THE SECOND WORLD REVOLUTION

...The chronic obsession of the United States over the past two decades with its self-appointed task of containing "the menace of world Communism" by military measures is now bearing its bitter fruit: we have lost contact with human realities...

...Most of that trade is still with developed countries...

...representative, in making the notification of tariff elimination to U.N...

...American grants-in-aid are, it has been demonstrated, no guarantee of good government—or of a more equitable social system...

...Secretary General U Thant, forecast a Soviet trade of $11 billion with the developing nations by 1980...

...The movement spreads...

...In spite of these critical circumstances the United States is following a policy, especially in Asia, that is anachronistic and divorced from fundamentals...

...Survey work for the exploitation of the Mekong potential began some years ago under U.N...

...The Soviet Union, in accord with the UNCTAD recommendations, has removed all customs duties on imports from the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...The other Communist giant, China, is not unaware of the importance of the economic factor...

...Then, at long last, if substantial funds were diverted from American military expenditures to the meeting of world economic needs, there could be fruitful implementation of the promise in President Johnson's statement on March 25 of American cooperation with "wider and bolder" programs of economic development which Asian leaders could be expected to evolve in the future, for "progress and peace...

...The existing structure of American economic enterprise, including profits and wages, does not permit such international altruism in other than a minor way...

...Some political solutions are required, too...

...Of this amount, the United States alone spends nearly half...

...We contribute military aid to both Pakistan and India (thereby exacerbating the strained relations between the two...

...The challenge is clear and present...

...We should abandon the principle by which we refuse to accept payment in kind for the aid we provide overseas because such payment in commodities competes with our domestic producers of petroleum, synthetic rubber, and a host of light consumer goods...

...market to the competition of Indian cotton goods, Peruvian ceramics, or Venezuelan petroleum—not to mention Chinese hog bristles or Cuban sugar...

...In 1938, the last year before World War II, the Soviet Union had a two-way foreign trade of only slightly more than $500 million...

...We still maintain the transparent fiction that the Kuomintang right-wing faction on Formosa constitutes the rightful government of all China, and we support that refugee establishment with American money and arms and the U.S...

...it is not the end...

...For our world position deteriorates dangerously with each day that passes...

...Because of its economic weakness (for it is itself a "developing nation"), it is not in a good position to compete directly with either the United States or the Soviet Union in the extension of credits, loans, and grants, and in the provision of technical aid and advanced industrial equipment to other countries...

...and that new preferential import concessions should be made by developed countries to developing countries to assure the latter "a fair and reasonable share" of the developed countries' markets...

...For all of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, the Marshall Plan, and our annual foreign-aid programs, no Administration in Washington has even begun thinking about abolishing such tariffs...

...We might then come to a realization that the chief desire of the Asians, now that they have possessed themselves of political independence, is not to fight as foot soldiers in an American crusade against "world Communism," but to attain peace and progress...

...Is the world to arrive at the conviction that its hungry peoples, who will increasingly be asking the United States for bread, are to get from us little more than a military answer...

...Western Europe now is developing a wariness and growing hostility to the inroads of American business firms and has begun to apply restrictions upon American investment...

...The conference also took note of "the wide concern expressed regarding the inadequacy of the growth target of five per cent per annum for the United Nations Development Decade," and recommended that the developing countries should mobilize their domestic resources for development—while developed countries, for their part, should assist in that economic development...

...He has written on Asian affairs for a number of publications, including Eastern World, Pacific Affairs, The Nation, The Reporter, and The Progressive...

...For the poorer emerging nations of the world, which see the gap between themselves and the industrialized countries increasing instead of narrowing, it is taking on a real meaning...

...Century and aimed at national political independence, has about run its course...

...Holding up Chinese Communist policies as a pat-ern, he proposed in effect that the developing countries should practice self-reliance, all the while practicing ''friendly cooperation" with other countries, such as China...

