The Battle of Clay's Cliches

...Not only politically safer but also economically—vide the ghastly, wasteful botches of Stalin's regime in Russia...

...On the other hand, as the Clay Report suggests, our aid to India (and the Report adds Pakistan) could be stepped up...

...The one-man, one-party, one-army, one-ideology state seems much the fitter instrument for the private and public objectives of the ordinary Man of Destiny, especially when he can describe it as some form of "Socialism" and thus bemuse a few helpful Westerners...

...And so on...

...therefore, they should be earmarked to a separate budget and called by a different name...

...Now, although the Clay Report gives us no occasion to charge that members of the panel do not realize that modern governments must perform innumerable indispensable functions in the economic sphere, it is clear from the many references to "private productive ventures" that they find their personal affinities with the second, or David Harum, view of things...

...Kiwanis and Rotary generate excitement...

...Techniques: How to get a backward society changed into a middleclass society is the next point at which discussions of economic development break down...

...one wonders if today Khrushchev might not like to see it "slip" back again...

...Each of these suggestions is prefigured somewhere in the Clay Report, though we may regret that its authors did not take the time to make their remarks more explicit and comprehensible than they did...

...To air a pet theory of my own, a very good case can be made for spending the vast bulk of American aid money in only three or four crucial countries: India in Asiar Brazil in Latin America, perhaps Nigeria in Africa...

...not because India is going to "offset the Red Chinese colossus," but because with India there is a fair chance that the right kind of aid, in the right quantities, will enable a great nation to float the economically pluralist, progressive, relatively stable society which our strategy envisages...

...Washington is to inform recipients of its aid that it requires more "will and discipline" from them...

...regrettably, this point the Clay Report did not touch on at all...

...Sectors: When a man talks about the "economic development" which foreign aid is supposed to inspire, he is usually carrying around in his head one of two general notions about how this development can, and should, occur...

...Diligent diplomatic efforts," we are told, along with "phased reductions" of aid to countries not exerting the proper "will and discipline," are to persuade the Tourés and Sukarnos of this world to disband their armies and buckle down to working and saving...

...the strong, wise, successful man does not continually hesitate to take his own pulse...

...To provide exactly the kind of advice and assistance, at the right time, which helps four or five of the most important countries in the world to overcome the fatal handicaps of capital starvation and to modernize themselves into pluralist, self-sustaining economies would constitute a wondrous accomplishment of statecraft...

...It is also true that for this "intimate" mode of aid to succeed a large cadre of trained Americans must live very close to the economic lives of the peoples to whom they are accredited...

...Why then should American aid programs not take primarily the form of support for thousands of small-scale, closely attended projects, instead of backing huge "infrastructure" projects like roads no one travels, artificial harbors no one uses...

...When the President originally requests $4.9 billion, then cuts his requirement by $420 million, then observes Congress slice off another half-billion or so—all this is not so important as that the considerable sums which remain are put usefully to work for the purposes of humanity and United States policy...

...The same verdict must be made about other major consumers of our aid, i.e., Jordan...

...The doctrinaire proponents of "foreign aid" are wrong to interpret every dubiety as a sign of xenophobia and isolationism...

...There are numerous examples available: How much easier it would have been on the English taxpayer's pocketbook if a privately chartered company, like the old Imperial East Africa Company, had taken the fall in the growing of peanuts in Tanganyika rather than the Ministry...

...For instance, the anxiety about the American "balance of payments" problem is excessive...

...We must always remember that success can never be guaranteed...

...The assumption that the fostering of pluralist, "democratic capitalist" systems around the world is the proper aim of American aid policy does not rest on eschatology alone...

...Yet I do not see why this should be so...

...States like Tunisia must not spend our money on armies which have no purpose other than the harassment of internal political opponents of the current regime...

...When the state marketing board in Ghana finally eliminates the mammy-lorry system of getting food into Accra, who will employ the displaced women, who will pay the costs of the administration, who will insure that it works...

