Foreign Aid: Scrambling to the Rescue

THE dust had scarcely settled on the ruins of the Senate foreign aid bill when the Administration set out to rebuild the program out of the rubble. The White House started at once to try to reverse the stunning 41-to-27 defeat. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, in daily consultation with President Nixon, put together a high-level, high-pressure lobbying campaign that sent Cabinet members scrambling to the rescue of foreign aid. Secretary of State William Rogers pleaded with a hostile Senate Foreign Relations Committee to put the program back together. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird warned that the moment could not be worse for closing off the aid pipeline. From Bangkok, traveling Treasury Secretary John Connally chimed in. If aid is ended, he said, "all that we have done since World War II would go down the drain."

The unseasonably balmy Washington air was thick with pro-aid arguments. The basic premise: cutting off foreign aid now would undermine the U.S. position in the world at a critical period. As one White House aide put it: "Without foreign aid the President will have a more difficult time convincing the Russians and the Chinese when he's negotiating with them. If there is no foreign aid in the arsenal, you don't shoot as far." The simple assumption is that foreign aid makes friends for the U.S., and thus adds to the weight that Washington can wield vis-`a-vis Moscow and Peking. If military aid to Cambodia and Viet Nam are cut back, the State Department suggests, it will delay American withdrawal from Viet Nam because the local military will not be strong enough to carry on alone. President Nixon has promised a new troopwithdrawal announcement next week --based on the assumption that the U.S. will continue to supply the Vietnamese with military hardware. Indeed, the argument goes, the whole Nixon Doctrine would be undercut by ending aid; the President's reduction of the U.S. physical presence overseas is designed to be offset by continuing--even temporarily increased--U.S. military and economic assistance.

Not all of the discourse was quite so elevated. Lobbyists for the Agency for International Development, which runs the foreign aid program, moved about explaining pointedly to Senators and Representatives that some 86% of all AID funds are spent in the U.S.--for salaries, services, commodities and goods.

Win by Proxy. To salvage foreign aid, the Administration put its weight behind a resolution approved last week by the House Foreign Affairs Committee that would simply continue aid authorizations at last year's $2.6 billion annual level. That will come before the House this week. The committee will also start work on a bill to replace the one that the Senate rejected.

The Senate too set out to salvage foreign aid. After nearly a week of wrangling, the Foreign Relations Committee came up with a plan that would temporarily keep things going at reduced levels--while insisting urgently on a fundamental reorganization of the program. "I think the initiative is in the Senate's hands," said Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana. The compromise was worked out only narrowly, with Minority Leader Hugh Scott at one point exercising a proxy from the ailing Karl Mundt of South Dakota to win by an 8-to-7 vote in committee. Senator William Fulbright proposed a $2 billion package in three separate bills--one covering economic assistance, another for special humanitarian aid and a third carrying military-assistance authorization. The committee decided to combine the first two, and increased the dollar totals slightly to $2.3 billion, divided almost equally between economic-humanitarian aid and military assistance.

One of the senatorial complaints is that foreign aid has become too restricted an instrument of U.S. foreign policy; in the past year, 93% of U.S. aid for economic maintenance, the category called "supporting assistance," went to only three countries--Viet Nam, Laos and Nigeria. Parts of the program are popular enough but, one Republican leader snapped, '"if they think they can get just aid to Israel and the starving children, they're crazy." The Senate was plainly trying to do just that. The separate bills may not both pass the Senate, since military aid is notably less popular there than aid for economic and humanitarian purposes. It has been the target of Senate doves, who have objected to military aid to Indochina to express their objections to the war. The two-bill approach would probably be fatal should it reach the House. There, the situation is reversed: military aid has had more backers than economic aid; only if the two factions get together behind one omnibus bill is there a bare majority for aid of any kind.

Radical Revolution. The fierce attack on foreign aid has been building for a long time and not been taken seriously enough by the Administration. The attack unites liberals and conservatives, disillusioned humanitarians who complain about lack of gratitude, and disappointed cynics who complain that the aid bribe has not kept a great many nations in the U.S. camp. Another profound objection is that aid distorts and damages the recipient nations. One example: over a period of 17 years $481 million was poured into Laos, $192 per capita; that was more than the economy could absorb, so the result was inflation, black marketeering--and political gains for the Pathet Lao.

All these and other complaints came together in a withering but inchoate speech on the Senate floor by Idaho's Frank Church, long a fervent aid supporter. Helping nations in Africa and Asia as a means of containing Communism is absurd, he contended: the people are "too poor and illiterate to be interested in such sophistications as ideology or revolution." In other cases, "for many countries radical revolution is the only real hope for development and the single most helpful thing we can do is to leave them alone." In most cases, he continued, U.S. attempts to bring about "stability" through aid actually prevent development. Reason: the U.S. insists on a favorable climate for American business investment rather than allowing the countries to develop as they need to. Aid merely props up the existing social and political order.

Even supporters of the aid program have to admit that many of Church's criticisms are on target. But he dismissed too glibly the massive successes of aid in the past and was far too casual about the basic U.S. position in the world. It is one thing to urge America to recognize its limitations; it is quite another to sit back and, as he put it, let nature take its course. Minority Leader Hugh Scott admitted that "we can expect revolution upon revolution" in the Third World, but he still feels that the U.S. must "participate modestly in the hope that they will turn out in ways compatible with our own interests and ideals." Most anti-aid arguments, complained Scott, amount to "telling the world to stop because we want to get off."

Anonymous Giving. Actually the Administration made reform proposals last April that might have met at least some of the critics' objections. But the House considered the reforms too complex to be handled this year and pigeonholed them. The Nixon plan was to split foreign aid into its three properly distinct parts, much as Fulbright wants to do.

One important objective of the reforms would be to channel a larger share of U.S. aid through such multinational agencies as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank. This too is something that Democratic critics have been demanding. Theoretically, at least, an independent international agency can channel funds on a sounder, less political basis, thus avoiding the appearance of big-power meddling by the major donor.

There are practical dangers; an agency with broad representation may try to spread the available funds too widely so as to give everyone a share, thus preventing maximum impact anywhere. Relatively anonymous giving is also harder to sell to Congress and the public than are specific grants. Those objections may turn out to be unimportant.

Since both the Administration and the Senate seem increasingly determined on reform, it looks inevitable. But time is required for reforms, let alone for a redefinition of America's place in the world. These things cannot be achieved in haste, anger or boredom. Thus the immediate need is to save the present program, however clumsy, until something more rational can be enacted to take its place.

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