...And are they going to starve willingly, while the United States struggles with the problem of storing its food "surpluses," and seeks through many devices to keep good agricultural land out of cultivation to prevent ever greater "surpluses...

...What should be our policy for Asia...

...Many Asian countries have less food per capita today than they had before they achieved political independence...

...This would require a reduction of American tariffs...

...But the conscience of man marches with the growing awareness of man, and there is now a forum undreamed of in the First World Revolution in which the demands of humanity can make themselves felt—the United Nations...

...Japan is one...

...It must be granted, on the American political record, that there is little likelihood of the President's proposing to the Congress that we should open the protected U.S...

...Nan Han-chen thus clearly exposed Peking's current strategy: the Chinese Communists would harness the frustrations and deepening angers of the hungry peoples of the world to the end that, under China's leadership, the have-nots of the world should overcome the haves, and forcibly effect an "equitable" redistribution of the world's wealth...

...The tide of anti-Americanism keeps pace with rising opposition to American military policies...

...The United States has long-term bases, and armed forces, in our former colony, the Philippines...

...auspices, and it is obvious that $1 billion for use in that general connection would be helpful and welcome...

...Other countries have a more flexible attitude than the United States respecting economic relations with the "third world" of developing nations...

...In the final struggle, our most frightful weapons will not help...

...The United States has made a gesture in its offer, outlined by the President in his speech at Johns Hopkins University, to provide $1 billion for "cooperation in increased development" of the Mekong River basin...

...But "neo-colonialism" is more than a phrase invented by Communists for the purpose of tarring honest business entrepreneurs of the West...

...It wields neither political sovereignty nor suzerainty along that crescent, but leases or borrows its bases...

...The Canadians some time ago felt the necessity to take action to curb expanding American control over their economy...

...Colonialism and imperialism of the old type are dying, and will soon have disappeared from the earth...

...The poor will not necessarily endeavor to wrest wealth from the rich by violent means...

...In that conference, attended by representatives from 120 countries, the emerging nations showed themselves united in the demand for a more equitable world economic order...

...American policies formulated within the framework of a simplistic anti^Communism are thus predestined to be rejected by the nations of the world...

...It would call for certain American industries to abandon the luxury of administered prices, with government protection, in favor of competition from the products of the "cheap" labor of the developing countries...

...What is proposed here, in simplified terms, is a renunciation, by the rich industrialized nations, of some of their most profitable trade advantages in favor of something in the order of a partial sharing of international wealth and markets...

...Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), reporting on food production in the year ending July 15, 1964, stated that for the fifth consecutive year the world's agricultural production had increased less, in percentage, than had population...

...We have 50,000 troops in South Korea still, twelve years after the Korean truce...

...It was proposed that each economically advanced country should endeavor to supply to the developing countries financial resources "of a minimum net amount approaching as nearly as possible to one per cent of its national income . . ." This would amount to five billion dollars or more in the case of the United States...

...And at the end of the year, Premier Chou En-lai urged that Communist countries join with other nations, and in particular with those of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in opposition to the United States...

...It has built up a quasi-empire of military power, founded upon a network of treaties, girdling the earth...

...An effective policy would incorporate new political and economic elements to lend it strength...

...For the past twenty years, since the end of the war with Japan, our Asia policy has revolved around China...

...China suffers many handicaps and in the end may lose out to the Soviet Union or Japan or some combination of "non-aligned" states in the contest for influence in the contested zone of the developing nations...

...How shall the oppressive poverty of the emerging nations be overcome...

...With the persistence of that gnawing hunger, Communist activities increase in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, the Malaysian Federation, and in India...

...As the poor, over-populated nations of the world meet frustration in their desire for economic advancement, are they going to endure indefinitely, without protest, the sight of the United States, so much richer than they, wasting some $50 billion annually on armaments, while they are unable to scrape together one-third that sum for needed capital investment...

...It will see the poof nations of the world ranged against the rich, in a demand for substantial aid for the achievement of economic progress...

