Containment and the Third World
In his address to the United Nations in September 1983, President Reagan-echoing John Foster Dulles-urged the world to choose sides between the United States and the Soviet Union: "The members...
...administrations have asserted: it contains large, wealthy countries and small, destitute ones...
...and Soviet umbrella...
...pressures...
...support for the French in Vietnam, the anti-colonial uprising in Puerto Rico in 1950 and Dulles' rigid demand that the world's nations should define themselves for or against "Godless communism" chilled the enthusiasm of the emerging nations for U.S...
...agricultural products...
...2 Conservative critics of the movement accuse it of being no more than a repeat of the 19th century notion of diplomatic neutrality...
...others are isolated by enormous oceans...
...has become an alternative forum for countries seeking to escape from U.S...
...They argue that internal reforms are essential in the developing countries, that the international division of labor must be reorganized to give the Third World greater control over its resources, and that the activities of transnational corporations must be regulated...
...Major power status and the obligations of morality obliged India, said Nehru, to an "independent policy...
...As conceived by Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II, the U.N...
...It desired no role in the superpower face-off and had no pretensions to global power itself--a pragmatic attitude more typical of other postcolonial nations...
...In the Congo, the post-independence government had collapsed and the U.N...
...The European countries increased their trade with the Soviet Union, while Japanese products penetrated deep into the U.S...
...Has four sub-offices: International Economic Policy, Trade Administration, Trade Development, U.S...
...5. Peter Willets, The Non-AlignedMovement, p. 20...
...From the perspective of containment, countries were little more than arenas for East-West confrontation, chess pieces in that larger game where a country could be 'lost' even if it professed non-alignment...
...Non-Alignment Since then the Movement has held six full summit meetings, and since the mid- 1970s there have been annual meetings at the ministerial level...
...3. Ibid...
...Some lack access to the sea...
...3 891c eD/roN 17NACLA Report In Yugoslavia, Tito had broken with Stalin...
...chief trade negotiator...
...Invitations went to leaders of 17 nations to attend a preliminary meeting in Cairo...
...In Algeria, a fierce guerrilla war continued against the French...
...Heritage weds the New Right and the neo-conservatives, while AEI runs from the right of the Republican Party to the right of the Democratic Party...
...in some, tiny elites control the wealth, in others there is more equitable distribution...
...The easiest course has been to deny the existence of the Third World as a category, a political force or an expression of human needs...
...members swelled and so did the influence of the Third World nations...
...Speaking at the Non-Aligned Summit in Havana in 1979, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere admitted that within the Group of 77, "We are not all friends...
...The U.N...
...oversees U.S...
...But the oil crisis, coupled with the decline of the U.S...
...INDEPENDENT AGENCIES AND GOVERNMENT CORPORATIONS: 1. The Export-lmport Bank: government-financed, encourages exports through low interest loans...
...Antagonism between Moscow and Washington essentially created two spheres of influence...
...Post-war reality failed to support that conception, however: Britain lost its status as a world power...
...Over 100 countries now consider themselves to be part of the Group of 77...
...marketplace" when asked what is to be done...
...General As3 891c eD/rtoN 192NACA No,.d sembly resolutions cannot simply be ignored, and behind recent U.S...
...THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION AND THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE-Washington, D.C.: Vigilant of the Reagan Administration from a rightist perspective on general policy questions, including foreign policy...
...both joined the Non-Aligned Movement...
...2. U.S...
...The seeds of this new initiative were planted in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 when 29 former colonies met for the first time in the absence of the European powers and the United States...
...others, none...
...If one nation in the nuclear age declares another to be evil, its destruction becomes easier to justify...
...To date, the proposals of the Brandt Commission remain unimplemented, although they are ever more of a central credo for many Western European governments...
...the gap between the resource-rich and resource-poor countries of the Third World has widened, and there is serious discord over the role of the Soviet Union in Third World affairs...
...India's leaders, meanwhile, regarded their country as a major world power, less by virtue of any economic or military strength than from its moral force-in great part the legacy of Gandhi...
...U.S...
...It is still not clear how this intransigence and the new Cold War will affect the North-South dialogue, but U.S...
...With its own historical memory of British colonialism, the United States was leery of keeping colonies in the European manner...
...To accept the Cold War as inevitable, say the non-aligned, is "[a] view [which] reflects a 18Nov/ftcU8 1 LATIN AMERICA AND THE NON-ALIGNED Until the 1970s, Latin American and Caribbean nations saw the Non-Aligned Movement as irrelevant to hemispheric concerns...
