NEW FRONT IN THE COLD WAR

The U.S. searches for a world economic policy

THE U.S. is preparing to open a new front in the cold war—an economic front. On presidential instructions, former Budget Director Joseph M. Dodge hastened back to Washington from his Detroit bank to undertake a sweeping review of "the entire field of cold war economic strategy." Secretary of State Dulles is pressing for a huge expansion of U.S. investments abroad; Foreign Operations Director Harold Stassen. whose department is slated to go out of business next summer, has proposed an ambitious scheme which is already being called "A Marshall Plan for Asia."

The air is full of plans, but they have yet to undergo a purification by budget. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, a hard man with a dollar and a weighty man in the Cabinet, is against any large-scale foreign spending; Banker Dodge thinks Harold Stassen's plans are dangerously dreamy. The foreign-aid enthusiasts think Humphrey and Dodge are dangerously unimaginative. But despite individual differences, the Cabinet is unanimous in its belief that the character of the cold war is changing, and that the U.S. urgently needs to reshape its foreign policy. The objective is to shift the emphasis of U.S. world strategy away from military containment (which leaves the initiative with the Communists), closer to economic "liberation," with the emphasis on advance.

Pax Atomica. Currently, U.S. policy suffers from what one State Department man calls "a heavy military bias." Too many U.S. officials have fallen into the habit of measuring progress (or security) exclusively by the number of nuclear explosions, the number of divisions mobilized. The result is that the U.S. is stuck with a warlike vocabulary (e.g., "massive retaliation"), while the Communists, who continue to aggress, have stolen the words of peace (e.g., "coexistence").

President Eisenhower is convinced that "there is no longer any alternative to peace." The British believe that the world is entering a period of pax atomica, based on a recognition by both sides of a nuclear standoff. The new phrase spreading in both London and Washington is "competitive coexistence."

In the next ten years, warned the State Department last week, the main cold-war battleground may well be economic. "The leaders of the Soviet Union," said one of its experts, "are apparently proceeding on the theory that economics is the Achilles heel of the West." To meet this challenge, which in a period of cold peace might prove more dangerous than all the fleets and armies of Moscow and Peking, the U.S. needs to prove that democracy and capitalism have more to offer—in terms of freedom, justice and plenty—than the Communists ever can. What is needed is no less than a new World Economic Policy.