existence, except that its disappearance might be followed by anarchy or war.

P: Lebanon, which in nearly four months of civil war has transformed itself from a prosperous Middle Eastern Switzerland into an economic disaster area, wants $100 million in U.S. aid. The U.S. taxpayer will thus be asked to underwrite the factional' orgy of civic irresponsibility staged by the Lebanese.

P: While defendants in the show trials staged by the new Iraqi regime busily implicated the U.S. in an implausible variety of "imperialist conspiracies," the Iraqi army last week ungraciously accepted "a few thousand dollars" worth of military spare parts under an agreement which the U.S. had concluded with the prerevolutionary government of Nuri asSaid and the late King Feisal. The hopeful U.S. intention: to strengthen the hand of such pro-Western elements as may be in the new government.

Easy as it is to point up the contradictions of aid, easy as it is to show that it does not produce all that the optimists claim for it and brings little gratitude, the fact is that on balance, U.S. food has saved many lives, U.S. assistance has brought the beginnings of economic progress to many nations. If such nations are still not healthy, they would have been sicker without aid--and prey to riot and revolution. And so, swallowing its misgivings, the U.S., in its newfound determination to rid itself of the stigma of hostility to Arab nationalism, is now even implicitly committed to give vital economic aid, on his own terms, to the Egyptian dictator whose propaganda spokesmen daily proclaim his contempt for the U.S. and all its works.

* The British gold sovereigns that bore on their reverse side the figure of St. George on horseback slaying the dragon.

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