...In 1904, the United States granted Cuba independence, while retaining the right-in what would become the classic style of indirect colonialism-to veto any laws it did not care for...
...They expressed that influence primarily in the General Assembly, where the principle of 'one state, one vote' operates...
...wars between Third World nations create unpredictable problems...
...and Soviet bloc policies in the Third World, and especially in Latin America...
...6. Cuadernos del Tercer Mundo, Guia del TercerMundo 1981, (Lima, Peru: DESCO, 1980), p. 485-486...
...the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) gives formal guarantees against political risks and expropriation for U.S...
...It ferociously asserts the old order and is prepared to defend it with military force...
...In Europe and Japan, political leaders demand a world in which the economic and political realities of their nations are not reduced to weapons in a terminal confrontation between the superpowers...
...today, the interdependence of the world is not a question of polemics: it is a question of reality...
...With the prolonged global recession of recent years, the troubled and inconclusive search for a more equitable distribution of the world's wealth has grown even more urgent...
...Food for Peace program, providing surplus food as a form of economic aid...
...One initiative came from the United States itself-from within the elite but outside the prevailing administration consensus...
...and the Soviets faced each other in a deadly game-one in which, at least according to the players in Washington, there was no room for spectators...
...The industrialized countries are aware of its utility.' ,6 Divide-and-conquer is indeed a staple U.S...
...However well this Manichean view of the world may have served to structure U.S...
...In his address to the United Nations in September 1983, President Reagan-echoing John Foster Dulles-urged the world to choose sides between the United States and the Soviet Union: "The members of the United Nations must be aligned on the side ofjustice rather than injustice, peace rather than aggression, human dignity rather than subjugation...
...Unlike classic neutrality, argues Peter Willets in his book The Non-Aligned Movement: The Origins of Third World Alliance, the term does not suggest a passive, isolationist policy of non-involvement...
...The other initiative-the Brandt Commission-went more radically beyond crisis management and the maintenance of the status quo...
...In short, non-alignment is an active position...
...Soviet foreign policy, meanwhile, understood early on the significance and power of this new force and sought its support and friendshipundoubtedly with one eye on its conflict with the United States...
...Today, those principles find expression in the Non-Aligned Movement, the Group of 77 and-above all-the United Nations...
...Their research contributed valiantly to win the war in Vietnam...
...Yet its role as an autonomous pole in international relations is of greater importance than ever...
...As originally formulated, non-alignment meant the "assertion of state sovereignty in Afro-Asia," but over the years the term has come to cover nations in the Middle East and Latin America...
...Under the NIEO any nation will have the right to choose its own economic system without interference or external threat- including the right to regulate, exgua, Panama, Peru, St...
...Foreign relations were structuredaroundthe "special relationship" with the United States...
...The position of the Third World, meanwhile, is scarcely at its brightest...
...Through the United Nations, the NonAligned Movement and the Group of 77 have been able to act as distinct groups with a high degree of cohesion, especially on broad NorthSouth issues...
...4. Peace Corps: manpower assistance programs to the Third World...
...General Assembly passed a crucial resolution calling for worldwide decolonization...
...7. Ibid., p. 488...
...Our per capita income varies from $100 to $2,000 per year...
...The Group of 77 While the Non-Aligned Movement has concerned itself with a new international political order, its economic counterpart has been the Group of 77...
...The world will not be divided into two halves again...
...Events in Africa in 1960 gave early warning of the importance of the new Third World nations...
...foreign policy in the 1950s, it is foolish and dangerous in 1983...
...Sixteen nations became indeUNCLE SAM: "It's the wind, rustling the palms...
...Its foreign policy is "peaceful coexistence, equal state relations, cooperation for development and an end to colonialism...
...Ho Chi Minh, the founding father of Vietnam, modeled his country's declaration of independence from French colonialism on the American Declaration of Independence...
...In South Africa, police had killed 67 blacks and wounded nearly 200 at Sharpeville...
...some are blessed with natural resources, others have none...
...it invokes the "magic of the Cutting a Switch for a Bad Boy...
...THE PHILIPPINES: "What yer got...
...It opposes the Cold War, supports anticolonial struggles and has taken sides in disputes between the developed and developing worlds...
...it increases arms flows and training to local armies...
...Their vision has given precedence to their common problems of hunger and poverty and their common desire to give the concept of human rights concrete meaning for their inhabitants...
...and Foreign Commercial Services...
...propriate or nationalize foreign investment...
