How do these objectives relate to each other? If the local political leader concentrates merely on consolidating his central power or on rallying his people around an external objective, he may well achieve short-run success; but he will not meet the demand for economic and social progress pressing up steadily from the grass roots. He runs the longer-run risks of creating a centralized state without a viable political basis; or of exhausting his popular mandate in efforts to assert the sovereignty and power of the new nation against the external world, efforts which fail to satisfy his people's rising expectations for material advance. To be successful, a politician in a transitional society must, in the end, link nationalist fervor and the new centralized state to programs of economic and social substance.
The length of time and the vicissitudes of transition to modern economic and political status thus depend substantially on the degree to which local talent, energy and resources are channelled into the constructive tasks of modernization. The powers of the central government must, of course, be reasonably well established as a prior condition, and the government must present to its people a record of enhanced international standing; but the long-run influence of the central government depends, in the end, on its becoming a major source of energy, initiative and resource for modernizing the economy—a lesson Soekarno is being taught, painfully and late.
Communist policy is based squarely on an understanding of this precarious transitional process. Increasingly since the summer of 1951, Moscow and Peking have sought to associate Communism (as well as the Soviet Union and Communist China as governments) with the aspirations of the political leaders and peoples of the transitional areas for national independence, economic development and peace. On the other hand, Soviet diplomacy and propaganda have systematically sought to divert their attention from the tasks of modernization towards "bloody shirt" policies; that is, an obsessive concern to redress real or believed past humiliations—colonialism, Israel, Kashmir, West Irian, etc. In this connection, the resolutions generated out of the recent Cairo conference of the Afro-Asian bloc are worth careful study.
This strategy does double work for Moscow. In the short run, it creates costly disruption within the free world; it threatens the supply of essential raw materials to Western Europe; it threatens to disrupt the American air base structure; and, on the colonialism issue, it further splits the United States from Western Europe. In the long run, it creates
the conditions which will help the Communists take over power. It creates these future conditions by diverting the energies of the new nations away from the tasks of economic and social modernization; and thus the people's hopes for improved welfare are frustrated. It is the Communist intent that, when these hopes for progress are sufficiently frustrated, men and women in these areas will turn to Communism. The local Communist parties are already steadily at work seeking to heighten and to exploit these frustrations.
The Communist policy being pursued in Asia, the Middle East and Africa is modelled closely—and, we believe, quite consciously—after the Communist success in China. Sun Yat-sen turned to Moscow for guidance and support after he failed to get economic and political support from the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s Moscow did, to a degree, support the Kuomintang while seeking to give it an anti-Western cast; but the Chinese Communists at the same time, with Moscow's help and encouragement, pursued a policy first of infiltration of the Kuomintang and then of military and political obstruction designed to make it impossible for Chiang Kai-shek to achieve the social and economic progress which Chinese men and women ardently sought. And this double pattern persisted virtually down to the end: while the Soviet Union remained solemnly committed to support Nationalist China diplomatically, it turned captured Japanese arms over to the Chinese Communists in 1946. Chiang Kai-shek's view of reform as a second priority played, of course, into the hands of Communist policy throughout this sequence.
There is little doubt that Moscow and Peking regard Nasser, Nehru, Soekarno and the other non-Communist leaders of the new nations as the Chiang Kai-sheks of the future.
It is in this perspective—of short-run and long-run Communist strategic objectives—that the Soviet economic offensive should be viewed. In Jugoslavia, Egypt, Syria and Afghanistan, Moscow has urgent shortterm strategic objectives; and those four countries get about three-fourths of Soviet aid outside the Communist bloc. In India, Indonesia, Burma, Ceylon and elsewhere, the amounts of aid doled out are sufficient to build up a measure of good will and a favorable image of Communist intentions; but they are grossly insufficient to supply the foreign exchange requirements for a serious economic development effort.