Still More Foreign Aid?

January 14, 1957

In asking for advance authority to commit American troops to “protect the territorial integrity and political independence” of any Middle Eastern nation against Communist “armed aggression” the President has taken an immense step forward in foreign policy. Yet Congress is still faced with an awkward problem. It is being asked to give much wider discretionary powers to a President and a Secretary of State who have ineptly used the discretionary powers they already possess.

Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal was a breach of a treaty and an arbitrary seizure of an international agency. We failed to denounce it as such. Instead, we restrained Britain and France and called a futile “users’” conference, whose conciliatory proposals Egypt contemptuously rejected. When France and England in desperation took the only remaining action likely to protect the vital interests of the West, we called the U.N. Assembly into session in order to stigmatize them as “aggressors.”

The President now seems to be proposing to do with American money and at the risk of American lives the very things which he prevented Britain, France, and Israel from doing with their own money and at the risk of their own soldiers’ lives. If the withdrawal of British and French troops now leaves a power “vacuum” in the Middle East, it is a vacuum which our own policy helped to create. The President’s new proposals are a great step forward. But they still, in several respects, fail to face up to realities:

U.N. WEAKNESS

1—The President’s proposals deal with a possible future crisis rather than the crisis that now confronts us. He offers to send troops to defend nations “requesting aid, against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international Communism.” But this fails to deal with the problem of “peaceful” Communist infiltration, or to meet clearly the problem of Middle East countries, like Egypt and Syria, that are already under the control of men willing to play with the Communists.

2—The President apparently still wishes to leave the problem of Egyptian-Israeli relations and of the Suez Canal to the United Nations, though that body has so far signally failed to solve either problem. The President’s own speech, however, clearly shows how weak a reed is the U.N. to bind our destinies to: “The United Nations was able to bring about a cease-fire and withdrawal of hostile forces from Egypt because it was dealing with governments and peoples who had a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. But in the case of Hungary . . . the Soviet Union . . . has shown callous indifference to the recommendations, even the censure, of the General Assembly.” What does this mean but that the United Nations is either a hollow fiction as a preserver of world peace, or merely a tool that can be used against the democracies but not against the Communist dictatorships?

3—The President’s message strongly implied that we would act alone in using troops in the Middle East, and not with England, France, or other members of NATO. This would not only put an immensely greater burden upon us, in money and men, delay help, and risk defeat, but its very proposal must further arouse the suspicions and resentment of our allies. We have already, by the recent ambiguities and contradictions of our foreign policy, badly shaken the confidence of those allies.

4—We come at last to the question of foreign aid. The President wishes to continue such aid “for economic and defensive military purposes,” and will ask authorization of a special discretionary fund of $400 million for the Middle East. But how and to what effect will these funds be employed? Are we once more to urge money upon Nasser, to prop up the Egyptian economy that his own actions have done so much to disrupt? Are we to reimburse Syria for its action in blowing up the pipeline that runs across it? Or are we to recognize, at last, that the whole economic foreign-aid program is a colossal failure? Egypt will recover through restoring the Suez Canal traffic and tolls, and the Middle East generally through restoring the movement of oil, far more quickly than with U.S. Government grants.