...At this moment in history, many of those nations refuse to take up battle positions on one side or another of what they regard as an artificial divide...
...Before World War II, the countries of Africa, Asia and much of the Near East were European colonies...
...After Stalin's death, under Khrushchev's doctrine of peaceful coexistence, Tito reasoned that Yugoslavia's security would be best served by reducing superpower tensions...
...Nasser had come to power in 1954 after a military coup two years earlier had overthrown a corrupt monarchy...
...What the three leaders desired was the diplomatic means to avoid Cold War alignment without per se creating a Third World bloc, a nationalist agenda of radical social content with major international influence...
...It has stressed bilateral negotiations...
...economy...
...Its example of rapid industrial development out of conditions of poverty which any African or Latin American would have recognized fascinated Third World leaders...
...0 ca How has the Reagan Administration responded to these shifting realities...
...The government of Nicaragua has used the U.N...
...Western influence in China ended with Mao Zedong's communist triumph...
...from that, emerged a conference in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, attended by the leaders of 25 countries, from September 16, 1961-the first meeting of the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations...
...Its publication is Washington Quarterly...
...4 Yet even in the Cold War, the non-aligned may side with one superpower or another, provided each issue is decided "on the merits" and not as a matter of bloc support...
...For some nations, it may be better described as a "counter-ideology to the pressures from the 'Free World' and the 'Socialist system...
...6. International Security, from Harvard, bland but recommended reading...
...DEPARTMENT OF LABOR: through the Bureau for International Affairs, has policy input in matters affecting U.S...
...Sub-groups within the Office handle monetary affairs, trade and investment, natural resources and commodities...
...Set up when Reagan left the governorship of California, its purpose was to build the network of intellectuals and studies for his presidential campaign...
...and maybe ef you was halfway decent he' gin you some...
...Nonetheless, in diplomatic circles appearances count for much...
...The most important are: THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS-New York City: Home of the WASP establishment, still the pre-eminent foreign policy center, though under serious attack from the conservative CSIS (see below...
...later resolutions fixed a timetable for decolonization and established the machinery for holding the colonial powers accountable...
...was to be a forum in which all nations would participate through a body called the General Assembly...
...R.C...
...Conference on Trade and Development...
...In the relative stalemate that ensued, the new nations came to see the U.N...
...International Trade Commission: advises the president on trade and tariff policy, trade with the East4. Policy Review, house organ of the Heritage Foundation...
...SOffice of International Affairs, under the undersecretary for monetary affairs, deals with international monetary, financial, commercial, trade and energy policies...
...DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE: has three foreign affairs functions...
...The United States and its Western allies had divergent strategies for dealing with the South...
...global influence robbed the American image of its lustre...
...CUBA: "Pie...
...To be sure, there is diversity within the Third World, just as repeated U.S...
...CIA adventures in Iran and Guatemala, U.S...
...participation in the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and regional development banks servicing the Third World...
...No amount of rosy joint communiques from the summit meetings of Western leaders can disguise this tension...
...Each of the three premiers had different reasons for carving out an international position beyond the U.S...
...International Trade Commission: advises the president on trade and tariff policy, trade with the Eastern Bloc and unfair trade practices...
...INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY STUDIESSan Francisco: A more esoteric institute for specialist Reagan-watchers...
...had been required to intervene...
...CL S '(ic...
...With the end of the war, the colonial empires of Europe collapsed...
...The Rise of the Third World Future historians will probably regard as the most important event of the turbulent 20th century the emergence as new nations of the former colonies and neo-colonies of Europe and the United States...
...From their joint discussions and continuing talks with leaders of the new nations came a new doctrine called nonalignment...
...Founded by Willy Brandt, head of the Socialist International and a former West German chancellor, it set about a systematic study of the "North-South" problem and set forth sweeping recommendations: the North, said Brandt, should give urgent attention to the demands of the Third World as a matter of its own survival...
...It is their resolutions which have kept the questions of the Cold War, disarmament and anti-colonialism at the forefront of the U.N.'s concerns...
...Latin American nations, though formally independent, functioned as neo-colonies of the United States...
...attacks on the U.N...
...Publishes Foreign Affairs, most prestigious of the specialist journals...
...Policy and the Third World For the Third World, U.S...
...4. Ibid., p. 20., quoting Belgrade Conference of Heads of State or Government ofNon-Aligned Countries, (Belgrade:Jugoslavija Publishing House, 1961), p. 270...
...The effectiveness of oil as a weapon has declined...