...If the emphasis of American aid programs were to be deflected from great Super-installations to intensive, small-scale, dynamic, man-byman, plant-by-plant investments, the basic requirement of all strategy —overwhelming concentation of forces at the right place and the right time—would be even more necessary, and difficult to achieve, than at present...

...IN SUM, it is sensible and proper for the Clay committee, and Congress, to fret about the nature and perspectives of the American foreign-aid program...

...Except for aid officials worried about their departmental budgets, the problem is not the gross amount of money allocated to the program...

...Most Americans who think about the matter at all do agree that for societies to gain the relative stability, rationality and lack of frustrations needed to share the goodies of the 21st century, to avoid tripping into the trap of great wars, they must be more-or-less middle-class societies, nurturing moreor-less free individual entrepreneurs who exercise more-or-less unsupervised business initiatives—with all the multitude of dispersed power centers and intra-social associations this busy private activity implies...

...It has only begun to shake us up in the West, let alone affect the Bushman of Bechuanaland...

...Then there is the David Harum temperament...

...Moreover, how many planners have there ever been who were gifted enough to draft a program, riding roughshod over a host of private interests, and mobilizing millions of people, which takes account of every contingency...

...Many of these investments would be a dead loss...

...It is not that the Clay panelists are typically American, parochial free-enterprisers...

...The slippage of the world's three largest continents toward a demi-monde of bitter and uncontrollable mobocracies is a real phenomenon, and an American policy which does not put forth every effort necessary to contain and to reverse this slippage is no policy at all...

...Targets: When the Clay Report says, "We cannot believe that our national interest is served by indefinitely continuing commitments at the present rate to ninety-five countries and territories," it says something every realistic man must agree to, though not perhaps for identical reasons...

...The American West developed because capital from England, France and the East Coast was applied to a large number of specific enterprises—many of them small— some of which withered, more of which flourished...

...It is this irresistible attraction of consolidated power to the underdeveloped leader, plus the comparative ease with which he can put the idea across in his new country, plus the prospect of its inevitable decay into corruption, nepotism and repression, which makes such a sensitive and sophisticated writer as Robert Heilbroner despair of American aid programs' ever accomplishing anything toward the creation of societies we can admire...

...nothing is so impossible to transplant, deliberately and successfully, to alien grounds...

...Why, for example, should there not be an agent of an American development bank in every large city and town of a certain backward country, lending money, giving advice, helping in marketing and distribution, servicing hundreds of private ventures simultaneously...

...Are Americans mistaken to believe this...

...It is impossible to conceive of such a program being carried out in anything like the number of countries which today receive U.S...

...Then a New York bank sets up a branch office...

...Surely the Clay committee is right...

...Again, in South America, assistance to Bolivia is lost, assistance to Brazil (the right kind of assistance) might accomplish exactly what we want to accomplish, the social and political stabilization of the continent...

...In getting used to the concepts of production, investment and profit, however—as in learning anatomy— there is no better method than "the use of one's own sight and the training of one's own hands...

...Nothing, it seems, is more fragile, complex and seamless than bourgeois-dom in its full strength and maturity...

...What must be done must be done...

...The key elements in the situation were personal supervision by the investor (people usually watch their own money) and cost-accounting (knowing whether they were making money or losing it...

...Intellectually, one must comment, this piecemeal approach will not attract the all-knowing foreign-aid bureaucrat, who loves to fly from Addis Ababa to Ceylon to Vientiane in his Government airplane, planning almost on the scale of the Ford Foundation...

...But neither can I believe that American economists and politicians have exhausted every resource of ingenuity in this matter...

...People pour in, school boards voluntarily organize, and after 15 years or so the area is "developed" (and affairs are run by the entrepreneurial middle-class that made the place what it is...

...Given the national will to do it, no sensible man questions the ability of United States to engage in an aid program three times bigger than the present one...

...China "slipped" to Russia more than 15 years ago...

...Sad to say, the effects of oversights in social planning are also multiplied by the very dimensions of the schemes...

...The aid program must whittle down its objectives to an overall operation which can be practically administered, in a close and efficient way, by an American governmental agency, no better than other agencies, surviving on the sort of appropriations it can reasonably expect to coax from an always skeptical Congress...

