Rising Expectations of What?

Within less than a fortnight of the signing of the Punta del Este pact, President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was blown to shreds by political explosions in Brazil and British Guiana. The fate of this paper balloon, inflated by so much hot air pumped from White House eggheads, was inevitable from the outset. Still, even skeptical observers hardly expected quite so quick a kaput.

The shadow of the Alliance for Progress will linger on as one more zombie draining the blood of our federal budget. But for all practical purposes, it is finished before it starts. The basic ideas from which the Alliance was spawned, however, continue to flourish in all their vigor, serenely immune to the tests of experience: 1) The “main theater” of the Cold War is the underdeveloped region—the industrially backward nations, many of them newly independent, of Asia, Africa and Latin America. 2) The primary objective of U.S. policy is to keep these nations from absorption within the Soviet Empire. Until a short time ago, this was interpreted to mean keeping them attached to the Western camp. The objective has been reduced to the hope of keeping them “neutral” or “uncommitted.” 3) The way to prevent underdeveloped nations from going Communist and swinging into the Soviet Empire is to develop them —to help them fulfill “the revolution of rising expectations.” 4) The success of the revolution of rising expectations (let’s refer to it as “RRE”) calls for reform along democratic-egalitarian lines—political democracy, land reform—and a rapid rise in the mass standard of living.

JB

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James Burnham

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Latin America

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Within less than a fortnight of the signing of the Punta del Este pact, President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was blown to shreds by political explosions in Brazil and British Guiana. The fate of this paper balloon, inflated by so much hot air pumped from White House eggheads, was inevitable from the outset. Still, even skeptical observers hardly expected quite so quick a kaput.

The shadow of the Alliance for Progress will linger on as one more zombie draining the blood of our federal budget. But for all practical purposes, it is finished before it starts. The basic ideas from which the Alliance was spawned, however, continue to flourish in all their vigor, serenely immune to the tests of experience: 1) The “main theater” of the Cold War is the underdeveloped region—the industrially backward nations, many of them newly independent, of Asia, Africa and Latin America. 2) The primary objective of U.S. policy is to keep these nations from absorption within the Soviet Empire. Until a short time ago, this was interpreted to mean keeping them attached to the Western camp. The objective has been reduced to the hope of keeping them “neutral” or “uncommitted.” 3) The way to prevent underdeveloped nations from going Communist and swinging into the Soviet Empire is to develop them —to help them fulfill “the revolution of rising expectations.” 4) The success of the revolution of rising expectations (let’s refer to it as “RRE”) calls for reform along democratic-egalitarian lines—political democracy, land reform—and a rapid rise in the mass standard of living.