The truth is: Soviet-bloc trading actions are neither purely economic nor purely noneconomic.
The Soviet trade offensive can be explained in terms of economic warfare, if we define economic warfare as economic action by the state that is designed to serve basic hostile objectives directed at another nation or group of nations—whether or not the immediate gains are economic.
Their Objectives Haven’t Changed
In Chapter I, the Soviet bloc’s long-term objectives in its economic relations with the free world were outlined. It was pointed out that these objectives have a dual character: strengthening the bloc and weakening the free-world powers. The objectives were summarized this way:
- To feed the economy, especially the industrial-military base, with imports that help the bloc become more powerful and less dependent on the free world.
- To drive wedges among free-world nations at every opportunity.
- To increase the reliance of free-world nations on the bloc for markets or supplies, and thus make the free world more vulnerable to bloc pressures.
Within this broad framework the Kremlin pursues more immediate and specific goals, such as:
- Obtaining through normal commercial channels the ships, machinery, and other industrial goods which they can produce only at relatively high expenditure of labor and resources—or which they cannot produce at all.
- Obtaining through illicit channels those strategic materials whose shipment is restricted by free-world governments in the interest of their national security.
- Forcing the relaxation of free-world security controls in order to get strategic goods more cheaply and easily and to create dissension among free nations.
- Fostering rivalry among free-world merchants in trading with the bloc, thus reducing the net cost to the bloc of obtaining goods it desires from the West.
- Buying increased quantities of certain consumer goods, though apparently just enough to help with problems within the bloc and to rouse the interest of the West. (Of course it would not take a “trade offensive” to obtain these consumer goods, for they have never been restricted by the West.)
- Selling the West an exaggerated idea of the size and reliability of markets, supplies, and general benefits that can be obtained through East-West trade.
- Making their limited export commodities go as far as possible in solving their import problems without draining vital resources away from their program of forced industrialization.
- Making financial and other economic arrangements in neighboring countries and nonindustrial areas in order (1) to gain more influence and more access to resources there, and (2) to diminish the influence and access to resources of free-world industrial nations.
The foregoing can be recognized, as among the things being attempted in the Soviet “trade offensive” of 1953-54. They did not fall in separate compartments, but were woven together in a central plan and they contributed to one another. They were not so new as some of them might look at first glance. The long-term objectives which they served were not new at all.