...Apparently this is one of the most controversial aspects of the Report...

...There is, first, the Faustian temperament which believes in committees of economists, sociologists, engineers and agronomists studying a nation's soil, birthrate, commodity exchanges, balances of trade, and then, in close harmony with a government as impressed by the experts as they are with themselves, designing an integrated eight-year plan to minimize delay, waste, conflicts of interest, uncertainty...

...But given a bit of tactical skill, and more luck, the payoff would be such as to erase the costs of the program, however high, and it would be a payoff that could be publicly demonstrated...

...Perhaps the most vulnerable, and comical, sections of the Report are those which deal with the need of and methods for obtaining proper "performances" from other foreign governments...

...I am not really so naive as to desire or expect that one day Lagos, Nigeria, will resemble Louisville, Kentucky, or to think that appalling hazards like the population explosion do not make an optimistic view of the destinies of the underdeveloped countries hard to support...

...diligent diplomatic effort" will put our intentions across...

...But by summarizing them we may be able to suggest some methods of getting at the answers they invite...

...Peter Ritner, Senior Editor at The Macmillan Company, is author of The Death of Africa and, most recently, The Society of Space...

...If the United States could succeed in promoting these few huge pivotal states into self-modernizing spirals, the geopolitical drift of the entire underdeveloped area into chaos and feckless totalitarianism might be checked —as nothing else would check it...

...These monies were never expected to achieve the "economic development" which justifies the aid program...

...Centralized social power inevitably must be controlled by politicians, and this is not always economically fortunate...

...If they purchase anything, it is something to the purpose of national political strategy...

...To habituate huge, pauper nations to a permanent dole is worse than worthless...

...A good deal of the carping was deserved...

...For one thing, as John Kenneth Galbraith has written, "It is idle to imagine that good development plans can be created or carried out without a good government to do it...

...It must recognize the need of strategic concentration, pick its targets carefully, and never mind the anguished outcries from every rejected quarter...

...This, it seems to me, is what the Clay Report, in its bumbling way, is trying to say...

...When Americans think about foreign aid, nothing will help so much as to be lucid about what we are trying to do, even at the risk of certain oversimplifications...

...But I would guess it is not merely the "historic form, character, and interest of our own economic system" which concerned them...

...Only the shrewdest (and luckiest) generalship, shorn of musty emotions and tired dogmas, professionally appraising the real world, testing each move forward in the cold winds of experience, opportunity and reason, will suffice to carry the United States into the 21st century surrounded by a world it can view at all comfortably...

...A few preliminary clarifications must be noted...

...First, the Report rightly emphasizes that much darkness will be lifted from the whole aid area when the billions of dollars which have flowed out in military assistance to South Vietnam, South Korea and Formosa are no longer confounded with "aid...

...After a few months his cousin, a carpenter, arrives...

...they were also intellectually persuaded that the stimulation of private entrepreneurship is the precise end at which an intelligible American aid effort must aim...

...So heartbreaking have been the consequences of the recent "reconstruction" of China's agricultural sector that perhaps it should not even be mentioned...

...For these reasons, American efforts should be directed mainly at the stratum of the private entrepreneur in such key countries, and away from Brobdingnagian schemes that consume so much money, which can easily go so wrong, and which can so readily be perverted by halfbaked politicos on the make...

...Someone else expands the town laundry...

...The Industrial Revolution is by far the most disruptive force ever to strike human society...

...The mentality of these people is akin to that of surgeons in the era before Vesalius: The physician sat high on his stool, "contemptuously steering the ship out of the manual," while the dissectors, mere functionaries, were left to blunder along with the cadaver as best they could...

...Heilbroner's pessimism may be called for...

...It is the want of visible results from the programs in backward countries—as distinguished from the success of the Marshall Plan operation which got us into the aid business in the first place—a want which is the direct consequence of strategic sloppiness in the mounting of the programs, that constitutes the serious menace to their future...