...Its approach to the Third World is in the classic tradition of "divide-and-conquer...
...policy shows every sign of wanting to destroy it...
...Cuba alone identified with and supported the new initiatives...
...2. Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace...
...economy relative to its principal Western competitors, showed up the fact that the West was no longer a political or economic monolith...
...Unlike the European nation states of three hundred years earlier, they put aside many of their own differences, sought common counsel and forged a new internationalism...
...trade, aid and investment...
...The Third World demonstrates vividly that containment is the wrong policy for the wrong time...
...From it has emerged the plea from the countries of the South for a New International Economic Order (NIEO...
...and the Third World The United Nations has become the most important and prestigious forum for the views of the Third World...
...Tensions among Third World nations, including East-West tensions, have caused the influence of the Non-Aligned Movement to ebb and flow, especially now when there More Trouble in the Nursery...
...THE PHILIPPINES: "Where'd yer git it...
...5. Commentary, voice of the neo-conservatives, edited by arch-hawk Norman Podhoretz...
...Lucia, Surinam and Trinidad and Tobago, Alongside this identification with the Third World has come a relative decline in the influence of the Organization of American States (OAS), created as an instrument of U.S...
...For others, it is a way of managing internal political stress...
...2. Peter Willets, The Non-AlignedMovement: The Origins of a Third World Alliance, (New York: Nichols Publishing Company, 1978), p. 29...
...When it acquired Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American War, there was debate within elite circles over the legality of possessing colonies under the U.S...
...The core of the Commission-intellectually and politically-were the European Social Democratic parties, which in the last decade have held office in Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Austria, Portugal and-in the wake of long military dictatorships-in Spain and Greece...
...TRADE REPRESENTATIVE: located within the Office of the Presidency, with overall responsibility for trade policy...
...A permanent executive, the Coordinating Bureau, was established in 1970 and later mandated to coordinate an informal caucus at the United Nations...
...By the end of the decade, tensions between the Soviets and the United States had worsened with the "U-2 Incident" in which a CIA spy plane was shot down...
...and maintained a pro-Western foreign policy...
...But the obsession of the United States with international communism and the concomitant expansion of U.S...
...OFFICE OF THE U.S...
...The Soviet Union is no more the embodiment of evil than the United States is of good: both are societies with great accomplishments and grave flaws...
...workers...
...THE GEORGETOWN CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES-Washington, D.C.: Sharing its scholars with the equally conservative American Enterprise Institute, CSIS is the focal point for aggressively anti-Soviet, anti-Third World intetlectuals...
...support...
...Its answer to the Third World is, "Do it our way or else...
...The 1970s brought new tests for both the Atlantic Alliance and U.S.-Japanese relations...
...In 1960, the U.N...
...5. The Inter-American Foundation: an independent government corporation giving grants to self-help programs...
...private foreign investment...
...3. U.S...
...0 Office of international Cooperation and Development, promoting the use of U.S...
...pendent and joined the U.N...
...Jerry Doyle, Philadelphia Record, 1927...
...But this new nationalism confronted a world in which the U.S...
...International Development Cooperation Agency: coordinates economic assistance through AID...
...Khrushchev himself proposed the decolonization resolution in the 15th session of the General Assembly in 1960...
...The election debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy centered on missile gaps and getting tough with Castro...
...is sharp internal debate over its tilt to the Soviet Union...
...When not trying to subvert them, U.S...
...And Social Democracy, with its blend of socialist rhetoric, welfare capitalism and internationalism, holds itself out as a progressive alternative to U.S...
...After the oil embargo in 1973, the United States set about dividing OPEC while offering selective concessions to member countries...
...3. U.S...
...Bipolarity ignores the political and economic realities of the rest of the world: Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean-the so-called Third World -and the other industrialized powers of Europe and Japan...
...manages the Trade and Development Program to encourage U.S...
...On one hand, it enjoyed vast economic and industrial resources...
...But the questions of world peace and social justice which gave birth to Third World cooperation are still the most pressing questions on the world's agenda, and they will remain so until the end of the century...
...Real power still resides in the Security Council: though its numbers have grown, the five original members still have veto power...
...Distinctly liberal, often described as the voice of the Trilateralists...
...UNCTAD's first meeting in 1964 set the tone for the strained, sometimes angry, North-South dialogue which has persisted ever since...
...After World War II, the United States was well-positioned to take advantage of the demise of the European empires...
...lies the realization that this country has lost the ability to control the institution it created...
