HANS
J.
MORGENTHAU
threaten the foundations of their power.
If
these groups do not co–
operate or, as they frequently do, actively oppose change, the
United States must turn to alternative groups. Where they do not
exist it must develop them.
In
this task, the United States has signally
failed. Yet when worst comes to worst it must be willing to reconcile
itself to revolutionary change, even at the risk that such change may
take place under Communist auspices.
At this point, foreign policies and domestic politics merge. For
the domestic climate of opinion constitutes at present a virtually
insuperable impediment to American officials abroad pursuing such
a novel and risky policy of promoting revolution. Communist suc–
cesses abroad have in the past been equated with treason at home.
Successive Presidents have failed in the task, which only they can
perform, of educating the American people in the facts of interna–
tional life.
If
President Kennedy continues to fail to bring home to
the American people what the facts of international life require of
American foreign policy, he will have doomed to failure the cold
war policies of the United States in the uncommitted third of the
world.
On the level of the execution of policy, that failure is threatened
by the deficiencies of our policy of foreign aid. The American
theory and practice of foreign aid during the fifties was derived
largely from certain unexamined assumptions which are part of the
American folklore of politics. The popular mind has established a
number of simple and highly doubtful correlations between foreign
aid, on the one hand, and a rising standard of living, social and
political stability, democratic institutions and practices, and a peace–
ful foreign policy, on the other. The simplicity of these correlations is
so reassuring that the assumption of a simple and direct relationship
between foreign aid and economic, social, and political progress is
rarely questioned.
Thus fundamental questions like the following were hardly ever
asked explicitly: what are the social, political, and moral effects of
foreign aid likely to be under different circumstances? Does success–
ful foreign aid require a particular intellectual, political, and moral
climate, or will the injection of capital and technological capability
from the outside create this climate? To what extent and under what
conditions is it possible for one nation to transform, through outside