...Assorted Misconceptions: In some passages the common sense of the Clay Report disappears behind a fog of stale words and ideas...

...I do not know how confidently one should investigate the motives of a group consisting of General Lucius Clay, Robert Anderson, Eugene Black, Clifford Hardin, Robert Lovett, Edward Mason, L. F. McCollum, Herman Phleger and Howard Rusk (George Meany, the final member of the committee, dissented...

...The Report does not explain how we are to prevent assistance, excepting that given on the individual level, from being transmuted into the subsidy of a gendarmerie, if that is what the local Caudillo really wants...

...An official paper which parades cliches like "frontier of freedom," "inevitable day of reckoning," "free world strength," "putting its internal house in order," etc., must expect to be misunderstood and assailed by readers who suspect that the authors' brains are fuzzier than they ought to be...

...Such a texture of polity ill accords with the inward mysticisms, the ideological commitments, of the party chiefs who dominate the politics of the underdeveloped countries...

...AN ANALYSIS OF THE NEW FOREIGN-AID REPORT The Battle of Clay's Cliches By Peter Ritner The State Department's release late last month of "The Scope and Distribution of United States Military and Economic Assistance Programs"—or, as it has come to be called, the Clay Report—has evoked a flurry of catcalls from many of the most articulate "forward-looking" celebrities in American political life...

...and good bankers are not much commoner than good surgeons...

...But—and here is the point—neither Congress nor the people will support any program at all unless they see visible results...

...The Report does not answer most of its own questions...

...It is an official acknowledgement that people in the Government, and many others outside the Government, have been asking troubling questions for a long time, and it is thus at least one step toward the clarification and discussion of these questions...

...Nor need Americans spend much more of their time boring themselves with the "aid as a Cold War weapon" theme...

...Is there proof they are wrong...

...The fact is that, aside from its literary primitiveness, the Clay Report is not a bad state paper of a particular type...

...Someone on the committee should have thought of the domestic scene, and asked himself whether "diligent diplomatic efforts," plus the carrot-and-stick technique, often triumph in getting pressure groups at home, like the Negroes or the labor unions, to abandon what they deem to be their raisons d'etre...

...Russia is not necessarily the beneficiary of the totalitarianization of the backward regions of the earth...

...It is that any man can prove at least this much, that a modified diversified free-enterprise system is in many significant respects safer and more resilient than a centralized, politically controlled and directed economy...

...To convince the politicians of backward countries to accept and anticipate their inherent fallibility is of course quite something else again...

...Here the mind's-eye sees an eager youngster moving into a sleepy region and starting a small insurance agency...

...Even formulating the problem this way most academic economists would label naive...

...To adopt this principle, and to call a spade a spade, American aid bureaucrats might just as well candidly concede that the $671 million Indonesia has received in loans and grants from the United States is money down a rathole: This expenditure cannot be defended as serving the interests of American policy, nor in the long run as benefitting the Indonesian people...

...The United States is first of all to insist that France, Britain and Italy contribute more money to Africa than they want to...

...There is solid evidence that economic pluralism and diversity possess ample economic justification...

...The United States is faced, therefore, with the compulsion to select targets in the interest of economy of force, a selection involving choices repugnant to the people for whom foreign aid has longest been an article of faith...

...Nothing is so dependent on exotic circumstances...

...Next, it is not relevant to answer the Clay Report's recommendations for pruning the aid programs by poking fun at a country with a Gross National Product the size of America's for squirreling away its pennies...

...Basically, the vision of a middleclass entrepreneurial society, with its characteristic hum of muted conflicts-of-interests, appeals to the Nkrumahs no more than it does to the de Gaulles...

...It needs saying...

...But that is not to say the Clay Report is wrong to declare that the United States has small motive to encourage governments of a form it has only too much reason to know must one day deteriorate into cruelty, instability and economic muddle...

...But some would succeed, and from these successes one could hope for a ramification of individual entrepreneurship throughout the whole society...

...It seems materialist, particularist, unreliable —above all, too slow, considering the clamor of their peoples and the delicate poise of their personal careers...