Foreign Aid Budget - 26 January 1990

If an American were to spend two weeks in Europe, as I did at Christmas time, he would discover something, an attitude towards America that is quite new in my time – and my time goes back to well before the Second World War.

I recall an indelible scene that happened to me in the melancholy autumn of 1938 when Hitler, having annexed Austria, had taken over Czechoslovakia and we were all shrinking from the glaring recognition that Poland was to be the next victim on his list.

I was on a train going up to Lancashire, and at Crewe an off-duty railwayman got in. He was very familiar as a physical and emotional type to anyone who had spent his boyhood in industrial Lancashire. He was short and wizened and pigeon-chested. He had watery eyes and a chronic cough. Today, we should certainly call him under-nourished as, in my father's time, he would have been called, in the quaint lingo of the day, a candidate for consumption.

He wore a cap and a shirt, buttoned up without the celluloid collar that was probably attached only once a week after he'd scrubbed up and put on his only chapel-going suit. He sat for a while, gazing out at the grimy slums sliding by and then looked up and saw my suitcase up on the rack. It bore a label saying "Cunard, cabin luggage".

Quite simply and casually, as if we'd been talking for hours, he said, "Will America be comin' in t'War then?" I said, "I'm afraid not this time. I think the Americans will stay at home". He gave a little, cocky shrug to his shoulders and said, "Eh well, we'll have to fight buggers ourselves then, won't we?"

He didn't look as if he could knock over a mouse but it was the first flicker of a spirit that kept the Nazis at bay until America came in. From this Lancashire sparrow to government officials I talked to, the spontaneous response was always the same. Of course, 1938 was a special and perilous time for the future and, as it turned out, for the survival of a democratic Europe.

But ever since, an American, newly-arrived in Britain certainly, was met with a similar sort of question, "Would Marshall Aid be enough to repair, as Dean Acheson put it, the fabric of Europe?". "How would President Truman react to the Russians blockade of Berlin?". "Did Kennedy mean what he said that Berlin was the American front line?". "Did Reagan seriously believe that the Soviet Union's superiority in nuclear arms was massive?" And so on.

Today, it's quite different. In many long evenings, with different friends, nobody began by asking or wondering about American policy. I might have been a visitor from Finland. Only one man asked me directly how Mr Bush was doing.

Of course, all of us were overwhelmed by the revolutions in Eastern Europe but in all previous European moments of tension or crisis, from the Berlin blockade to Mr Gorbachev's offers of arms reduction, what America would do was always assumed to be the important counter-move.

People were not slighting America or making a point of underestimating her power, it was just assumed in the most amiable way, that the United States was, like Manchester United, say, the once-great football team which this year was not in the Cup Final.

The reporters and commentators who came into their own were correspondents, European and American, who were filing their despatches from Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Berlin, Bonn, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Latvia. And they were analysing events in much the same way – apart from the actual fighting in the cities or the countryside and the mood of the protesters in the city squares, the reporters were beginning to count the difficult ways in which the peoples liberating themselves from the Soviet empire would have to move to set up something like stable, self-governing republics.

Mainly, we've been reading at great length about the problem in all the rebellious countries of how intellectuals and idealists, with no experience of democratic government, can learn a system in which different factions are accepted, opposition is respected, and getting your own way is never guaranteed.

And the aching problem for all of them, of somehow tolerating a desperate slump in their already low standards of living until a new economy can be allowed to stagger into working order. And the special problem of Mr Gorbachev, once he allowed that eligion was a permissible form of spiritual comfort, to enforce religious toleration on Muslims and Christians giving vent, at last, to generations of mutual hatred.And the latest of our fearful questions – whether or not Mr Gorbachev has not landed himself, in Azerbaijan, with his own Northern Ireland.

Through all the European tumult of the past three, four months, it has been understood that America, like Britain, France, the Scandinavian countries, was treading water while Eastern Europe was taking the plunge.

Nobody in Washington denied this new, onlooking, role but if you asked what American policy was to be when Eastern Europe became reasonably stable, the answer was predictable – aid, money, investment were what the newly-liberated would want from us.

At that point, we come up against American theory and American practice, the traditional assumption of how America acts towards countries needing foreign aid and the striking disparity in the past few years with its actual performance.

It's a contrast that our media have not been dwelling on lately. I do believe it would be a shock, not only to what we used to call well-informed people but also to many congressmen, to learn how woefully the United States has fallen behind in the dispensing of substantial foreign aid.

Put it to most Americans, "How do you stand in the amount of foreign aid that is charged off per capita, as they say, to the taxpayer?", I'm pretty sure a majority of Americans would say that this country is, if not the top benefactor, at least among the top two or three.

The facts are enlightening. The number one nation in the scale of generosity is Denmark. The Danes, from a small country of only five millions, give annually $135 each. After them, the Dutch, $119. Then the French, $92, the United States, $40 per capita. Next to the bottom of the list, Britain's offer $31 a year.

But how about investment capital? We've been reading a good deal lately about the intentions of big and small American corporations to move money and factories into Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland. Well, so far the countries investing heavily in markets and influence in Eastern Europe are Japan, West Germany and France.

Recently, one lone senator has brought up the subject of foreign aid and proposed a method of redistributing it. He is the Republican leader in the Senate, Senator Dole. He has not, so far as I know, recited the figures I've given you for which I'm indebted to a New York journalist, Mr Robert Reno, nor has he otherwise disturbed the myth of America as the great western benefactor.

He just said that the foreign aid budget is top heavy, in favour of five nations which gobble up two-thirds of the available monies. The countries he mentioned are Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt and Israel.

Just to call them off that way suggests to the casual listener or reader that their shares are about equal. The fact is that Israel gets more than all the others combined. The main Jewish organisations in the United States know it well and were the first to protest against Senator Dole's suggestion of cutting aid to the five beneficiaries by 5%.

This confronts Senator Dole with a very ticklish moment in his political career at a time when disturbing signs of rising anti-Semitism in this country coincide with a marked decline in domestic oil production and a consequent need for more oil from the Arabs.

Considering that Israel is America's firmest and strongest ally in the Middle East, we can be fairly sure that the Congress is not going to cut what nine successive presidents have thought of as essential – military and economic aid to Israel.

I don't believe that Senator Dole's proposal is a careful, measured policy. It's more like a cry of frustration at Israel's steady refusal to listen to the appeals of President Bush and Secretary of State Baker, to permit some form of self-government to the Palestinians.

This sudden focus on Senator Dole's five most favoured nations leaves the bigger picture, in the background, blurred. The bigger picture is the ever-shrinking mass of money available for foreign aid. Four years ago the outlay for foreign aid was $12billions out of a total budget of $945billions, about 1.2%. Today, it's $7billions out of a trillion – about 0.7%.

And recently something happened that, for perhaps a long time to come, is going to reduce the government money for foreign aid outside this hemisphere. That something was the invasion of Panama.

The United States has committed itself to repair the political and social life of Panama, to invigorate its comatose economy, to help boost a democratic society, when it acquires one. The guess of the people in the government general's accounting office is approaching one billion dollars by the time the occupying forces, the police and medical resources are withdrawn.

So the word for the brave and needy East Europeans seems to be "put not your trust in Washington" but in the private sector, in American corporations – if you can find any that are not owned by a Dutchman, a Briton, a Japanese or a Canadian. Or all four combined.

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