NEW FRONT IN THE COLD WAR

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To start it going, the U.S. would earmark between $2 and $3 billion a year (about one-fifteenth of its arms budget) for the next five years, to provide an investment fund for underdeveloped nations. Britain and other industrial nations would be asked to supply additional billions; private investors, most of them American, would be encouraged to add to the kitty. Loans from this giant fund would be made available to the have-not nations without military or political strings, but each borrower would be expected to concentrate on those industries for which climate and resources best fitted it: there would be no "partnership" money to set up uncompetitive prestige industries, which might require high-tariff protection.

Favorable Battleground. Partnership protagonists in Washington expect to avoid the big error of the Marshall Plan—that of handing over U.S. aid on a government-to-government basis. As soon as the pumps are primed, partnership loans to governments would be quickly tapered off, and the building of dams and factories left to private capital, operating for profit. The partnership would also provide U.S. and European technicians, to teach Indians, Bolivians, Egyptians, how modern industry is run. U.S. experts believe that atomic-energy reactors might be used efficaciously to provide some of the power for industries in fuel-scarce areas.

State Department planners have accepted as a target M.I.T.'s cautious estimate that, once started, World Partnership for Growth would make possible an overall 1% annual increase in income per capita for the underdeveloped nations of the world. Considering the poverty and vast size of the populations involved, this is no mean target. But it is easily within the giant capabilities of the U.S.

Together with the President's program for expanding world trade, some such world-investment program is indispensable to 1) the security, and 2) the future prosperity of the U.S. For if the West loses the struggle for one billion in-betweens, on three continents, the balance of world power may go in favor of Communism.

There will be resistance to a World Economic Policy—at home and abroad. But economics, a field in which Americans excel, is a battleground which the U.S. might gladly choose to fight on.