...Today, they include Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Nicarasense of hopelessness and helplessness...
...With considerable diplomatic adroitness and political courage, the new nations found ways to stay on the sidelines...
...International relations will never again be reduced to the simplicities of 1946...
...CONTAINMENT AND THE THIRD WORLD 1. The New York Times, September 27, 1983...
...DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE: promotes trade and investment through the International Trade Administration (ITA...
...tutelage...
...Instead, they looked to each other for solutions outside the constraints of the U.S./Soviet confrontation...
...But, Nyerere warned, "Divide-andconquer is an old technique of domination...
...CUBA: "Mah Uncle Sam gin it to me...
...on the other, it was not burdened by a long colonial...
...To keep track of foreign policy debates, the attentive reader is urged to subscribe to the specialist journals: 1. Foreign Affairs...
...In 1946, it granted political independence to the Philippines and in the same period encouraged a limited exercise of local autonomy for Puerto Rico...
...The number of U.N...
...investors...
...Worse than just politically reckless, this notion is bankrupt as a framework for international relations...
...And in its approaches to the Third World, the Soviet Union was not burdened by the legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism...
...By the end of the decade, governments of various political persuasions had become members...
...For over 20 years Third World nations have worked together to build a framework for international relations which avoids the trap of U.S./Soviet conflict...
...Hard as it may be to believe today, in 1945 the United States was widely perceived as an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist power...
...foreign policy since World War II has been a consistently depressing affair...
...The early 1970s saw new progressive governments in Chile and Jamaica...
...That was the Trilateral Commis20 A LCAN Re ortNov/Dec 1983 sion, whose fate has already been discussed...
...The Caribbean islands belonged to Britain, France, the Netherlands or the United States...
...The Group derives its name from the 77 Third World countries which lobbied at the U.N...
...In the view of the Group of 77, the prevailing economic order is obsolete and unjust...
...General Assembly and its new Security Council seat to gain diplomatic leverage, and the Salvadorean and Guatemalan insurgencies have actively sought U.N...
...as the best vehicle for placing a new agenda before the world...
...General Assembly in 1962 to win the convocation of what came to be known as UNCTAD-the U.N...
...Constitution...
...Wishing to escape from traditional patterns of Western domination without being absorbed into the Soviet camp, Egypt was searching for political and economic changes to benefit its impoverished population...
...PROMOTING U.S...
...During the next thirty 16 NACLA ReportNa/De 1983 17 years new nations emerged from the old colonies in a wave of nationalism which rivalled in significance the birth of the European nations in the 16th and 17th centuries...
...formulates economic, financial, tax and fiscal policy...
...THE RAND INSTITUTE AND THE HUDSON INBTITUTE-Santa Monica and Tarrytown: Two defense studies centers, solid and established...
...Sympathizers counter that more than a diplomatic position, non-alignment is an ideology...
...Its components are: THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY: the third most important government department...
...Tito visited Africa early in 1961 and found support for a meeting of like-minded radical nationalist states...
...they were Yugoslavian president Josip Broz-better known as Tito-Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt...
...hemisphere control...
...The relations between great powers are delicate, and the rhetoric of "good and evil," and "us and them" are of little help in managing them...
...agricultural resources and technologies...
...Bowman, Minneapolis Tribune, 1901...
...It is precisely these fallacious moral absolutes that make the world so dangerous...
...Foreign Agricultural Service, operating out of embassies to stimulate overseas markets for U.S...
...response to the Third World challenge...
...Most historians credit three men with leading the process of giving a voice to the decolonized world...
...heritage...
...McKee Barclay, Baltimore Sun, 1910...
...foreign policy has tended to ignore Third World efforts to find a common stance on political and economic issues...
...An official spokesperson (currently Indira Gandhi) holds the position for the three years between summits...
...Osborn, Milwaukee Sentinell, 1907...
...World security, however, would be guaranteed by five nations-the United States, Great Britain, France, China and the Soviet Union-acting through a smaller body, the Security Council, in accordance with traditional spheres of influence...
...2122 WHERE THE THINKERS THINK Elite discourse at its most serious is conducted at think tanks, research centers, universities and commissions-the incubators where ideas are born and nurtured...
...Some of us have minerals...
...Some countries represented here are at war with one another...
...Its internal unity is strained for a variety of reasons...
...BUSINESS A further bureaucratic network promotes U.S...
...The U.N...
...Administers embassy labor attache program and runs technical assistance programs for foreign labor unions...
Vol. 17 • November 1983 • No. 6