...Yet the Second Revolution has already begun...

...but the economic factor contributing to social unrest and political upheavals will be an underlying cause...

...We have been led by our half-blinded fascination with a political chimera first to neglect and then to ignore the concerns uppermost in the consciousness of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans...

...They will be increasingly critical of American efforts to solve the economic and political problems of South Vietnam by the use of bombs and napalm against North Vietnam, and noxious gas against the Vietcong in South Vietnam...

...Even in Stalin's time, the Soviets had begun to address themselves to the changing world economic situation...

...But it proposes to substitute political for economic factors in the competition for influence among the developing nations, to help establish its leadership in the third world...

...It is a bold strategy, and one obviously designed for implementation only over decades...

...With the debt burden of developing countries rapidly growing beyond their capacity to pay, nations with high standards of living are being called upon to open their markets not only to primary products but to semi-processed and manufactured goods from developing nations possessing lower standards of living— which also means lower wage scales...

...They do not forget that the first nuclear bombs were American and that they were used against an Asian people...

...The problem is seen in all its stark reality in Asia...

...In the coming clash of cultures mixed with racial conflict there will increasingly be denial of the values that American policy-makers swear by...

...We enjoy only a probationary status in the face of the quickened sense of nationalism that affects not only Europeans and Americans, but Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos, Pakistani, and Latin Americans...

...The annual world expenditure on arms is approximately $120 billion...

...Next, in February of this year, speaking before the Afro-Asian Economic Seminar at Algiers, the chief of the Chinese delegation, Nan Han-chen, made a report in which he traced the root cause of the present poverty and economic backwardness of the Afro-Asian countries to "the continuous aggression, control, rapacious plunder, and exploitation by imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism...

...It is against this background of poverty and dearth that the world's problems must now be viewed...

...He noted the profits of American and British interests in oil production, the control by American and Belgian firms of valuable mines in the Congo and Southern Rhodesia, and the heavy American consumption of rare world metals...

...There are also American troops in Japan, two decades after the end of the war in which Japan was defeated, and we occupy Okinawa as a victorious power...

...The American war in Southeast Asia will provide the immediate occasion for the expression of much anti-American feeling...

...But the Soviet direction is clear...

...It is safe to predict that at the second Afro-Asian Conference, scheduled this month, there will be new manifestations of resentment against the United States...

...Like a Titan, the United States still relies upon its physical prowess...

...In that forum, "Communism" will increasingly be less an issue than food, ideological crusades less important than industrialization, American-designed "total victories" of less concern than compromise settlements...

...Nan offered remedies that might well attract frustrated nations...

...Finally, aid grants would in due course be channeled through an international aid agency, for fairness and efficiency in distribution...

...The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), held in Geneva from March to June 1964, constituted a major implicit challenge to the presumed verities of an American foreign policy centered on the concept of military containment...

...He did not fail to point up the disadvantageous terms of trade experienced by the developing nations, the high rates of interest imposed upon borrowers by the rich lending countries, and the benefits deriving to the developed nations through their control of shipping and marine insurance...

...It is hardly to be expected that the United States will quickly follow suit...

...The hungry peoples of the world are less concerned with the Chinese bomb—so long as it is not directed at any particular country—than they are with the effects of the population explosion...

...That empire of influence compares in some outward aspects to some of the great empires of the past...

...the Soviet Union is another...

...The world is in revolutionary flux and demands the greatest flexibility in contemporary statesmanship, but the United States seems content to continue to hold untenable world positions and to fight for obsolete causes...

...Let it be said at once, however, that such a commendable American contribution to economic progress is not by itself a substitute for solution of basic political and social problems unrelated to factors of irrigation, river transport, and fisheries...

...In the general principles recommended by the conference, it was held that there should be "no discrimination on the basis of differences in socio-economic systems...

...We have authoritative expositions by Chinese Communist leaders in this connection...

