More Goods to Russia

The Eisenhower Administration has not made much progress this year toward its announced goal of freer trade among the nations of the non-Communist world. But last week it announced that the free world's trade with Russia and Russia's European satellites would henceforth be freer. The new arrangements were not made at U.S. initiative; they resulted from Soviet blandishments and the consequent pressure (TIME, Aug. 30) of U.S. allies who insisted that they be allowed more latitude in trade with the Reds.

The U.S. maintains a list of things that cannot be shipped to Communist countries, either because they are in short supply west of the Iron Curtain or believed to be very useful to the Red war machine. Under the Battle Act. passed in 1951, the U.S cannot give aid to any friendly country that ships items on this list. The act gives the Administration considerable leeway in enforcement.

Last spring pressure began to mount in Britain and elsewhere for relaxation of the U.S. embargo list. The U.S. then began talks in Paris with 14 countries for a revision. Last week Foreign Operations Administrator Harold Stassen announced the changes. They are sweeping, and represent another major setback for U.S. policy.

The changes fall into three groups:

1) Strategic items under flat embargo were reduced from 260 to 170. Permitted exports include crude oil, diesel oil, mica, non-military tires, non-turbine locomotives, air-conditioning equipment, general-purpose machine tools, light generators, light tractors. Raw copper is still banned, but copper wire is released.

2) Quota goods--items on which shipments must stop after a certain export level is reached--were reduced from 90 to 20 (to which number the strategic items previously banned altogether will be added). Examples of items released from quota: welding equipment, tungsten.

3) Goods that are not banned or restricted, but which have been watched for sudden sales spurts, were reduced from 100 to 60. Examples: can-making machines, water-treatment equipment, empty oil drums.

Some goods new to military technology were added to the embargo list--e.g., titanium-processing machinery (titanium is the new "wonder metal" for airplane jet engines).

Stassen put the best possible face on the relaxation, saying that "a net advantage to the free world" resulted from it. This statement is questionable on two counts:

1) Freer trade in the non-Communist world would be a cumulative, long-range constructive process, but the Communist empire is deeply committed to a long-range goal of economic self-sufficiency. Any trade built up with the Red bloc will be axed off when the Reds consider it to their "net advantage" to do so.

2) The Stassen argument assumes that the U.S. knows better than the Russians what the Russians really need. Tractors are taken off the embargo list on the ground that Russia produces a lot of them. But last week Moscow's Pravda was bitterly complaining that lagging Russian tractor production was grievously hurting the program of farm expansion. Every tractor shipped to Russia will help make up this lag and could also release Russian capacity for military tank construction.

The Battle Act may be unenforceable. Allied pressure for relaxation of East-West trade may be too great to withstand. If so, Stassen might have said so, instead of pretending that the U.S. is outsmarting the Russians by sending them more things they think they need.

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