...Here, there would be no disgrace, no "loss of face," if the United States were to borrow a leal or two from the Soviet and Chinese —and even the Japanese and Indian —books...

...Seventh Fleet...

...They need technological and administrative skills...

...The hard fact is that, with the burgeoning world population, not even the basic problem of food supply has been solved by most of the developing nations...

...imperialism . . ." In January, 1964, Peking proclaimed the doctrine of the "intermediate zone," again proposing a world united front against the United States—this time embracing political and economic elements of broader scope...

...we are deeply, if imprecisely, involved in both Thailand and Laos...

...What, in the end, will be the fruits of an American world strategy which depends to such a great extent upon military power...

...In his exposition, he permitted the easy inference that he favored denial by the underdeveloped nations of their resources to the "neo-colonialist" industrial nations—and the ultimate expropriation by the under-developed countries of foreign capital investments located on their soil...

...The U.S...

...With a population of less than one billion in 1920, that continent will probably contain four billion persons at the end of this century...

...That policy, justified to Americans by the continued existence of Communist rule in China, is chiefly of military design...

...And we might finally admit (especially to ourselves) that there exists a diversity in Asian as well as in European Communism which is susceptible of exploitation for the profit of ^world order even if that exploitation is intellectually more demanding than military exercises...

...If not, we should, without further delay, begin a fundamental restructuring of our present harsh policy...

...The First World Revolution, which had its beginnings in the Eighteenth o. EDMUND CLUBB, who was a specialist on China in the State Department for two decades, is a lecturer at Columbia and New York Universities...

...He may have been excessively optimistic...

...Those nations have discovered that prosperity does not necessarily follow in the footsteps of political independence...

...Our commitment in Vietnam is notoriously military...

...A Second World Revolution is in the immediate offing...

...Intellectually, it is still fighting in the First World Revolution...

...The Second World Revolution by O. EDMUND CLUBB The escalation of the war in Southeast Asia highlights the persisting failure of the American policy-makers in the postwar period to comprehend the changing nature of the times in which we live...

...If so, our policy with respect to the third world is headed for certain disaster...

...The use by the United States of harsh military means in an effort to stem the tide of Asian revolution evokes strong reactions from Asian peoples...

...government, despite periodic fits and starts dating back to 1956, has not yet undertaken a fundamental reassessment of its foreign aid program...

...They are also sadly in need of better world trade terms, which now favor the industrialized nations over those producing primary materials...

...But the resemblance is only superficial: The United States does not own the military strong points it occupies from Korea in a great crescent swinging south and then east to Western Europe...

...The Mekong grant could be a significant beginning...

...that all countries should cooperate in creating conditions conducive to the achievement of a rapid increase in the exports of developing countries...

...We should depend more on mutual trade, supplementing aid, in an economic program related to the desperate needs of the underdeveloped countries...

...In 1959, its foreign trade topped the $10 billion mark...

...But the Soviet U.N...

...What strength will our "anti-Communism" then be able to muster...

...This is the situation they face, along with a great disparity in their natural resources—compared to North America particularly—in terms of arable land, forests, iron ore, coal, and petroleum reserves...

...In any event, it must be realized that $1 billion, to be expended over an unspecified period of time, is notably less than the amount now being spent by the United States for support of South Vietnam's and our own military operations in the Vietnamese war...

...They need capital in amounts which they cannot accumulate by themselves—some $10 billion to $14 billion annually in order to achieve an economic growth rate of three per cent...

...but is there any greater assurance that the rich and powerful United States can gain the day...

...Especially marked is the failure to recognize the significance of contemporary social developments in the "third world," that zone of developing nations which lies between the Western industrialized nations and the Communist bloc...

...The U.N...

...In August, 1963, with particular reference to racial troubles in the United States, Mao Tse-tung called for, in effect, the formation of a world united front, to include even "enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie," against "the racial discrimination practiced by U.S...